Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What
is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there
was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost it seemed
to her, she had married him because she disliked him, in a secret,
physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really because
in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had seemed, in
some way, her master, beyond her.
Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her
depths: and she realised how it had been eating her life away.
She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from
outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible
because it was insane. Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called
love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual
asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money
and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity.
His love was a sort of insanity.
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forward! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.
Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs. Bolton. He did not know it. Like many
insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was
_not_ aware of; the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
Mrs. Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort
of bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of
the signs of insanity in modern woman. She _thought_ she was utterly
subservient and living for others. Clifford fascinated her because he
always, or so often, frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He
had a finer, subtler will of self-assertion than herself. This was his
charm for her.
Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.
"It's a lovely day, today!" Mrs. Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. "I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your
chair today, the sun's just lovely."
"Yes? Will you give me that book--there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out."
"Why, they're so beautiful!" She pronounced it with the "y" sound:
be-yutiful! "And the scent is simply gorgeous."
"The scent is what I object to," he said. "It's a little funereal."
"Do you think so!" she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed
by his higher fastidiousness.
"Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?"
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.
"I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready."
"Very good, Sir Clifford!" she replied, so soft and submissive,
withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in
her.
When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:
"I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning."
Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:
"Very good, Sir Clifford!"
She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers on
his face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He
let her shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so
very concentrated, watching that she did it right. And gradually her
fingertips knew his cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat
perfectly. He was well-fed and well-liking, his face and throat were
handsome enough, and he was a gentleman.
She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite
softness, almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he
was yielding to her.
She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie.
She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge,
absolutely, to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day:
"All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've
handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall
pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and
they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in
men!"
At first Mrs. Bolton had thought there really was something different
in a gentleman, a _real_ gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford
had got a good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom
of him, to use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby
grown to a man's proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine
manner and power in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that
she had never dreamed of, with which he could still bully her.
Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:
"For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!"
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run.
It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten
o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his
manuscript. But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his
manuscripts. But she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in
time Mrs. Bolton would do even that.
For Connie had suggested to Mrs. Bolton that she should learn to use
a typewriter. And Mrs. Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and
practised assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter
to her, and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And
he was very patient spelling for her the difficult words, or the
occasional phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a
pleasure to instruct her.
Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up
to her room after dinner.
"Perhaps Mrs. Bolton will play piquet with you," she said to Clifford.
"Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling."
But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs. Bolton, and asked her
to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her
all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see
Mrs. Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her
queen or her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again.
And Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying
to her:
"You must say _j'adoube_!"
She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:
"_J'adoube!_"
Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession
of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from
the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him
want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him,
her genuine thrill.
To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours:
a little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy
Bolton's tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent.
But Connie did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out
of Clifford. To say she was in love with him would be putting it
wrongly. She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class,
this titled gentleman, this author who could write books and poems,
and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was
thrilled to a weird passion. And his "educating" her roused in her a
passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair
could have done. In truth, the very fact that there could _be_ no love
affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other
passion, the peculiar passion of _knowing_, knowing as he knew.
There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so
young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time,
there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph,
and private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction! How Connie
loathed it!
But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his
service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!
Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather,
it was mostly Mrs. Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream
of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was
Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one with a
great deal more, that these women left out. Once started, Mrs. Bolton
was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them
all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their
affairs, it was wonderful, if just a _trifle_ humiliating to listen to
her. At first she had not ventured to "talk Tevershall," as she called
it, to Clifford. But once started, it went. Clifford was listening
for "material," and he found it in plenty. Connie realised that his
so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal
gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs. Bolton, of course, was
very warm when she "talked Tevershall." Carried away, in fact. And it
was marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She
would have run to dozens of volumes.
Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After
all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only
in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any
human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For
even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows
and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast
importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into
new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead
our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the
novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life:
for it is in the _passional_ secret places of life, above all, that
the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and
freshening.
But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify
the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are _conventionally_ "pure."
Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip,
all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the
angels. Mrs. Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. "And
he was such a _bad_ fellow, and she was such a _nice_ woman." Whereas,
as Connie could see even from Mrs. Bolton's gossip, the woman had been
merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry
honesty made a "bad man" of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a "nice
woman" of her, in the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by
Mrs. Bolton.
For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.
Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs.
Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not
at all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course
knew by sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or
two. But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than
English village.
"I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James's daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp.
You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year
from a fall: eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he
slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter,
an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem
a shame. Well he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a
penny. And Tattie, I know, is five years--yes, she's fifty-three last
autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught
Sunday School for thirty years, till her father died. And then she
started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if you
know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock,
'as works in Harison's woodyard. Well, he's sixty-five if he's a day,
yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see
them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his
knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see.
And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old
James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to
live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown
from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the
way the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a
sight more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you
can't keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive
film, but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and
love films. Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, the
grownups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band.
Talk about morality! nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like,
and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they're having
to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working so bad, and
they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's awful,
especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they
do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show
off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and
then when they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply
rave: who's she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar
give me _one_ fur coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my
ten shillings! What's she going to give _me_, I should like to know?
Here I can't get a new Spring coat, my dad's working that bad, and
she gets van-loads. It's time as poor folks had some money to spend,
rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want a new Spring coat, I do, an'
wheer am I going to get it!--I say to them, be thankful you're well fed
and well clothed, without all the new finery you want!--And they fly
back at me: 'Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about in her old
rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like _her_ get van-loads, an' I
can't have a new Spring coat. It's a damned shame. Princess! bloomin'
rot about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos she's got lots,
they give her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've as much right as
anybody else. Don't talk to me about education. It's munney as matters.
I want a new Spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no
munney--.' That's all they care about, clothes. They think nothing of
giving seven and eight guineas for a winter coat--collier's daughters,
mind you--and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And then they go
to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls as would have
been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day. I heard that at the
Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have a built-up
platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand going almost
up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first class of
girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a thousand pounds in
new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are what they
are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And boys the
same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking,
drinking in the Miner's Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three
times a week. Why it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they
respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and
good, really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it
leads to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their
dads. They're sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self.
If you tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they
say: That'll keep, that will, I'm goin' t' enjoy mysen while I can. Owt
else'll keep!--Oh, they're rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything
falls on the older man, an' it's a bad look-out all round."
Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now--?
"Is there much socialism, bolshevism, among the people?" he asked.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Bolton. "You hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. I don't
believe you'll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They're too
decent for that. But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they
care for it really. They only want a bit of money in their pocket, to
spend at the Welfare, or go gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care.
When they've got no money, they'll listen to the reds spouting. But
nobody believes in it, really."
"So you think there's no danger?"
"Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you,
they're a selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do
anything. They aren't ever serious about anything, except showing
off on motorbikes and dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield.
You can't _make_ them serious. The serious ones dress up in evening
clothes and go off to the Pally to show off before a lot of girls
and dance these new Charlestons and what not. I'm sure sometimes the
bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier lads, off to
the Pally: let alone those that have gone with their girls in motors
or on motorbikes. They don't give a serious thought to a thing--save
Doncaster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on every race.
And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long chalk.
It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on
motorbikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons."
"But what do they do when they get there?"
"Oh, hang round--and have tea in some fine tea-place like the
Mikado--and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some
girl. The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like."
"And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?"
"They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But
I don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads
want is just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with
fine clothes: and they don't care about another thing. They haven't
the brains to be socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take
anything really serious, and they never will have."
Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or
Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys.
The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd
got, and how much you wanted.
Under Mrs. Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in
the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion
came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was
really the pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now
shrunk from with dread.
Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries:
Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous
mine, and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New
London was never very rich, and in ordinary times just got along
decently. But now times were bad, and it was pits like New London that
got left.
"There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and
Whiteover," said Mrs. Bolton. "You've not seen the new works at Stacks
Gate, opened after the War, have you Sir Clifford? Oh you must go one
day, they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the
pit-head, doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more
money out of the chemical by-products than out of the coal--I forget
what it is. And the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! Of
course it's brought a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a
lot of Tevershall men got on there, and doin' well, a lot better than
our own men. They say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question
of a few more years, and it'll have to shut down. And New London'll
go first. My word, won't it be funny, when there's no Tevershall pit
working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it closes
for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl
it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if
he could get on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall.
And now the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got
out. Doesn't it sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never
go till they have to. They don't like these new fangled mines, such
a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads
those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal,
where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well.
But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems
soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all
machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had to give up
the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the
more machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you
can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of
Stacks Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they
say so. But everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to
keep the men going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls
traipsing off to Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something
to talk about if Tevershall Collieries took a new lease on life, after
everybody saying they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men
ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so
much. Of course there was a boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made
a trust of himself and got the money safe for ever, somehow. So they
say! But they say even the masters and the owners don't get much out
of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the
Pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have thought, when I was a
girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it's fair
haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there
deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pit-head,
and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery.
Why whatever we should do if Tevershall shut down--? it doesn't bear
thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even
then the fanwheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies
up. I'm sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year
to year, you really don't."
It was Mrs. Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford.
His income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's
trust, even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern
him. It was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of
literature and fame; the popular world, not the working world.
Now he realised the distinction between popular success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a
private individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace
of pleasure. And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure
lay the populace of work, grim, grimey, and rather terrible. They
too had to have their providers. And it was a much grimmer business,
providing for the populace of work, than for the populace of pleasure.
While he was doing his stories, and "getting on" in the world,
Tevershall was going to the wall.
He realised now that the bitch-goddess of success had two main
appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat
and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided
by the men who made money in industry.
Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her
amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy,
much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance
of money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and
snarled among themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it
was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the
indispensables, the bone-bringers.
But under Mrs. Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up. In one way, Mrs. Bolton made
a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie kept him apart, and made him
sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs. Bolton made
him aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began to go soft as pulp.
But outwardly he began to be effective.
He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to
have forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a
tub, with the underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful
torch. And he said little. But his mind began to work.
He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the Government reports, and he read with care the latest
things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were
written in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept
secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in
the field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of
by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding,
the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical
mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the
technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than
art, than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this
technical science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or
demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In
this activity, men were beyond any mental age calculable. But Clifford
knew that when it did come to the emotional and human life, these
self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen, feeble boys. The
discrepancy was enormous and appalling.
But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional
and "human" mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was
interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.
He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the
engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a
new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over
the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was
getting things into his grip.
And he seemed verily to be reborn. _Now_ life came into him! He had
been gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the
artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He
simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The
very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave
him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was _going_
to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with
his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice.
But a man's victory.
At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal
into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new
locomotive engine with a self-feeder, that did not need a fireman. And
it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a
great heat, under peculiar conditions.
The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at
a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some
sort of external stimulus to the burning of such fuel, not merely air
supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow who had
proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him.
And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had
fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had
not done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had
done it.
He was not aware how much Mrs. Bolton was behind him. He did not know
how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when
he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost
a trifle vulgar.
With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything,
everything, and he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so
long as she gave him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a
secret dread of her. The new Achilles in him had a heel, and in this
heel the woman, the woman like Connie his wife, could lame him fatally.
He went in a certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely
nice to her. But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and
he began to be silent whenever she was present.
Only when he was alone with Mrs. Bolton did he really feel a lord and a
master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously
as her own could run. And he let her shave him and sponge all his body
as if he were a child, really as if he were a child.