Page 316 - women-in-love

feeding on the living body of the public like lice. A kind of
fire would go over Christiana Crich’s brain, as she saw two
more pale-faced, creeping women in objectionable black
clothes, cringing lugubriously up the drive to the door. She
wanted to set the dogs on them, ‘Hi Rip! Hi Ring! Ranger!
At ‘em boys, set ‘em off.’ But Crowther, the butler, with all
the rest of the servants, was Mr Crich’s man. Nevertheless,
when her husband was away, she would come down like a
wolf on the crawling supplicants;
‘What do you people want? There is nothing for you here.
You have no business on the drive at all. Simpson, drive
them away and let no more of them through the gate.’
The servants had to obey her. And she would stand
watching with an eye like the eagle’s, whilst the groom in
clumsy confusion drove the lugubrious persons down the
drive, as if they were rusty fowls, scuttling before him.
But they learned to know, from the lodge-keeper, when
Mrs Crich was away, and they timed their visits. How many
times, in the first years, would Crowther knock softly at the
door: ‘Person to see you, sir.’
‘What name?’
‘Grocock, sir.’
‘What do they want?’ The question was half impatient,
half gratified. He liked hearing appeals to his charity.
‘About a child, sir.’
‘Show them into the library, and tell them they shouldn’t
come after eleven o’clock in the morning.’
‘Why do you get up from dinner?—send them off,’ his
wife would say abruptly.

316 Women in Love