He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad
Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work
and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming
fairly well-off. But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in
big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for him to
pedgill away at the lace designing, working from the tiny
squares of his paper, counting and plotting and niggling. He did
it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels within him,
adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost. And he came
back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly
man.
He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some
social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his
dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the
household, mad when anything clumsy or gross occurred. Later,
when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid,
almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and
became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure,
neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm.
Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything
to do with learning. From the first he hung round the
slaughter-house which stood away in the third yard at the back
of the farm. The Brangwens had always killed their own meat, and
supplied the neighbourhood. Out of this grew a regular butcher's
business in connection with the farm.
As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood
that ran across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the
crew-yard, by the sight of the man carrying across to the
meat-shed a huge side of beef, with the kidneys showing,
embedded in their heavy laps of fat.
He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular
features something like a later Roman youth. He was more easily
excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in
character. At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale,
plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who
insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and
made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery
business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of
contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to
be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew
everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.
Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and
lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to
Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger,
remained at home.