LADY CHATERLEY'S LOVER
On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood. It was a lovely morning, the pear-blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world in a wonder of white here and there.
It was cruel for Clifford, while the world bloomed, to have to be helped from chair to bath-chair. But he had forgotten, and even seemed to have a certain conceit of himself in his lameness. Connie still suffered, having to lift his inert legs into place. Mrs Bolton did it now, or Field.
She waited for him at the top of the drive, at the edge of the screen of beeches. His chair came puffing along with a sort of valetudinarian slow importance. As he joined his wife he said:
`Sir Clifford on his roaming steed!'
`Snorting, at least!' she laughed.
He stopped and looked round at the facade of the long, low old brown house.
`Wragby doesn't wink an eyelid!' he said. `But then why should it! I ride upon the achievements of the mind of man, and that beats a horse.'
`I suppose it does. And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,' she said.
`Or a Rolls-Royce: Plato was an aristocrat!'
`Quite! No more black horse to thrash and maltreat. Plato never thought we'd go one better than his black steed and his white steed, and have no steeds at all, only an engine!'
`Only an engine and gas!' said Clifford.
`I hope I can have some repairs done to the old place next year. I think I shall have about a thousand to spare for that: but work costs so much!' he added.
`Oh, good!' said Connie. `If only there aren't more strikes!'
`What would be the use of their striking again! Merely ruin the industry, what's left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!'
`Perhaps they don't mind ruining the industry,' said Connie.
`Ah, don't talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if it can't keep their pockets quite so flush,' he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs Bolton.
`But didn't you say the other day that you were a conservative-anarchist,' she asked innocently.
`And did you understand what I meant?' he retorted. `All I meant is, people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the form of life intact, and the apparatus.'
Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:
`It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves.'
`I don't think people are eggs,' he said. `Not even angels' eggs, my dear little evangelist.'
He was in rather high feather this bright morning. The larks were trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent steam. It was almost like old days, before the war. Connie didn't really want to argue. But then she did not really want to go to the wood with Clifford either. So she walked beside his chair in a certain obstinacy of spirit.
`No,' he said. `There will be no more strikes, it. The thing is properly managed.'
`Because strikes will be made as good as impossible.'
`But will the men let you?' she asked.
`We shan't ask them. We shall do it while they aren't looking: for their own good, to save the industry.'
`For your own good too,' she said.
`Naturally! For the good of everybody. But for their good even more than mine. I can live without the pits. They can't. They'll starve if there are no pits. I've got other provision.'
They looked up the shallow valley at the mine, and beyond it, at the black-lidded houses of Tevershall crawling like some serpent up the hill. From the old brown church the bells were ringing: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!
`But will the men let you dictate terms?' she said. `My dear, they will have to: if one does it gently.'
`But mightn't there be a mutual understanding?'
`Absolutely: when they realize that the industry comes before the individual.'
`But must you own the industry?' she said.
`I don't. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor. It's the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies. Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us. And universal starvation is no high aim. Even general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly.'
`That is fate. Why is the star Jupiter bigger than the star Neptune? You can't start altering the make-up of things!'
`But when this envy and jealousy and discontent has once started,' she began.
`Do, your best to stop it. Somebody's got to be boss of the show.'
`But who is boss of the show?' she asked.
`The men who own and run the industries.'
`It seems to me they're a bad boss,' she said.
`Then you suggest what they should do.'
`They don't take their boss-ship seriously enough,' she said.
`They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,' he said.
`That's thrust upon me. I don't really want it,' she blurted out. He stopped the chair and looked at her.
`Who's shirking their responsibility now!' he said. `Who is trying to get away now from the responsibility of their own boss-ship, as you call it?'
`But I don't want any boss-ship,' she protested.
`Ah! But that is funk. You've got it: fated to it. And you should live up to it. Who has given the colliers all they have that's worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health-conditions, their books, their music, everything. Who has given it them? Have colliers given it to colliers? No! All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving. There's your responsibility.'
Connie listened, and flushed very red.
`I'd like to give something,' she said. `But I'm not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley sells them to the people, at a good prof it. Everything is sold. You don't give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?'
`And what must I do?' he asked, green. `Ask them to come and pillage me?'
`Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?'
`They built their own Tevershall, that's part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can't live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.'
`But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal-mine.'
`Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.
`Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,' she cried.
`I don't think they are. That's just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism. You don't look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.'
Which was true. For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, ill the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong, yet she couldn't say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.
`No wonder the men hate you,' she said.
`They don't!' he replied. `And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could. Don't thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen. I mean Nero's mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.'
When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.
Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.
`And what we need to take up now,' he said, `is whips, not swords. The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.'
`But can you rule them?' she asked.
`I? Oh yes! Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don't rule with my legs. I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me.'
`But he wouldn't be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not,' she stammered.
`I don't care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence. Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him. It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler. Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products. It is the overwhelming pressure of environment.'
`Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood,' she said.
`No, my child! All that is romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.'
`Then there is no common humanity between us all!'
`Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.'
Connie looked at him with dazed eyes.
`Won't you come on?' she said.
And he started his chair. He had said his say. Now he lapsed into his peculiar and rather vacant apathy, that Connie found so trying. In the wood, anyhow, she was determined not to argue.
