Page 234 - lady-chatterlys-lover

Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly
unconscious of the old England. There was a gap in the con-
tinuity of consciousness, almost American: but industrial
really. What next?
Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide
her head in the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living
man.
The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome!
The common people were so many, and really so terrible. So
she bought as she was going home, and saw the colliers trail-
ing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one shoulder higher
than the other, slurring their heavy ironshod boots. Under-
ground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing
from the pit roof, shoulders Out of shape. Men! Men! Alas,
in some ways patient and good men. In other ways, non-ex-
istent. Something that men SHOULD have was bred and
killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children.
One might bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought!
They were good and kindly. But they were only half, Only
the grey half of a human being. As yet, they were ‘good’.
But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Suppos-
ing the dead in them ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible
to think of. Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial
masses. They seemed so WEIRD to her. A life with utterly
no beauty in it, no intuition, always ‘in the pit’.
Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!
Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. For-
ty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in
manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the