'Life.'
'Life!'she re-echoed,with a queer thrill.
'It's life,'he said.'There's no keeping clear.And if you do keep clear you might almost as well die.So if I've got to be broken open again,I have.'
She did not quite see it that way,but still 'It's just love,'she said cheerfully.
'Whatever that may be,'he replied.
They went on through the darkening wood in silence,till they were almost at the gate.
'But you don't hate me,do you?'she said wistfully.
'Nay,nay,'he replied.And suddenly he held her fast against his breast again,with the old connecting passion.'Nay,for me it was good,it was good.Was it for you?'
'Yes,for me too,'she answered,a little untruthfully,for she had not been conscious of much.
He kissed her softly,softly,with the kisses of warmth.
'If only there weren't so many other people in the world,'he said lugubriously.
She laughed.They were at the gate to the park.He opened it for her.
'I won't come any further,'he said.
'No!'And she held out her hand,as if to shake hands.But he took it in both his.
'Shall I come again?'she asked wistfully.
'Yes!Yes!'
She left him and went across the park.
He stood back and watched her going into the dark,against the pallor of the horizon.Almost with bitterness he watched her go.She had connected him up again,when he had wanted to be alone.She had cost him that bitter privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.
He turned into the dark of the wood.All was still,the moon had set.
But he was aware of the noises of the night,the engines at Stacks Gate,the traffic on the main road.Slowly he climbed the denuded knoll.And from the top he could see the country,bright rows of lights at Stacks Gate,smaller lights at Tevershall pit,the yellow lights of Tevershall and lights everywhere,here and there,on the dark country,with the distant blush of furnaces,faint and rosy,since the night was clear,the rosiness of the outpouring of white-hot metal.Sharp,wicked electric lights at Stacks Gate!An undefinable quick of evil in them!And all the unease,the ever-shifting dread of the industrial night in the Midlands.He could hear the winding-engines at Stacks Gate turning down the seven-o'clock miners.The pit worked three shifts.
He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood.But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.The industrial noises broke the solitude,the sharp lights,though unseen,mocked it.A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.The world allows no hermits.And now he had taken the woman,and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.For he knew by experience what it meant.
It was not woman's fault,nor even love's fault,nor the fault of sex.
The fault lay there,out there,in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.There,in the world of the mechanical greedy,greedy mechanism and mechanized greed,sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic,there lay the vast evil thing,ready to destroy whatever did not conform.Soon it would destroy the wood,and the bluebells would spring no more.All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.
He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman.Poor forlorn thing,she was nicer than she knew,and oh!so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with.Poor thing,she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths,she wasn't all tough rubber-goods and platinum,like the modern girl.And they would do her in!As sure as life,they would do her in,as they do in all naturally tender life.Tender!Somewhere she was tender,tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths,something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today.But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.For a little while,before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in,her as well as him.
He went home with his gun and his dog,to the dark cottage,lit the lamp,started the fire,and ate his supper of bread and cheese,young onions and beer.He was alone,in a silence he loved.His room was clean and tidy,but rather stark.Yet the fire was bright,the hearth white,the petroleum lamp hung bright over the table,with its white oil-cloth.He tried to read a book about India,but tonight he could not read.He sat by the fire in his shirt-sleeves,not smoking,but with a mug of beer in reach.And he thought about Connie.
To tell the truth,he was sorry for what had happened,perhaps most for her sake.He had a sense of foreboding.No sense of wrong or sin;he was troubled by no conscience in that respect.He knew that conscience was chiefly tear of society,or fear of oneself.He was not afraid of himself.
But he was quite consciously afraid of society,which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent,partly-insane beast.
The woman!If she could be there with him,arid there were nobody else in the world!The desire rose again,his penis began to stir like a live bird.At the same time an oppression,a dread of exposing himself and her to that outside Thing that sparkled viciously in the electric lights,weighed down his shoulders.She,poor young thing,was just a young female creature to him;but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he desired again.