In front of them ran the open cleft of the riding, between the hazel walls and the gay grey trees. The chair puffed slowly on, slowly surging into the forget-me-nots that rose up in the drive like milk froth, beyond the hazel shadows. Clifford steered the middle course, where feet passing had kept a channel through the flowers. But Connie, walking behind, had watched the wheels jolt over the wood-ruff and the bugle, and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny. Now they made a wake through the forget-me-nots.
All the flowers were there, the first bluebells in blue pools, like standing water.
`You are quite right about its being beautiful,' said Clifford. `It is so amazingly. What is quite so lovely as an English spring!'
Connie thought it sounded as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament. An English spring! Why not an Irish one? or Jewish? The chair moved slowly ahead, past tufts of sturdy bluebells that stood up like wheat and over grey burdock leaves. When they came to the open place where the trees had been felled, the light flooded in rather stark. And the bluebells made sheets of bright blue colour, here and there, sheering off into lilac and purple. And between, the bracken was lifting its brown curled heads, like legions of young snakes with a new secret to whisper to Eve. Clifford kept the chair going till he came to the brow of the hill; Connie followed slowly behind. The oak-buds were opening soft and brown. Everything came tenderly out of the old hardness. Even the snaggy craggy oak-trees put out the softest young leaves, spreading thin, brown little wings like young bat-wings in the light. Why had men never any newness in them, any freshness to come forth with! Stale men!
Clifford stopped the chair at the top of the rise and looked down. The bluebells washed blue like flood-water over the broad riding, and lit up the downhill with a warm blueness.
`It's a very fine colour in itself,' said Clifford, `but useless for making a painting.'
`Quite!' said Connie, completely uninterested.
`Shall I venture as far as the spring?' said Clifford.
`Will the chair get up again?' she said.
`We'll try; nothing venture, nothing win!'
And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding washed over with blue encroaching hyacinths. O last of all ships, through the hyacinthian shallows! O pinnace on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Whither, O weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. O Captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill, in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.
They passed the narrow track to the hut. Thank heaven it was not wide enough for the chair: hardly wide enough for one person. The chair reached the bottom of the slope, and swerved round, to disappear. And Connie heard a low whistle behind her. She glanced sharply round: the keeper was striding downhill towards her, his dog keeping behind him.
`Is Sir Clifford going to the cottage?' he asked, looking into her eyes.
`Ah! Good! Then I can keep out of sight. But I shall see you tonight. I shall wait for you at the park-gate about ten.'
He looked again direct into her eyes.
They heard the Papp! Papp! of Clifford's horn, tooting for Connie. She `Coo-eed!' in reply. The keeper's face flickered with a little grimace, and with his hand he softly brushed her breast upwards, from underneath. She looked at him, frightened, and started running down the hill, calling Coo-ee! again to Clifford. The man above watched her, then turned, grinning faintly, back into his path.
She found Clifford slowly mounting to the spring, which was halfway up the slope of the dark larch-wood. He was there by the time she caught him up.
`She did that all right,' he said, referring to the chair.
Connie looked at the great grey leaves of burdock that grew out ghostly from the edge of the larch-wood. The people call it Robin Hood's Rhubarb. How silent and gloomy it seemed by the well! Yet the water bubbled so bright, wonderful! And there were bits of eye-bright and strong blue bugle...And there, under the bank, the yellow earth was moving. A mole! It emerged, rowing its pink hands, and waving its blind gimlet of a face, with the tiny pink nose-tip uplifted.
`It seems to see with the end of its nose,' said Connie.
`Better than with its eyes!' he said. `Will you drink?'
She took an enamel mug from a twig on a tree, and stooped to fill it for him. He drank in sips. Then she stooped again, and drank a little herself.
`Good, isn't it! Did you wish?'
`Yes, I wished. But I won't tell.'
She was aware of the rapping of a woodpecker, then of the wind, soft and eerie through the larches. She looked up. White clouds were crossing the blue.
`White lambs only,' he replied.
A shadow crossed the little clearing. The mole had swum out on to the soft yellow earth.
`Unpleasant little beast, we ought to kill him,' said Clifford.
`Look! he's like a parson in a pulpit,' she said.
She gathered some sprigs of woodruff and brought them to him.
`New-mown hay!' he said. `Doesn't it smell like the romantic ladies of the last century, who had their heads screwed on the right way after all!'
She was looking at the white clouds.
`I wonder if it will rain,' she said.
`Rain! Why! Do you want it to?'
They started on the return journey, Clifford jolting cautiously downhill. They came to the dark bottom of the hollow, turned to the right, and after a hundred yards swerved up the foot of the long slope, where bluebells stood in the light.
`Now, old girl!' said Clifford, putting the chair to it.
It was a steep and jolty climb. The chair pugged slowly, in a struggling unwilling fashion. Still, she nosed her way up unevenly, till she came to where the hyacinths were all around her, then she balked, struggled, jerked a little way out of the flowers, then stopped
`We'd better sound the horn and see if the keeper will come,' said Connie. `He could push her a bit. For that matter, I will push. It helps.'
`We'll let her breathe,' said Clifford. `Do you mind putting a scotch under the wheel?'
Connie found a stone, and they waited. After a while Clifford started his motor again, then set the chair in motion. It struggled and faltered like a sick thing, with curious noises.
`Let me push!' said Connie, coming up behind.
`No! Don't push!' he said angrily. `What's the good of the damned thing, if it has to be pushed! Put the stone under!'
