THE CLYDE
She was sitting up on the chaise-longue and had poured out the tea--he
had pushed the tea-table towards the chaise-longue--and she was
talking in an ordinary tone just as though she had not immodestly
bared her spirit to him and as though she knew not that he realised
she had done so. She was talking at length, as one who in the past had
been well accustomed to giving monologues and to holding drawing-rooms
in subjection while she chattered, and to making drawing-rooms feel
glad that they had consented to subjection. She was saying:
"You've no idea what the valley of the Clyde is now. You can't have.
It's filled with girls, and they come into it every morning by train
to huge stations specially built for them, and they make the most
ghastly things for killing other girls' lovers all day, and they go
back by train at night. Only some of them work all night. I had to
leave my own works to organise the canteen of a new filling factory.
Five thousand girls in that factory. It's frightfully dangerous. They
have to wear special clothing. They have to take off every stitch from
their bodies in one room, and run in their innocence and nothing else
to another room where the special clothing is. That's the only way
to prevent the whole place being blown up one beautiful day. But five
thousand of them! You can't imagine it. You'd like to, G.J., but you
can't. However, I didn't stay there very long. I wanted to go back to
my own place. I was adored at my own place. Of course the men adored
me. They used to fight about me sometimes. Terrific men. Nothing
ever made me happier than that, or so happy. But the girls were more
interesting. Two thousand of them there. You'd never guess it, because
they were hidden in thickets of machinery. But see them rush out
endlessly to the canteen for tea! All sorts. Lots of devils and cats.
Some lovely creatures, heavenly creatures, as fine as a queen. They
adored me too. They didn't at first, some of them. But they soon
tumbled to it that I was the modern woman, and that they'd never
seen me before, and it was a great discovery. Absurdly easy to
raise yourself to be the idol of a crowd that fancies itself canny!
Incredibly easy! I used to take their part against the works-manager
as often as I could; he was a fiend; he hated me; but then I was a
fiend, too, and I hated him more. I used often to come on at six in
the morning, when they did, and 'sign on'. It isn't really signing on
now at all; there's a clock dial and a whole machine for catching
you out. They loved to see me doing that. And I worked the lathes
sometimes, just for a bit, just to show that I wasn't ashamed to work.
Etc.... All that sentimental twaddle. It pleased them. And if any
really vigorous-minded girl had dared to say it was sentimental
twaddle, there would have been a crucifixion or something of the sort
in the cloak-rooms. The mob's always the same. But what pleased them
far more than anything was me knowing them by their Christian names.
Not all, of course; still, hundreds of them. Marvellous feats of
memorising I did! I used to go about muttering under my breath:
'Winnie, wart on left hand, Winnie, wart on left hand, wart on left
hand, Winnie.' You see? And I've sworn at them--not often; it wouldn't
do, naturally. But there was scarcely a woman there that I couldn't
simply blast in two seconds if I felt like it. On the other hand, I
assure you I could be very tender. I was surprised how tender I could
be, now and then, in my little office. They'd tell me anything--sounds
sentimental, but they would--and some of them had no more notion
that there's such a thing on earth as propriety than a monkey has. I
thought I knew everything before I went to the Clyde valley. Well,
I didn't." Concepcion looked at G.J. "You know you're very innocent,
G.J., compared to me."
"I should hope so!" said G.J., impenetrably.
"What do you think of it all?" she demanded in a fresh tone, leaning a
little towards him.
He replied: "I'm impressed."
He was, in fact, very profoundly impressed; but he had to illustrate
the hardness in himself which she had revealed to him. (He wondered
whether the members of the Lechford Committee really did credit him
with having dethroned a couple of chairmen. The idea was new to his
modesty. Perhaps he had been underestimating his own weight on the
committee. No doubt he had.) All constraint was now dissipated between
Concepcion and himself. They were behaving to each other as though
their intimacy had never been interrupted for a single week. She
amazed him, sitting there in the purple stockings and the affronting
gown, and he admired. Her material achievement alone was prodigious.
He pictured her as she rose in the winter dark and in the summer dawn
to go to the works and wrestle with so much incalculable human nature
and so many complex questions of organisation, day after day, week
after week, month after month, for nearly eighteen months. She had
kept it up; that was the point. She had shown what she was made of,
and what she was made of was unquestionably marvellous.
