第61章

Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on the face of the earth,and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff drifting in from anywhere,to poach Clifford's rabbits among other occupations.

The car ran on along the uplands,seeing the rolling county spread out.

The county!It had once been a proud and lordly county.In front,looming again and hanging on the brow of the sky-line,was the huge and splendid bulk of Chadwick Hall,more window than wall,one of the most famous Elizabethan houses.Noble it stood alone above a great park,but out of date,passed over.It was still kept up,but as a show place.'Look how our ancestors lorded it!'

That was the past.The present lay below.God alone knows where the future lies.The car was already turning,between little old blackened miners'cottages,to descend to Uthwaite.And Uthwaite,on a damp day,was sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam,to whatever gods there be.Uthwaite down in the valley,with all the steel threads of the railways to Sheffield drawn through it,and the coal-mines and the steel-works sending up smoke and glare from long tubes,and the pathetic little corkscrew spire of the church,that is going to tumble down,still pricking the fumes,always affected Connie strangely.It was an old market-town,centre of the dales.One of the chief inns was the Chatterley Arms.There,in Uthwaite,Wragby was known as Wragby,as if it were a whole place,not just a house,as it was to outsiders:Wragby Hall,near Tevershall:Wragby,a 'seat'.

The miners'cottages,blackened,stood flush on the pavement,with that intimacy and smallness of colliers'dwellings over a hundred years old.

They lined all the way.The road had become a street,and as you sank,you forgot instantly the open,rolling country where the castles and big houses still dominated,but like ghosts.Now you were just above the tangle of naked railway-lines,and foundries and other 'works'rose about you,so big you were only aware of walls.And iron clanked with a huge reverberating clank,and huge lorries shook the earth,and whistles screamed.

Yet again,once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked heart of the town,behind the church,you were in the world of two centuries ago,in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood,and the old pharmacy,streets which used to lead Out to the wild open world of the castles and stately couchant houses.

But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded with iron rolled past,shaking the poor old church.And not till the lorries were past could he salute her ladyship.

So it was.Upon the old crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish blackened miners'dwellings crowded,lining the roads out.And immediately after these came the newer,pinker rows of rather larger houses,plastering the valley:the homes of more modern workmen.And beyond that again,in the wide rolling regions of the castles,smoke waved against steam,and patch after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements,sometimes in the hollows,sometimes gruesomely ugly along the sky-line of the slopes.

And between,in between,were the tattered remnants of the old coaching and cottage England,even the England of Robin Hood,where the miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts,when they were not at work.

England,my England!But which is my England?The stately homes of England make good photographs,and create the illusion of a connexion with the Elizabethans.The handsome old halls are there,from the days of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones.But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco,that has long ceased to be golden.And one by one,like the stately homes,they were abandoned.Now they are being pulled down.As for the cottages of England--there they are--great plasterings of brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside.

'Now they are pulling down the stately homes,the Georgian halls are going.Fritchley,a perfect old Georgian mansion,was even now,as Connie passed in the car,being demolished.It was in perfect repair:till the war the Weatherleys had lived in style there.But now it was too big,too expensive,and the country had become too uncongenial.The gentry were departing to pleasanter places,where they could spend their money without having to see how it was made.'

This is history.One England blots out another.The mines had made the halls wealthy.Now they were blotting them out,as they had already blotted out the cottages.The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.

One meaning blots out another.The new England blots out the old England.

And the continuity is not Organic,but mechanical.

Connie,belonging to the leisured classes,had clung to the remnants of the old England.It had taken her years to realize that it was really blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England,and that the blotting out would go on till it was complete.Fritchley was gone,Eastwood was gone,Shipley was going:Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.

Connie called for a moment at Shipley.The park gates,at the back,opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway;the Shipley colliery itself stood just beyond the trees.The gates stood open,because through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used.They hung around the park.

The car passed the ornamental ponds,in which the colliers threw their newspapers,and took the private drive to the house.It stood above,aside,a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century.

It had a beautiful alley of yew trees,that had approached an older house,and the hall stood serenely spread out,winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully.Behind,there were really beautiful gardens.