There was another pause, then another start; but more ineffectual than before.
`You must let me push,' said she. `Or sound the horn for the keeper.'
She waited; and he had another try, doing more harm than good.
`Sound the horn then, if you won't let me push,' she said. `Hell! Be quiet a moment!'
She was quiet a moment: he made shattering efforts with the little motor.
`You'll only break the thing down altogether, Clifford,' she remonstrated; `besides wasting your nervous energy.'
`If I could only get out and look at the damned thing!' he said, exasperated. And he sounded the horn stridently. `Perhaps Mellors can see what's wrong.'
They waited, among the mashed flowers under a sky softly curdling with cloud. In the silence a wood-pigeon began to coo roo-hoo hoo! roo-hoo hoo! Clifford shut her up with a blast on the horn.
The keeper appeared directly, striding inquiringly round the corner. He saluted.
`Do you know anything about motors?' asked Clifford sharply.
`I am afraid I don't. Has she gone wrong?'
`Apparently!' snapped Clifford.
The man crouched solicitously by the wheel, and peered at the little engine.
`I'm afraid I know nothing at all about these mechanical things, Sir Clifford,' he said calmly. `If she has enough petrol and oil---'
`Just look carefully and see if you can see anything broken,' snapped Clifford.
The man laid his gun against a tree, took oil his coat, and threw it beside it. The brown dog sat guard. Then he sat down on his heels and peered under the chair, poking with his finger at the greasy little engine, and resenting the grease-marks on his clean Sunday shirt.
`Doesn't seem anything broken,' he said. And he stood up, pushing back his hat from his forehead, rubbing his brow and apparently studying.
`Have you looked at the rods underneath?' asked Clifford. `See if they are all right!'
The man lay flat on his stomach on the floor, his neck pressed back, wriggling under the engine and poking with his finger. Connie thought what a pathetic sort of thing a man was, feeble and small-looking, when he was lying on his belly on the big earth.
`Seems all right as far as I can see,' came his muffled voice.
`I don't suppose you can do anything,' said Clifford.
`Seems as if I can't!' And he scrambled up and sat on his heels, collier fashion. `There's certainly nothing obviously broken.'
Clifford started his engine, then put her in gear. She would not move.
`Run her a bit hard, like,' suggested the keeper.
Clifford resented the interference: but he made his engine buzz like a blue-bottle. Then she coughed and snarled and seemed to go better.
`Sounds as if she'd come clear,' said Mellors.
But Clifford had already jerked her into gear. She gave a sick lurch and ebbed weakly forwards.
`If I give her a push, she'll do it,' said the keeper, going behind.
`Keep off!' snapped Clifford. `She'll do it by herself.'
`But Clifford!' put in Connie from the bank, `you know it's too much for her. Why are you so obstinate!'
Clifford was pale with anger. He jabbed at his levers. The chair gave a sort of scurry, reeled on a few more yards, and came to her end amid a particularly promising patch of bluebells.
`She's done!' said the keeper. `Not power enough.'
`She's been up here before,' said Clifford coldly.
`She won't do it this time,' said the keeper.
Clifford did not reply. He began doing things with his engine, running her fast and slow as if to get some sort of tune out of her. The wood re-echoed with weird noises. Then he put her in gear with a jerk, having jerked off his brake.
`You'll rip her inside out,' murmured the keeper.
The chair charged in a sick lurch sideways at the ditch.
`Clifford!' cried Connie, rushing forward.
But the keeper had got the chair by the rail. Clifford, however, putting on all his pressure, managed to steer into the riding, and with a strange noise the chair was fighting the hill. Mellors pushed steadily behind, and up she went, as if to retrieve herself.
`You see, she's doing it!' said Clifford, victorious, glancing over his shoulder. There he saw the keeper's face.
`Leave her alone. I asked you not.
`Let her try!' snarled Clifford, with all his emphasis.
The keeper stood back: then turned to fetch his coat and gun. The chair seemed to strange immediately. She stood inert. Clifford, seated a prisoner, was white with vexation. He jerked at the levers with his hand, his feet were no good. He got queer noises out of her. In savage impatience he moved little handles and got more noises out of her. But she would not budge. No, she would not budge. He stopped the engine and sat rigid with anger.
Constance sat on the bank arid looked at the wretched and trampled bluebells. `Nothing quite so lovely as an English spring.' `I can do my share of ruling.' `What we need to take up now is whips, not swords.' `The ruling classes!'
The keeper strode up with his coat and gun, Flossie cautiously at his heels. Clifford asked the man to do something or other to the engine. Connie, who understood nothing at all of the technicalities of motors, and who had had experience of breakdowns, sat patiently on the bank as if she were a cipher. The keeper lay on his stomach again. The ruling classes and the serving classes!
He got to his feet and said patiently:
He spoke in a quiet voice, almost as if to a child.
Clifford tried her, and Mellors stepped quickly behind and began to push. She was going, the engine doing about half the work, the man the rest.
Clifford glanced round, yellow with anger.
The keeper dropped his hold at once, and Clifford added: `How shall I know what she is doing!'
The man put his gun down and began to pull on his coat. He'd done.
The chair began slowly to run backwards.
`Clifford, your brake!' cried Connie.
She, Mellors, and Clifford moved at once, Connie and the keeper jostling lightly. The chair stood. There was a moment of dead silence.
`It's obvious I'm at everybody's mercy!' said Clifford. He was yellow with anger.
No one answered. Mellors was slinging his gun over his shoulder, his face queer and expressionless, save for an abstracted look of patience. The dog Flossie, standing on guard almost between her master's legs, moved uneasily, eyeing the chair with great suspicion and dislike, and very much perplexed between the three human beings. The tableau vivant remained set among the squashed bluebells, nobody proffering a word.
`I expect she'll have to be pushed,' said Clifford at last, with an affectation of sang froid.
No answer. Mellors' abstracted face looked as if he had heard nothing. Connie glanced anxiously at him. Clifford too glanced round.
`Do you mind pushing her home, Mellors!' he said in a cool superior tone. `I hope I have said nothing to offend you,' he added, in a tone of dislike.
`Nothing at all, Sir Clifford! Do you want me to push that chair?'
The man stepped up to it: but this time it was without effect. The brake was jammed. They poked and pulled, and the keeper took off his gun and his coat once more. And now Clifford said never a word. At last the keeper heaved the back of the chair off the ground and, with an instantaneous push of his foot, tried to loosen the wheels. He failed, the chair sank. Clifford was clutching the sides. The man gasped with the weight.
`Don't do it!' cried Connie to him.
`If you'll pull the wheel that way, so!' he said to her, showing her how.
`No! You mustn't lift it! You'll strain yourself,' she said, flushed now with anger.
But he looked into her eyes and nodded. And she had to go and take hold of the wheel, ready. He heaved and she tugged, and the chair reeled.
`For God's sake!' cried Clifford in terror.
But it was all right, and the brake was off. The keeper put a stone under the wheel, and went to sit on the bank, his heart beat and his face white with the effort, semi-conscious.
Connie looked at him, and almost cried with anger. There was a pause and a dead silence. She saw his hands trembling on his thighs.
`Have you hurt yourself?' she asked, going to him.
`No. No!' He turned away almost angrily.
There was dead silence. The back of Clifford's fair head did not move. Even the dog stood motionless. The sky had clouded over.
At last he sighed, and blew his nose on his red handkerchief.
`That pneumonia took a lot out of me,' he said.
No one answered. Connie calculated the amount of strength it must have taken to heave up that chair and the bulky Clifford: too much, far too much! If it hadn't killed him!
He rose, and again picked up his coat, slinging it through the handle of the chair.
`Are you ready, then, Sir Clifford?'
He stooped and took out the scotch, then put his weight against the chair. He was paler than Connie had ever seen him: and more absent. Clifford was a heavy man: and the hill was steep. Connie stepped to the keeper's side.
`I'm going to push too!' she said.
And she began to shove with a woman's turbulent energy of anger. The chair went faster. Clifford looked round.
`Very! Do you want to kill the man! If you'd let the motor work while it would---'
But she did not finish. She was already panting. She slackened off a little, for it was surprisingly hard work.
`Ay! slower!' said the man at her side, with a faint smile of his eyes.
`Are you sure you've not hurt yourself?' she said fiercely.
He shook his head. She looked at his smallish, short, alive hand, browned by the weather. It was the hand that caressed her. She had never even looked at it before. It seemed so still, like him, with a curious inward stillness that made her want to clutch it, as if she could not reach it. All her soul suddenly swept towards him: he was so silent, and out of reach! And he felt his limbs revive. Shoving with his left hand, he laid his right on her round white wrist, softly enfolding her wrist, with a caress. And the flame of strength went down his back and his loins, reviving him. And she bent suddenly and kissed his hand. Meanwhile the back of Clifford's head was held sleek and motionless, just in front of them.
At the top of the hill they rested, and Connie was glad to let go. She had had fugitive dreams of friendship between these two men: one her husband, the other the father of her child. Now she saw the screaming absurdity of her dreams. The two males were as hostile as fire and water. They mutually exterminated one another. And she realized for the first time what a queer subtle thing hate is. For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself.---`Now I've hated him, I shall never be able to go on living with him,' came the thought into her mind.
On the level the keeper could push the chair alone. Clifford made a little conversation with her, to show his complete composure: about Aunt Eva, who was at Dieppe, and about Sir Malcolm, who had written to ask would Connie drive with him in his small car, to Venice, or would she and Hilda go by train.
`I'd much rather go by train,' said Connie. `I don't like long motor drives, especially when there's dust. But I shall see what Hilda wants.'
`She will want to drive her own car, and take you with her,' he said.
`Probably!---I must help up here. You've no idea how heavy this chair is.'
She went to the back of the chair, and plodded side by side with the keeper, shoving up the pink path. She did not care who saw.
`Why not let me wait, and fetch Field? He is strong enough for the job,' said Clifford.
But both she and Mellors wiped the sweat from their faces when they came to the top. It was curious, but this bit of work together had brought them much closer than they had been before.
`Thanks so much, Mellors,' said Clifford, when they were at the house door. `I must get a different sort of motor, that's all. Won't you go to the kitchen and have a meal? It must be about time.'
`Thank you, Sir Clifford. I was going to my mother for dinner today, Sunday.'
Mellors slung into his coat, looked at Connie, saluted, and was gone. Connie, furious, went upstairs.
At lunch she could not contain her feeling.
`Why are you so abominably inconsiderate, Clifford?' she said to him.
`Of the keeper! If that is what you call ruling classes, I'm sorry for you.'
`A man who's been ill, and isn't strong! My word, if I were the serving classes, I'd let you wait for service. I'd let you whistle.'
`If he'd been sitting in a chair with paralysed legs, and behaved as you behaved, what would you have done for him?'
`My dear evangelist, this confusing of persons and personalities is in bad taste.'
`And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. Noblesse oblige! You and your ruling class!'
`And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my game-keeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.'
`As if he weren't a man as much as you are, my word!'
`My game-keeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.'
`Pay him! What do you think you pay for, with two pounds a week and a house?'
`Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.'
`Probably he would like to: but can't afford the luxury!'
`You, and rule!' she said. `You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you re dried up! You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber!'
`You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!'
`I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why, my father is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!'
He reached and rang the bell for Mrs Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.
She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: `Him and buying people! Well, he doesn't buy me, and therefore there's no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They've got about as much feeling as celluloid has.'
She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn't want to hate him. She didn't want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and indiarubbery where other people were concerned.
She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinner-time. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer.---He was reading a French book.
`Have you ever read Proust?' he asked her.
`I've tried, but he bores me.'
`He's really very extraordinary.'
`Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentalities.'
`Would you prefer self-important animalities?'
`Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self-important.'
`Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well-bred anarchy.'
`It makes you very dead, really.'
`There speaks my evangelical little wife.'
They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn't help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He too was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him.
She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.
Connie returned to her room, threw her pyjamas on the tossed bed, put on a thin tennis-dress and over that a woollen day-dress, put on rubber tennis-shoes, and then a light coat. And she was ready. If she met anybody, she was just going out for a few minutes. And in the morning, when she came in again, she would just have been for a little walk in the dew, as she fairly often did before breakfast. For the rest, the only danger was that someone should go into her room during the night. But that was most unlikely: not one chance in a hundred.
Betts had not locked up. He fastened up the house at ten o'clock, and unfastened it again at seven in the morning. She slipped out silently and unseen. There was a half-moon shining, enough to make a little light in the world, not enough to show her up in her dark-grey coat. She walked quickly across the park, not really in the thrill of the assignation, but with a certain anger and rebellion burning in her heart. It was not the right sort of heart to take to a love-meeting. But à la guerre comme à la guerre!
`You are good and early,' he said out of the dark. `Was everything all right?'
He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open in the night. They went on apart, in silence.
`Are you sure you didn't hurt yourself this morning with that chair?' she asked.
`When you had that pneumonia, what did it do to you?'
`Oh nothing! it left my heart not so strong and the lungs not so elastic. But it always does that.'
`And you ought not to make violent physical efforts?'
She plodded on in an angry silence.
`Did you hate Clifford?' she said at last.
`Hate him, no! I've met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don't care for his sort, and I let it go at that.'
`Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.'
`But is it a question of that?' she said, a little annoyed.
`You say a man's got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he's a funker. And when he's got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he's got no balls. When he's a sort of tame.'
`And is Clifford tame?' she asked.
`Tame, and nasty with it: like most such fellows, when you come up against 'em.'
`And do you think you're not tame?'
At length she saw in the distance a yellow light.
`I always leave a light in the house,' he said.
She went on again at his side, but not touching him, wondering why she was going with him at all.
He unlocked, and they went in, he bolting the door behind them. As if it were a prison, she thought! The kettle was singing by the red fire, there were cups on the table.
She sat in the wooden arm-chair by the fire. It was warm after the chill outside.
`I'll take off my shoes, they are wet,' she said.
She sat with her stockinged feet on the bright steel fender. He went to the pantry, bringing food: bread and butter and pressed tongue. She was warm: she took off her coat. He hung it on the door.
`Shall you have cocoa or tea or coffee to drink?' he asked.
`I don't think I want anything,' she said, looking at the table. `But you eat.'
`Nay, I don't care about it. I'll just feed the dog.'
He tramped with a quiet inevitability over the brick floor, putting food for the dog in a brown bowl. The spaniel looked up at him anxiously.
`Ay, this is thy supper, tha nedna look as if tha wouldna get it!' he said.
He set the bowl on the stairfoot mat, and sat himself on a chair by the wall, to take off his leggings and boots. The dog instead of eating, came to him again, and sat looking up at him, troubled.
He slowly unbuckled his leggings. The dog edged a little nearer.
`What's amiss wi' thee then? Art upset because there's somebody else here? Tha'rt a female, tha art! Go an' eat thy supper.'
He put his hand on her head, and the bitch leaned her head sideways against him. He slowly, softly pulled the long silky ear.
`There!' he said. `There! Go an' eat thy supper! Go!'
He tilted his chair towards the pot on the mat, and the dog meekly went, and fell to eating.
`Do you like dogs?' Connie asked him.
`No, not really. They're too tame and clinging.'
He had taken off his leggings and was unlacing his heavy boots. Connie had turned from the fire. How bare the little room was! Yet over his head on the wall hung a hideous enlarged photograph of a young married couple, apparently him and a bold-faced young woman, no doubt his wife.
`Is that you?' Connie asked him.
He twisted and looked at the enlargement above his head.
`Ay! Taken just afore we was married, when I was twenty-one.' He looked at it impassively.
`Do you like it?' Connie asked him.
`Like it? No! I never liked the thing. But she fixed it all up to have it done, like.'
He returned to pulling off his boots.
`If you don't like it, why do you keep it hanging there? Perhaps your wife would like to have it,' she said.
He looked up at her with a sudden grin.
`She carted off iverything as was worth taking from th' 'ouse,' he said. `But she left that!'
`Then why do you keep it? for sentimental reasons?'
`Nay, I niver look at it. I hardly knowed it wor theer. It's bin theer sin' we come to this place.'
`Why don't you burn it?' she said.
He twisted round again and looked at the enlarged photograph. It was framed in a brown-and-gilt frame, hideous. It showed a clean-shaven, alert, very young-looking man in a rather high collar, and a somewhat plump, bold young woman with hair fluffed out and crimped, and wearing a dark satin blouse.
`It wouldn't be a bad idea, would it?' he said.
He had pulled off his boots, and put on a pair of slippers. He stood up on the chair, and lifted down the photograph. It left a big pale place on the greenish wall-paper.
`No use dusting it now,' he said, setting the thing against the wall.
He went to the scullery, and returned with hammer and pincers. Sitting where he had sat before, he started to tear off the back-paper from the big frame, and to pull out the sprigs that held the backboard in position, working with the immediate quiet absorption that was characteristic of him.
He soon had the nails out: then he pulled out the backboards, then the enlargement itself, in its solid white mount. He looked at the photograph with amusement.
`Shows me for what I was, a young curate, and her for what she was, a bully,' he said. `The prig and the bully!'
He did look indeed very clean-shaven and very clean altogether, one of the clean young men of twenty years ago. But even in the photograph his eyes were alert and dauntless. And the woman was not altogether a bully, though her jowl was heavy. There was a touch of appeal in her.
`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 backboard 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.
`Perhaps you care for her now,' she said.
`Me!' His eyes widened. `Ah no, I can't think of her,' he said quietly.
`Then why don't you get a divorce? She'll come back to you one day,' said Connie.
`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 will. That's done! It would make me sick to see her.'
`You will see her. And you're not even legally separated, are you?'
`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 might 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.'
`I'll tell you,' he said. `The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen. She was a school-master'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, 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 Timbuctoo. 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 a 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. Well, I married her, and she wasn't bad. Those other "pure" women had nearly taken all the balls out of me, but she was all right that way. She wanted me, and made no bones about it. And I was as pleased as punch. That was what I wanted: a woman who wanted me to fuck her. So I fucked her like a good un. And I think she despised me a bit, for being so pleased about it, and bringin' her her breakfast in bed sometimes. She sort of let things go, didn't get me a proper dinner when I came home from work, and if I said anything, flew out at me. And I flew back, hammer and tongs. She flung a cup at me and I took her by the scruff of the neck and squeezed the life out of her. That sort of thing! But she treated me with insolence. And she got so's she'd never have me when I wanted her: never. Always put me off, brutal as you like. And then when she'd put me right off, and I didn't want her, she'd come all lovey-dovey, and get me. And I always went. But when I had her, she'd never come off when I did. Never! She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting, she'd clutch clutch with herself down there, an' then she'd come off, fair in ecstasy. And then she'd say: That was lovely! Gradually I got sick of it: and she got worse. She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it was a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick. Self! Self! Self! all self! tearing and shouting! They talk about men's selfishness, but I doubt if it can ever touch a woman's blind beakishness, once she's gone that way. Like an old trull! And she couldn't help it. I told her about it, I told her how I hated it. And she'd even try. She'd try to lie still and let me work the business. She'd try. But it was no good. She got no feeling off it, from my working. She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee. And it came back on her like a raving necessity, she had to let herself go, and tear, tear, tear, as if she had no sensation in her except in the top of her beak, the very outside top tip, that rubbed and tore. That's how old whores used to be, so men used to say. It was a low kind of self-will in her, a raving sort of self-will: like in a woman who drinks. Well in the end I couldn't stand it. We slept apart. She herself had started it, in her bouts when she wanted to be clear of me, when she said I bossed her. She had started having a room for herself. But the time came when I wouldn't have her coming to my room. I wouldn't.
`I hated it. And she hated me. My God, how she hated me before that child was born! I often think she conceived it out of hate. Anyhow, after the child was born I left her alone. And then came the war, and I joined up. And I didn't come back till I knew she was with that fellow at Stacks Gate.
He broke off, pale in the face.
`And what is the man at Stacks Gate like?' asked Connie.
`A big baby sort of fellow, very low-mouthed. She bullies him, and they both drink.'
`My God, yes! I should just go, disappear again.'
There was a silence. The pasteboard in the fire had turned to grey ash.
`So when you did get a woman who wanted you,' said Connie, `you got a bit too much of a good thing.'
`Ay! Seems so! Yet even then I'd rather have her than the never-never ones: the white love of my youth, and that other poison-smelling lily, and the rest.'
`What about the rest?' said Connie.
`The rest? There is no rest. Only to my experience the mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain. The more old-fashioned sort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don't mind afterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothing to them, a bit distasteful. Add most men like it that way. I hate it. But the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they're not. They pretend they're passionate and have thrills. But it's all cockaloopy. They make it up. Then there's the ones that love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one. They always make you go off when you're not in the only place you should be, when you go off.---Then there's the hard sort, that are the devil to bring off at all, and bring themselves off, like my wife. They want to be the active party.---Then there's the sort that's just dead inside: but dead: and they know it. Then there's the sort that puts you out before you really "come", and go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs. But they're mostly the Lesbian sort. It's astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian.'
`And do you mind?' asked Connie.
`I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'
`Just go away as fast as I can.'
`But do you think Lesbian women any worse than homosexual men?'
`I do! Because I've suffered more from them. In the abstract, I've no idea. When I get with a Lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I see red. No, no! But I wanted to have nothing to do with any woman any more. I wanted to keep to myself: keep my privacy and my decency.'
He looked pale, and his brows were sombre.
`And were you sorry when I came along?' she asked.
`I'm sorry, from the outside: all the complications and the ugliness and recrimination that's bound to come, sooner or later. That's when my blood sinks, and I'm low. But when my blood comes up, I'm glad. I'm even triumphant. I was really getting bitter. I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really "come" naturally with a man: except black women, and somehow, well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.'
`And now, are you glad of me?' she asked.
`Yes! When I can forget the rest. When I can't forget the rest, I want to get under the table and die.'
`Why?' he laughed. `Hide, I suppose. Baby!'
`You do seem to have had awful experiences of women,' she said.
`You see, I couldn't fool myself. That's where most men manage. They take an attitude, and accept a lie. I could never fool myself. I knew what I wanted with a woman, and I could never say I'd got it when I hadn't.'
`Then why are you so pale and gloomy?'
`Bellyful of remembering: and perhaps afraid of myself.'
She sat in silence. It was growing late.
`And do you think it's important, a man and a woman?' she asked him.
`For me it is. For me it's the core of my life: if I have a right relation with a woman.'
`Then I'd have to do without.'
Again she pondered, before she asked:
`And do you think you've always been right with women?'
`God, no! I let my wife get to what she was: my fault a good deal. I spoilt her. And I'm very mistrustful. You'll have to expect it. It takes a lot to make me trust anybody, inwardly. So perhaps I'm a fraud too. I mistrust. And tenderness is not to be mistaken.'
`You don't mistrust with your body, when your blood comes up,' she said. `You don't mistrust then, do you?'
`No, alas! That's how I've got into all the trouble. And that's why my mind mistrusts so thoroughly.'
`Let your mind mistrust. What does it matter!'
The dog sighed with discomfort on the mat. The ash-clogged fire sank.
`We are a couple of battered warriors,' said Connie.
`Are you battered too?' he laughed. `And here we are returning to the fray!'
`Yes! I feel really frightened.'
He got up, and put her shoes to dry, and wiped his own and set them near the fire. In the morning he would grease them. He poked the ash of pasteboard as much as possible out of the fire. `Even burnt, it's filthy,' he said. Then he brought sticks and put them on the hob for the morning. Then he went out awhile with the dog.
When he came back, Connie said:
`I want to go out too, for a minute.'
She went alone into the darkness. There were stars overhead. She could smell flowers on the night air. And she could feel her wet shoes getting wetter again. But she felt like going away, right away from him and everybody.
It was chilly. She shuddered, and returned to the house. He was sitting in front of the low fire.
He put the sticks on the fire, and fetched more, till they had a good crackling chimneyful of blaze. The rippling running yellow flame made them both happy, warmed their faces and their souls.
`Never mind!' she said, taking his hand as he sat silent and remote. `One does one's best.'
`Ay!' He sighed, with a twist of a smile.
She slipped over to him, and into his arms, as he sat there before the fire.
`Forget then!' she whispered. `Forget!'
He held her close, in the running warmth of the fire. The flame itself was like a forgetting. And her soft, warm, ripe weight! Slowly his blood turned, and began to ebb back into strength and reckless vigour again.
`And perhaps the women really wanted to be there and love you properly, only perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps it wasn't all their fault,' she said.
`I know it. Do you think I don't know what a broken-backed snake that's been trodden on I was myself!'
She clung to him suddenly. She had not wanted to start all this again. Yet some perversity had made her.
`But you're not now,' she said. `You're not that now: a broken-backed snake that's been trodden on.'
`I don't know what I am. There's black days ahead.'
`No!' she protested, clinging to him. `Why? Why?'
`There's black days coming for us all and for everybody,' he repeated with a prophetic gloom.
He was silent. But she could feel the black void of despair inside him. That was the death of all desire, the death of all love: this despair that was like the dark cave inside the men, in which their spirit was lost.
`And you talk so coldly about sex,' she said. `You talk as if you had only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.'
She was protesting nervously against him.
`Nay!' he said. `I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two.'
`But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in me,' she said.
`I don't know what believing in a woman means.'
She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.
`But what do you believe in?' she insisted.
`Nothing, like all the men I've ever known,' she said.
They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said:
`Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.'
`But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.
`I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now.'
`Oh!' she said, kissing him mockingly. `Let's have them sautées.' He laughed, and sat erect.
`It's a fact!' he said. `Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar. Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being together with a man.'
`But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything to you.'
`Ay! Very well then!' he said, moving as if he wanted to rise. `Let's keep apart then. I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking.'
She slid away from him, and he stood up.
`And do you think I want it?' she said.
`I hope you don't,' he replied. `But anyhow, you go to bed an' I'll sleep down here.'
She looked at him. He was pale, his brows were sullen, he was as distant in recoil as the cold pole. Men were all alike.
`I can't go home till morning,' she said.