He would have liked to know about various things to which she had made
no reference. Did she live in a frowsy lodging-house near the great
works? What kind of food did she get? What did she do with her
evenings and her Sundays? Was she bored? Was she miserable or
exultant? Had she acquaintances, external interests; or did she
immerse herself completely, inclusively, in the huge, smoking,
whirring, foul, perilous hell which she had described? The
contemplation of the horror of the hell gave him--and her, too, he
thought--a curious feeling which was not unpleasurable. It had
savour. He would not, however, inquire from her concerning details.
He preferred, on reflection, to keep the details mysterious, as
mysterious as her individuality and as the impression of her worn
eyes. The setting of mystery in his mind suited her.
He said: "But of course your relations with those girls were
artificial, after all."
"No, they weren't. I tell you the girls were perfectly open; there
wasn't the slightest artificiality."
"Yes, but were you open, to them? Did you ever tell them anything
about yourself, for instance?"
"Oh, no!"
"Did they ever ask you to?"
"No! They wouldn't have thought of doing so."
"That's what I call artificiality. By the way, how have you been
ruined? Who ruined you? Was it the hated works-manager?" There had
been no change in his tone; he spoke with the utmost detachment.
"I was coming to that," answered Concepcion, apparently with a
detachment equal to his. "Last week but one in one of the shops there
was a girl standing in front of a machine, with her back to it. About
twenty-two--you must see her in your mind--about twenty-two, nice
chestnut hair. Cap over it, of course--that's the rule. Khaki overalls
and trousers. Rather high-heeled patent-leather boots--they fancy
themselves, thank God!--and a bit of lace showing out of the khaki at
the neck. Red cheeks; she was fairly new to the works. Do you see her?
She meant to be one of the devils. Earning two pounds a week nearly,
and eagerly spending it all. Fully awake to all the possibilities of
her body. I was in the shop. I said something to her, and she didn't
hear at first--the noise of some of the shops is shattering. I went
close to her and repeated it. She laughed out of mere vivacity, and
threw back her head as people do when they laugh. The machine behind
her must have caught some hair that wasn't under her cap. All her hair
was dragged from under the cap, and in no time all her hair was torn
out and the whole of her scalp ripped clean off. In a second or two I
got her on to a trolley--I did it--and threw an overall over her and
ran her to the dressing-station, close to the main office entrance.
There was a car there. One of the directors was just driving off.
I stopped him. It wasn't a case for our dressing-station. In three
minutes I had her at the hospital--three minutes. The car was soaked
in blood. But she didn't lose consciousness, that child didn't. She's
dead now. She's buried. Her body that she meant to use so profusely
for her own delights is squeezed up in the little black box in the
dark and the silence, down below where the spring can't get at it....
I had no sleep for two nights. On the second day a doctor at the
hospital said that I must take at least three months' holiday. He said
I'd had a nervous breakdown. I didn't know I had, and I don't know
now. I said I wouldn't take any holiday, and that nothing would induce
me to."
"Why, Con?"
"Because I'd sworn, absolutely sworn to myself, to stick that job till
the war was over. You understand, I'd sworn it. Well, they wouldn't
let me on to the works. And yesterday one of the directors brought
me up to town himself. He was very kind, in his Clyde way. Now you
understand what I mean when I say I'm ruined. I'm ruined with myself,
you see. I didn't stick it. I couldn't. But there were twenty or
thirty girls who saw the accident. They're sticking it."
"Yes," he said in a voice soft and moved, "I understand." And while
he spoke thus aloud, though his emotion was genuine, and his desire to
comfort and sustain her genuine, and his admiration for her genuine,
he thought to himself: "How theatrically she told it! Every effect
was studied, nearly every word. Well, she can't help it. But does she
imagine I can't see that all the casualness was deliberately part of
the effect?"
She lit a cigarette and leaned her half-draped elbows on the
tea-table, and curved her ringed fingers, which had withstood time and
fatigue much better than her face; and then she reclined again on the
chaise-longue, on her back, and sent up smoke perpendicularly, and
through the smoke seemed to be trying to decipher the enigmas of the
ceiling. G.J. rose and stood over her in silence. At last she went on:
"The work those girls do is excruciating, hellish, and they don't
realise it. That's the worst of it. They'll never be the same again.
