“He is very fine and strong somewhere, but he does need a level-headed woman to look after him.”

That was the FRIENDLY feminine verdict upon him. It flattered him, it pleased him, it galled him.

Having divorced a very charming and clever wife, who had held this opinion for ten years, and at last had got tired of the level-headed protective game, his gall was uppermost.

“I want to throw Jimmy out on the world, but I know the poor little man will go and fall on some woman’s bosom. That’s the worst of him. If he could only stand alone for ten minutes. But he can’t. At the same time, there IS something fine about him, something rare.”

This had been Clarissa’s summing-up as she floated away in the arms of the rich young American. The rich young American got rather angry when Jimmy’s name was mentioned. Clarissa was now HIS wife. But she did sometimes talk as if she were still married to Jimmy.

Not in Jimmy’s estimation, however. That worm had turned. Gall was uppermost. Gall and wormwood. He knew exactly what Clarissa thought — and said — about him. And the “something fine, something rare, something strong” which he was supposed to have “about him” was utterly outbalanced, in his feelings at least, by the “poor little man” nestled upon “some woman’s bosom”, which he was supposed to BE.

“I am NOT,” he said to himself, “a poor little man nestled upon some woman’s bosom. If I could only find the right sort of woman, she should nestle on mine.”

Jimmy was now thirty-five, and this point, to nestle or to be nestled, was the emotional crux and turning-point.

He imagined to himself some really WOMANLY woman, to whom he should be ONLY “fine and strong”, and not for one moment “the poor little man”. Why not some simple uneducated girl, some Tess of the D’Urbervilles, some wistful Gretchen, some humble Ruth gleaning an aftermath? Why not? Surely the world was full of such!

The trouble was he never met them. He only met sophisticated women. He really never had a chance of meeting “real” people. So few of us ever do. Only the people we DON’T meet are the “real” people, the simple, genuine, direct spontaneous, unspoilt souls. Ah, the simple, genuine, unspoilt people we DON’T meet! What a tragedy it is!

Because, of course, they must be there! Somewhere! Only we never come across them.

Jimmy was terribly handicapped by his position. It brought him into contact with so many people. Only never the right sort. Never the “real” people: the simple, genuine, unspoilt, etc., etc.

He was editor of a high-class, rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, and his rather personal, very candid editorials brought him shoals, swarms, hosts of admiring acquaintances. Realise that he was handsome, and could be extraordinarily “nice”, when he liked, and was really very clever, in his own critical way, and you see how many chances he had of being adored and protected.

In the first place his good looks: the fine, clean lines of his face, like the face of the laughing faun in one of the faun’s unlaughing, moody moments. The long, clean lines of the cheeks, the strong chin and the slightly arched, full nose, the beautiful dark-grey eyes with long lashes, and the thick black brows. In his mocking moments, when he seemed most himself, it was a pure Pan face, with thick black eyebrows cocked up, and grey eyes with a sardonic goaty gleam, and nose and mouth curling with satire. A good-looking, smooth-skinned satyr. That was Jimmy at his best. In the opinion of his men friends.

In his own opinion, he was a sort of Martyred Saint Sebastian, at whom the wicked world shot arrow after arrow — Mater Dolorosa nothing to him — and he counted the drops of blood as they fell: when he could keep count. Sometimes — as for instance when Clarissa said she was really departing with the rich young American, and should she divorce Jimmy, or was Jimmy going to divorce her? — then the arrows assailed him like a flight of starlings flying straight at him, jabbing at him, and the drops of martyred blood simply spattered down, he couldn’t keep count.

So, naturally, he divorced Clarissa.

In the opinion of his men friends, he was, or should be, a consistently grinning faun, satyr, or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a Martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of Plato. In the opinion of his woman friends, he was a fascinating little man with a profound understanding of life and the capacity really to understand a woman and to make a woman feel a queen; which of course was to make a woman feel her REAL self . . .

He might, naturally, have made rich and resounding marriages, especially after the divorce. He didn’t. The reason was, secretly, his resolve never to make any woman feel a queen any more. It was the turn of the women to make him feel a king.

Some unspoilt, unsophisticated, wild-blooded woman, to whom he would be a sort of Solomon of wisdom, beauty, and wealth. She would need to be in reduced circumstances to appreciate his wealth, which amounted to the noble sum of three thousand pounds and a little week-ending cottage in Hampshire. And to be unsophisticated she would have to be a woman of the people. Absolutely.

