“One never should keep these things,” said Connie.
“That one shouldn’t! One should never have them made!”
He broke the cardboard photograph and mount over his knee, and when it was small enough, put it on the fire.
“It’ll spoil the fire, though,” he said.
The glass and the backboards he carefully took upstairs.
The frame he knocked asunder with a few blows of the hammer, making the stucco fly. Then he took the pieces into the scullery.
“We’ll burn that tomorrow,” he said. “There’s too much plaster-moulding on it.”
Having cleared away, he sat down.
“Did you love your wife?” she asked him.
“Love?” he said. “Did you love Sir Clifford?”
But she was not going to be put off.
“But you cared for her?” she insisted.
“Cared?” he grinned.
“Perhaps you care for her now,” she said.
“Me!” His eyes widened. “Ah no, I can’t think of her,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
But he shook his head.
“Then why don’t you get a divorce? She’ll come back to you one day,” said Connie.
He looked up at her sharply.
“She wouldn’t come within a mile of me. She hates me a lot worse than I hate her.”
“You’ll see she’ll come back to you.”
“That she never shall. That’s done! It would make me sick to see her.”
“You will see her. And you’re not even legally separated, are you?”
“No.”
“Ah well, then she’ll come back, and you’ll have to take her in.”
He gazed at Connie fixedly. Then he gave the queer toss of his head.
“You may be right. I was a fool ever to come back here. But I felt stranded, and had to go somewhere. A man’s a poor bit of a wastrel, blown about. But you’re right. I’ll get a divorce and get clear. I hate those things like death, officials and courts and judges. But I’ve got to get through with it. I’ll get a divorce.”
And she saw his jaw set. Inwardly she exulted.
“I think I will have a cup of tea now,” she said.
He rose to make it. But his face was set.
As they sat at table she asked him:
“Why did you marry her? She was commoner than yourself. Mrs. Bolton told me about her. She could never understand why you married her.”
He looked at her fixedly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen. She was a schoolmaster’s daughter over at Ollerton, pretty, beautiful really. I was supposed to be a clever sort of young fellow from Sheffield Grammar School, with a bit of French and German, very much up aloft. She was the romantic sort that hated commonness. She egged me on to poetry and reading: in a way, she made a man of me. I read and I thought like a house on fire, for her. And I was a clerk in Butterley Offices, a thin, white-faced fellow fuming with all the things I read. And about everything I talked to her: but everything. We talked ourselves into Persepolis and Timbuktu. We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten counties. I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn’t have any; at least, not where it’s supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we’d got to be lovers. I talked her into it, as usual. So she let me. I was excited, and she never wanted it. She just didn’t want it. She adored me, she loved me to talk to her and kiss her: in that way she had a passion for me. But the other, she just didn’t want. And there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other that I did want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her. Then I took on with another girl, a teacher, who had made a scandal by carrying on with a married man and driving him nearly out of his mind. She was a soft, white-skinned, soft sort of a woman, older than me, and played the fiddle. And she was a demon. She loved everything about love, except the sex. Clinging, caressing, creeping into you in every way: but if you forced her to the sex itself, she just ground her teeth and sent out hate. I forced her to it, and she could simply numb me with hate because of it. So I was balked again. I loathed all that. I wanted a woman who wanted me, and wanted it.
“Then came Bertha Coutts. They’d lived next door to us when I was a little lad, so I knew ’em all right. And they were common. Well, Bertha went away to some place or other in Birmingham; she said, as a lady’s companion; everybody else said, as a waitress or something in an hotel. Anyhow, just when I was more than fed up with that other girl, when I was twenty-one, back comes Bertha, with airs and graces and smart clothes and a sort of bloom on her: a sort of sensual bloom that you’d see sometimes on a woman, or on a trolly. Well, I was in a state of murder. I chucked up my job at Butterley because I thought I was a weed, clerking there: and I got on as overhead blacksmith at Tevershall: shoeing horses mostly. It had been my dad’s job, and I’d always been with him. It was a job I liked: handling horses: and it came natural to me. So I stopped talking ‘fine,’ as they call it, talking proper English, and went back to talking broad. I still read books, at home: but I blacksmithed and had a pony-trap of my own, and was My Lord Duckfoot. My dad left me three hundred pounds when he died. So I took on with Bertha, and I was glad she was common. I wanted her to be common. I wanted to be common myself.