They're ruining their health, and, what's more important, their looks.
You can see them changing under your eyes. Ours was the best factory
on the Clyde, and the conditions were unspeakable, in spite of
canteens, and rest-rooms, and libraries, and sanitation, and all this
damned 'welfare'. Fancy a girl chained up for twelve hours every day
to a thundering, whizzing, iron machine that never gets tired. The
machine's just as fresh at six o'clock at night as it was at six
o'clock in the morning, and just as anxious to maim her if she doesn't
look out for herself--more anxious. The whole thing's still going on;
they're at it now, this very minute. You're interested in a factory,
aren't you, G.J.?"
"Yes," he answered gently, but looked with seemingly callous firmness
down at her.
"The Reveille Company, or some such name."
"Yes."
"Making tons of money, I hear."
"Yes."
"You're a profiteer, G.J."
"I'm not. Long since I decided I must give away all my extra profits."
"Ever go and look at your factory?"
"No."
"Any nice young girls working there?"
"I don't know."
"If there are, are they decently treated?"
"Don't know that, either."
"Why don't you go and see?"
"It's no business of mine."
"Yes, it is. Aren't you making yourself glorious as a philanthropist
out of the thing?"
"I tell you it's no business of mine," he insisted evenly. "I couldn't
do anything if I went. I've no status."
"Rotten system."
"Possibly. But systems can't be altered like that. Systems alter
themselves, and they aren't in a hurry about it. This system isn't
new, though it's new to you."
"You people in London don't know what work is."
"And what about your Clyde strikes?" G.J. retorted.
"Well, all that's settled now," said Concepcion rather uneasily, like
a champion who foresees a fight but lacks confidence.
"Yes, but--" G.J. suddenly altered his tone to the persuasive: "You
must know all about those strikes. What was the real cause? We don't
understand them here."
"If you really want to know--nerves," she said earnestly and
triumphantly.
"Nerves?"
"Overwork. No rest. No change. Everlasting punishment. The one
incomprehensible thing to me is that the whole of Glasgow didn't go on
strike and stay out for ever."
"There's just as much overwork in London as there is on the Clyde."
"There's a lot more talking--Parliament, Cabinet, Committees. You
should hear what they say about it in Glasgow."
"Con," he said kindly, "you don't suspect it, but you're childish.
It's the job of one part of London to talk. If that part of London
didn't talk your tribes on the Clyde couldn't work, because they
wouldn't know what to do, nor how to do it. Talking has to come
before working, and let me tell you it's more difficult, and it's more
killing, because it's more responsible. Excuse this common sense made
easy for beginners, but you brought it on yourself."
She frowned. "And what do you do? Do you talk or work?" She smiled.
"I'll tell you this!" said he, smiling candidly and benevolently. "It
took me a dickens of a time really to _put_ myself into anything that
meant steady effort. I'd lost the habit. Natural enough, and I'm not
going into sackcloth about it. However, I'm improving. I'm going
to take on the secretaryship of the Lechford Committee. Some of 'em
mayn't want me, but they'll have to have me. And when they've got
me they'll have to look out. All of them, including Queen and her
mother."
"Will it take the whole of your time?"
"Yes. I'm doing three days a week now."
"I suppose you think you've beaten me."
"Con, I do ask you not to be a child."
"But I am a child. Why don't you humour me? You know I've had a
nervous breakdown. You used to humour me."
He shook his head.
"Humouring you won't do _your_ nervous breakdown any good. It might
some women's--but not yours."
"You shall humour me!" she cried. "I haven't told you half my ruin.
Do you know I meant to love Carly all my life. I felt sure I should.
Well, I can't! It's gone, all that feeling--already! In less than two
years! And now I'm only sorry for him and sorry for myself. Isn't it
horrible? Isn't it horrible?"
"Try not to think," he murmured.
She sat up impetuously.
"Don't talk such damned nonsense! 'Try not to think'! Why, my
frightful unhappiness is the one thing that keeps me alive."
"Yes," G.J. yielded. "It was nonsense."
She sank back. He saw moisture in her eyes and felt it in his own.