At the same time, not just the “obscure vulgar simplican”.

He received many letters, many, many, many, enclosing poems, stories, articles, or more personal unbosomings. He read them all: like a solemn rook pecking and scratching among the litter.

And one — not one letter, but one correspondent — might be THE one — Mrs Emilia Pinnegar, who wrote from a mining village in Yorkshire. She was, of course, unhappily married.

Now Jimmy had always had a mysterious feeling about these dark and rather dreadful mining villages in the north. He himself had scarcely set foot north of Oxford. He felt that these miners up there must be the real stuff. And Pinnegar was a name, surely! And Emilia!

She wrote a poem, with a brief little note, that, if the editor of the Commentator thought the verses of no value, would he simply destroy them. Jimmy, as editor of the Commentator, thought the verses quite good and admired the brevity of the note. But he wasn’t sure about printing the poem. He wrote back, Had Mrs Pinnegar nothing else to submit?

Then followed a correspondence. And at length, upon request, this from Mrs Pinnegar:

“You ask me about myself, but what shall I say? I am a woman of thirty-one, with one child, a girl of eight, and I am married to a man who lives in the same house with me, but goes to another woman. I try to write poetry, if it is poetry, because I have no other way of expressing myself at all, and even if it doesn’t matter to anybody besides myself, I feel I must and will express myself, if only to save myself from developing cancer or some disease that women have. I was a school-teacher before I was married, and I got my certificates at Rotherham College. If I could, I would teach again, and live alone. But married teachers can’t get jobs any more, they aren’t allowed —”
THE COAL MINER
By His Wife

The donkey-engine’s beating noise

And the rattle, rattle of the sorting screens

Come down on me like the beat of his heart,

And mean the same as his breathing means.

The burning big pit-hill with fumes

Fills the air like the presence of that fair-haired man.

And the burning fire burning deeper and deeper

Is his will insisting since time began.

As he breathes the chair goes up and down

In the pit-shaft; he lusts as the wheel-fans spin

The sucking air: he lives in the coal

Underground: and his soul is a strange engine.

That is the manner of man he is.

I married him and I should know.

The mother earth from bowels of coal

Brought him forth for the overhead woe.

This was the poem that the editor of the Commentator hesitated about. He reflected, also, that Mrs Pinnegar didn’t sound like one of the nestling, unsophisticated rustic type. It was something else that still attracted him: something desperate in a woman, something tragic.
THE NEXT EVENT

If at evening, when the twilight comes,

You ask me what the day has been,

I shall not know. The distant drums

Of some new-comer intervene

Between me and the day that’s been.

Some strange man leading long columns

Of unseen soldiers through the green

Sad twilight of these smoky slums.

And as the darkness slowly numbs

My senses, everything I’ve seen

Or heard the daylight through, becomes

Rubbish behind an opaque screen.

Instead, the sound of muffled drums

Inside myself: I have to lean

And listen as my strength succumbs,

To hear what these oncomings mean.

Perhaps the Death-God striking his thumbs

On the drums in a deadly rat-ta-ta-plan.

Or a strange man marching slow as he strums

The tune of a new weird hope in Man.

What does it matter! The day that began

In coal-dust is ending the same, in crumbs

Of darkness like coal. I live if I can;

If I can’t, then I welcome whatever comes.

This poem sounded so splendidly desperate, the editor of the Commentator decided to print it, and, moreover, to see the authoress. He wrote, Would she care to see him, if he happened to be in her neighbourhood? He was going to lecture in Sheffield. She replied, Certainly.

He gave his afternoon lecture, on Men in Books and Men in Life. Naturally, men in books came first. Then he caught a train to reach the mining village where the Pinnegars lived.

It was February, with gruesome patches of snow. It was dark when he arrived at Mill Valley, a sort of thick, turgid darkness full of menace, where men speaking in a weird accent went past like ghosts, dragging their heavy feet and emitting the weird scent of the coal-mine underworld. Weird and a bit gruesome it was.

He knew he had to walk uphill to the little market-place. As he went, he looked back and saw the black valleys with bunches of light, like camps of demons it seemed to him. And the demonish smell of sulphur and coal in the air, in the heavy, pregnant, clammy darkness.

They directed him to New London Lane, and down he went down another hill. His skin crept a little. The place felt uncanny and hostile, hard, as if iron and minerals breathed into the black air. Thank goodness he couldn’t see much, or be seen. When he had to ask his way the people treated him in a “heave-half-a-brick-at-him” fashion.

After much weary walking and asking, he entered a lane between trees, in the cold slushy mud of the unfrozen February. The mines, apparently, were on the outskirts of the town, in some mud-sunk country. He could see the red, sore fires of the burning pit-hill through the trees, and he smelt the sulphur. He felt like some modern Ulysses wandering in the realms of Hecate. How much more dismal and horrible, a modern Odyssey among mines and factories, than any Sirens, Scyllas or Charybdises.

So he mused to himself as he waded through icy black mud, in a black lane, under black trees that moaned an accompaniment to the sound of the coal-mine’s occasional hissing and chuffing, under a black sky that quenched even the electric sparkle of the colliery. And the place seemed unhabitated like a cold black jungle.

At last he came in sight of a glimmer. Apparently, there were dwellings. Yes, a new little street, with one street-lamp, and the houses all apparently dark. He paused. Absolute desertion. Then three children.

They told him the house, and he stumbled up a dark passage. There was light on the little backyard. He knocked, in some trepidation. A rather tall woman, looking down at him with a “Who are you?” look, from the step above.

“Mrs Pinnegar?”

“Oh, is it you, Mr Frith? Come in.”

He stumbled up the step into the glaring light of the kitchen. There stood Mrs Pinnegar, a tall woman with a face like a mask of passive anger, looking at him coldly. Immediately he felt his own shabbiness and smallness. In utter confusion, he stuck out his hand.

“I had an awful time getting here,” he said. “I’m afraid I shall make a frightful mess of your house.” He looked down at his boots.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Have you had your tea?”

“No — but don’t you bother about me.”

There was a little girl with fair hair in a fringe over her forehead, troubled blue eyes under the fringe, and two dolls. He felt easier.

“Is this your little girl?” he asked. “She’s awfully nice. What is her name?”

“Jane.”

“How are you, Jane?” he said. But the child only stared at him with the baffled, bewildered, pained eyes of a child who lives with hostile parents.

Mrs Pinnegar set his tea, bread and butter, jam, and buns. Then she sat opposite him. She was handsome, dark straight brows and grey eyes with yellow grains in them, and a way of looking straight at you as if she were used to holding her own. Her eyes were the nicest part of her. They had a certain kindliness, mingled, like the yellow grains among the grey, with a relentless, unyielding feminine will. Her nose and mouth were straight, like a Greek mask, and the expression was fixed. She gave him at once the impression of a woman who has made a mistake, who knows it, but who will not change: who cannot now change.

He felt very uneasy. Being a rather small, shambling man, she made him aware of his physical inconspicuousness. And she said not a word, only looked down on him, as he drank his tea, with that changeless look of a woman who is holding her own against Man and Fate. While, from the corner across the kitchen, the little girl with her fair hair and her dolls, watched him also in absolute silence, from her hot blue eyes.

“This seems a pretty awful place,” he said to her.

“It is. It’s absolutely awful,” the woman said.

“You ought to get away from it,” he said.

But she received this in dead silence.

It was exceedingly difficult to make any headway. He asked about Mr Pinnegar. She glanced at the clock.

“He comes up at nine,” she said.

“Is he down the mine?”

“Yes. He’s on the afternoon shift.”

There was never a sound from the little girl.

“Doesn’t Jane ever talk?” he asked.

“Not much,” said her mother, glancing round.

He talked a little about his lectures, about Sheffield, about London. But she was not really interested. She sat there rather distant, very laconic, looking at him with those curious unyielding eyes. She looked to him like a woman who has had her revenge, and is left stranded on the reefs where she wrecked her opponent. Still unrelenting, unregretting, unyielding, she seemed rather undecided as to what her revenge had been, and what it had all been about.

“You ought to get away from here,” he said to her.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Oh”— he made a vague gesture —“anywhere, so long as it is QUITE away.”

She seemed to ponder this, under her portentous brow.

“I don’t see what difference it would make,” she said. Then glancing round at her child: “I don’t see what difference anything would make, except getting out of the world altogether. But there’s HER to consider.” And she jerked her head in the direction of the child.

Jimmy felt definitely frightened. He wasn’t used to this sort of grimness. At the same time he was excited. This handsome, laconic woman, with her soft brown hair and her unflinching eyes with their gold flecks, seemed to be challenging him to something. There was a touch of challenge in her remaining gold-flecked kindness. Somewhere, she had a heart. But what had happened to it? And why?

What had gone wrong with her? In some way, she must have gone against herself.

“Why don’t you come and live with me?” he said, like the little gambler he was.

The queer, conflicting smile was on his face. He had taken up her challenge, like a gambler. The very sense of a gamble, in which he could not lose desperately, excited him. At the same time, he was scared of her, and determined to get beyond his scare.

She sat and watched him, with the faintest touch of a grim smile on her handsome mouth.

“How do you mean, live with you?” she said.

“Oh — I mean what it usually means,” he said, with a little puff of self-conscious laughter.

“You’re evidently not happy here. You’re evidently in the wrong circumstances altogether. You’re obviously NOT just an ordinary woman. Well, then, break away. When I say, Come and live with me, I mean just what I say. Come to London and live with me, as my wife, if you like, and then if we want to marry, when you get a divorce, why, we can do it.”

Jimmy made this speech more to himself than to the woman. That was how he was. He worked out all his things inside himself, as if it were all merely an interior problem of his own. And while he did so, he had an odd way of squinting his left eye and wagging his head loosely, like a man talking absolutely to himself, and turning his eyes inwards.

The woman watched him in a sort of wonder. This was something she was NOT used to. His extraordinary manner, and his extraordinary bald proposition, roused her from her own tense apathy.

“Well!” she said. “That’s got to be thought about. What about HER?”— and again she jerked her head towards the round-eyed child in the corner. Jane sat with a completely expressionless face, her little red mouth fallen a little open. She seemed in a sort of trance: as if she understood like a grown-up person, but, as a child, sat in a trance, unconscious.

The mother wheeled round in her chair and stared at her child. The little girl stared back at her mother, with hot, troubled, almost guilty blue eyes. And neither said a word. Yet they seemed to exchange worlds of meaning.

“Why, of course,” said Jimmy, twisting his head again; “she’d come, too.”

The woman gave a last look at her child, then turned to him, and started watching HIM with that slow, straight stare.

“It’s not”— he began, stuttering —“it’s not anything SUDDEN and unconsidered on my part. I’ve been considering it for quite a long time — ever since I had the first poem, and your letter.”

He spoke still with his eyes turned inwards, talking to himself.” And the woman watched him unflinchingly.

“Before you ever saw me?” she asked, with a queer irony.

“Oh, of course. Of course before I ever saw you. Or else I never SHOULD have seen you. From the very first, I had a definite feeling —”

He made odd, sharp gestures, like a drunken man, and he spoke like a drunken man, his eyes turned inward, talking to himself. The woman was no more than a ghost moving inside his own consciousness, and he was addressing her there.

The actual woman sat outside looking on in a sort of wonder. This was really something new to her.

“And now you see me, do you want me, really, to come to London?”

She spoke in a dull tone of incredulity. The thing was just a little preposterous to her. But why not? It would have to be something a little preposterous, to get her out of the tomb she was in.

“Of course I do!” he cried, with another scoop of his head and scoop of his hand. “NOW I do ACTUALLY want you, now I actually see you.” He never looked at her. His eyes were still turned in. He was still talking to himself, in a sort of drunkenness with himself.

To her, it was something extraordinary. But it roused her from apathy.

He became aware of the hot blue eyes of the hot-cheeked little girl fixed upon him from the distant corner. And he gave a queer little giggle.

“Why, it’s more than I could ever have hoped for,” he said, “to have you and Jane to live with me! Why, it will mean LIFE to me.” He spoke in an odd, strained voice, slightly delirious. And for the first time he looked up at the woman and, apparently, STRAIGHT at her. But, even as he seemed to look straight at her, the curious cast was in his eye, and he was only looking at himself, inside himself, at the shadows inside his own consciousness.

“And when would you like me to come?” she asked, rather coldly.

“Why, as soon as possible. Come back with me tomorrow, if you will. I’ve got a little house in St John’s Wood, WAITING for you. Come with me tomorrow. That’s the simplest.”

She watched him for some time, as he sat with ducked head. He looked like a man who is drunk — drunk with himself. He was going bald at the crown, his rather curly black hair was thin.

“I couldn’t come tomorrow, I should need a few days,” she said.

She wanted to see his face again. It was as if she could not remember what his face was like, this strange man who had appeared out of nowhere, with such a strange proposition.

He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.

“Why, of course it’s wonderful that it’s happened like this for me,” he said, with odd pouting emphasis, pushing out his lips. “I was finished, absolutely finished. I was finished while Clarissa was with me. But after she’d gone, I was ABSOLUTELY finished. And I thought there was no chance for me in the world again. It seems to me perfectly marvellous that this has happened — that I’ve come across you —” he lifted his face sightlessly —“and Jane — Jane — why she’s REALLY too good to be true.” He gave a slight hysterical laugh. “She really is.”

The woman, and Jane, watched him with some embarrassment.

“I shall have to settle up here, with Mr Pinnegar,” she said, rather coldly musing. “Do you want to see him?”

“Oh, I—” he said, with a deprecating gesture, “I don’t CARE. But if you think I’d better — why, certainly —”

“I do think you’d better,” she said.

“Very well, then, I WILL. I’ll see him whenever you like.”

“He comes in soon after nine,” she said.

“All right, I’ll see him then. Much better. But I suppose I’d better see about finding a place to sleep first. Better not leave it too late.”

“I’ll come with you and ask for you.”

“Oh, you’d better not, really. If you tell me where to go —”

He had taken on a protective tone: he was protecting her against herself and against scandal. It was his manner, his rather Oxfordy manner, more than anything else, that went beyond her. She wasn’t used to it.

Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.

At the baker’s shop, where she had suggested he should ask for a bed, they would have none of him. Absolutely they didn’t like the looks of him. At the Pub, too, they shook their heads: didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But, in a voice more expostulatingly Oxford than ever, he said:

“But look here — you can’t ask a man to sleep under one of these hedges. Can’t I see the landlady?”

He persuaded the landlady to promise to let him sleep on the big, soft settee in the parlour, where the fire was burning brightly. Then, saying he would be back about ten, he returned through mud and drizzle up New London Lane.

The child was in bed, a saucepan was boiling by the fire. Already the lines had softened a little in the woman’s face.

She spread a cloth on the table. Jimmy sat in silence, feeling that she was hardly aware of his presence. She was absorbed, no doubt, in the coming of her husband. The stranger merely sat on the sofa, and waited. He felt himself wound up tight. And once he was really wound up, he could go through with anything.

They heard the nine-o’clock whistle at the mine. The woman then took the saucepan from the fire and went into the scullery. Jimmy could smell the smell of potatoes being strained. He sat quite still. There was nothing for him to do or to say. He was wearing his big black-rimmed spectacles, and his face, blank and expressionless in the suspense of waiting, looked like the death-mask of some sceptical philosopher, who could wait through the ages, and who could hardly distinguish life from death at any time.

Came the heavy-shod tread up the house entry, and the man entered, rather like a blast of wind. The fair moustache stuck out from the blackish, mottled face, and the fierce blue eyes rolled their whites in the coal-blackened sockets.

“This gentleman is Mr Frith,” said Emily Pinnegar.

Jimmy got up, with a bit of an Oxford wriggle, and held out his hand, saying: “How do you do?”

His grey eyes, behind the spectacles, had an uncanny whitish gleam.

“My hand’s not fit to shake hands,” said the miner. “Take a seat.”

“Oh, nobody minds coal-dust,” said Jimmy, subsiding on to the sofa. “It’s clean dirt.”

“They say so,” said Pinnegar.

He was a man of medium height, thin, but energetic in build.

Mrs Pinnegar was running hot water into a pail from the bright brass tap of the stove, which had a boiler to balance the oven. Pinnegar dropped heavily into a wooden armchair, and stooped to pull off his ponderous grey pit-boots. He smelled of the strange, stale underground. In silence he pulled on his slippers, then rose, taking his boots into the scullery. His wife followed with the pail of hot water. She returned and spread a coarse roller-towel on the steel fender. The man could be heard washing in the scullery, in the semi-dark. Nobody said anything. Mrs Pinnegar attended to her husband’s dinner.

After a while, Pinnegar came running in, naked to the waist, and squatted plumb in front of the big red fire, on his heels. His head and face and the front part of his body were all wet. His back was grey and unwashed. He seized the towel from the fender and began to rub his face and head with a sort of brutal vigour, while his wife brought a bowl, and with a soapy flannel silently washed his back, right down to the loins, where the trousers were rolled bac............