Women in Love

Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him.

He refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent

a certain time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity

had been aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a

curious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him. Then he

must try war. Then he must travel into the savage regions that had so

attracted him.

The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a

mind like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting

than the European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas,

and ideas of reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were

never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the

reaction against the positive order, the destructive reaction.

He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father

asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science

of mining, and it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort

of exultation, he laid hold of the world.

There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great

industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran

the colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the

trains, short trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty

wagons, each one bearing in big white letters the initials: 'C.B.&Co.' These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first

childhood, and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so

familiar, and so ignored. Now at last he saw his own name written on

the wall. Now he had a vision of power.

So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He

saw them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So

far his power ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore,

at Lethley Bank, the great colliery villages which depended entirely on

his mines. They were hideous and sordid, during his childhood they had

been sores in his consciousness. And now he saw them with pride. Four

raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets were crowded under his

dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the causeways

from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,

slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate

to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little

market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human

beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly

spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth,

but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made

way for his motor-car automatically, slowly.