The Rainbow

"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.