XI

singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a “sweet children’s song.” Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing. Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops, the post-office, into the little marketplace of forlorn space, where Sam Black was peering out of the door of the “Sun,” that called itself an inn, not a pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was bowing to Lady Chatterley’s car.

The church was away to the left, among black trees. The car slid on downhill, past the Miners’ Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the Nelson, the Three Tunns and the Sun, now it passed the Miners’ Arms, then the Mechanics’ Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners’ Welfare and so, past a few new “villas,” out into the blackened road between dark hedges and dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.

Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare’s England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realised since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an underworld. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses?