"It is the same everywhere," burst out Winifred. "It is the
office, or the shop, or the business that gets the man, the
woman gets the bit the shop can't digest. What is he at home, a
man? He is a meaningless lump--a standing machine, a
machine out of work."
"They know they are sold," said Tom Brangwen. "That's where
it is. They know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks
her throat out, what difference can it make? The man's sold to
his job. So the women don't bother. They take what they can
catch--and vogue la galère."
"Aren't they very strict here?" asked Miss Inger.
"Oh, no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed
husbands. They're not very particular--neither are they
very interested. They go dragging along what is left from the
pits. They're not interested enough to be very immoral--it
all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral--just a
question of pit-wages. The most moral duke in England makes two
hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality
end up."
Ursula sat black-souled and very bitter, hearing the two of
them talk. There seemed something ghoulish even in their very
deploring of the state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish
satisfaction in it. The pit was the great mistress. Ursula
looked out of the window and saw the proud, demonlike colliery
with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless, squalid
mass of the town lying aside. It was the squalid heap of
side-shows. The pit was the main show, the raison d'etre
of all.
How terrible it was! There was a horrible fascination
in it--human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that
symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning,
perverse satisfaction in it. For a moment she was dizzy.
Then she recovered, felt herself in a great loneliness,
where-in she was sad but free. She had departed. No more would
she subscribe to the great colliery, to the great machine which
has taken us all captives. In her soul, she was against it, she
disowned even its power. It had only to be forsaken to be inane,
meaningless. And she knew it was meaningless. But it needed a
great, passionate effort of will on her part, seeing the
colliery, still to maintain her knowledge that it was
meaningless.
But her Uncle Tom and her mistress remained there among the
horde, cynically reviling the monstrous state and yet adhering
to it, like a man who reviles his mistress, yet who is in love
with her. She knew her Uncle Tom perceived what was going on.
But she knew moreover that in spite of his criticism and
condemnation, he still wanted the great machine. His only happy
moments, his only moments of pure freedom were when he was
serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine
caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he
act wholely, without cynicism and unreality.