an evening with Clifford. If he hates your going, it would be no pleasure to
him.'
So! She was being pushed round on the chess-board again.
Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn't feel safe
in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and free
to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the pits, and
wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his
coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he'd got it
out. He knew he ought to find some way of using it, or converting it, so
that he needn't sell it, or needn't have the chagrin of failing to sell it.
But if he made electric power, could he sell that or use it? And to convert
into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate. To keep industry alive
there must be more industry, like a madness.
It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he
was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in the
affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her, his very
inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.
He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind
of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the
loudspeaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled on
inside him like a kind of dream.
And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with
Mrs Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone
in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of
blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she
had gone to bed, he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the
morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as
much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.
She told Connie one day: `I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford
last night.'
`And did he take the money from you?' asked Connie aghast.
`Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!'
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The
upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton's wages a hundred a year, and she
could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really
going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
`Seventeenth!' he said. `And when will you be back?'
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