`No! Go to bed. It's a quarter to one.'
`I certainly won't,' she said.
He went across and picked up his boots.
He began to put on his boots. She stared at him.
`Wait!' she faltered. `Wait! What's come between us?'
He was bent over, lacing his boot, and did not reply. The moments passed. A dimness came over her, like a swoon. All her consciousness died, and she stood there wide-eyed, looking at him from the unknown, knowing nothing any more.
He looked up, because of the silence, and saw her wide-eyed and lost. And as if a wind tossed him he got up and hobbled over to her, one shoe off and one shoe on, and took her in his arms, pressing her against his body, which somehow felt hurt right through. And there he held her, and there she remained.
Till his hands reached blindly down and felt for her, and felt under the clothing to where she was smooth and warm.
`Ma lass!' he murmured. `Ma little lass! Dunna let's light! Dunna let's niver light! I love thee an' th' touch on thee. Dunna argue wi' me! Dunna! Dunna! Dunna! Let's be together.'
She lifted her face and looked at him.
`Don't be upset,' she said steadily. `It's no good being upset. Do you really want to be together with me?'
She looked with wide, steady eyes into his face. He stopped, and went suddenly still, turning his face aside. All his body went perfectly still, but did not withdraw.
Then he lifted his head and looked into her eyes, with his odd, faintly mocking grin, saying: `Ay-ay! Let's be together on oath.'
`But really?' she said, her eyes filling with tears. `Ay really! Heart an' belly an' cock.'
He still smiled faintly down at her, with the flicker of irony in his eyes, and a touch of bitterness.
She was silently weeping, and he lay with her and went into her there on the hearthrug, and so they gained a measure of equanimity. And then they went quickly to bed, for it was growing chill, and they had tired each other out. And she nestled up to him, feeling small and enfolded, and they both went to sleep at once, fast in one sleep. And so they lay and never moved, till the sun rose over the wood and day was beginning.
Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes, smiling unconsciously into his face.
`Are you awake?' she said to him.
He was looking into her eyes. He smiled, and kissed her. And suddenly she roused and sat up.
`Fancy that I am here!' she said.
She looked round the whitewashed little bedroom with its sloping ceiling and gable window where the white curtains were closed. The room was bare save for a little yellow-painted chest of drawers, and a chair: and the smallish white bed in which she lay with him.
`Fancy that we are here!' she said, looking down at him. He was lying watching her, stroking her breasts with his fingers, under the thin nightdress. When he was warm and smoothed out, he looked young and handsome. His eyes could look so warm. And she was fresh and young like a flower.
`I want to take this off!' she said, gathering the thin batiste nightdress and pulling it over her head. She sat there with bare shoulders and longish breasts faintly golden. He loved to make her breasts swing softly, like bells.
`You must take off your pyjamas too,' she said.
And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.
Gold of sunshine touched the closed white curtain. She felt it wanted to come in.
`Oh, do let's draw the curtains! The birds are singing so! Do let the sun in,' she said.
He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin, and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and looking out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong.
There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
`But you are beautiful!' she said. `So pure and fine! Come!' She held her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
`No!' she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her dropping breasts. `Let me see you!'
He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
`How strange!' she said slowly. `How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?'
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.
`So proud!' she murmured, uneasy. `And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!---' She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change.---`Ay!' he said at last, in a little voice. `Ay ma lad! tha're theer right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an' ta'es no count O' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt O' me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha're more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha comes up smilin'.---Ax 'er then! Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, O ye gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt, that's what tha're after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an' th' cunt O' lady Jane!---'
`Oh, don't tease him,' said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast.
`Lie down!' he said. `Lie down! Let me come!' He was in a hurry now.
And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallos.
`And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!' she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. `Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine! And so lovely and innocent!' And she held the penis soft in her hand.
`Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love,' he said.
`Of course!' she said. `Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite different!'
`That's John Thomas's hair, not mine!' he said.
`John Thomas! John Thomas!' and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again.
`Ay!' said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. `He's got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn't have him killed.'
`No wonder men have always been afraid of him!' she said. `He's rather terrible.'
The quiver was going through the man's body, as the stream of consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was helpless, as the penis in slow soft undulations filled and surged and rose up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious towering fashion. The woman too trembled a little as she watched.
`There! Take him then! He's thine,' said the man.
And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away with the last, blind flush of extremity.
He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o'clock. It was Monday morning. He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.
She had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul washed transparent.
`You must get up, mustn't you?' he muttered.
`What time?' came her colourless voice.
`Seven-o'clock blowers a bit sin'.'
She was resenting as she always did, the compulsion from outside.
He sat up and looked blankly out of the window. `You do love me, don't you?' she asked calmly. He looked down at her.
`Tha knows what tha knows. What dost ax for!' he said, a little fretfully.
`I want you to keep me, not to let me go,' she said.
His eyes seemed full of a warm, soft darkness that could not think.
`Now in your heart. Then I want to come and live with you, always, soon.'
He sat naked on the bed, with his head dropped, unable to think.
`Don't you want it?' she asked.
Then with the same eyes darkened with another flame of consciousness, almost like sleep, he looked at her.
`Dunna ax me nowt now,' he said. `Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman's a lovely thing when 'er's deep ter fuck, and cunt's good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an' th' shape on thee, an' th' womanness on thee. Ah luv th' womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi' my bas an' wi' my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma'e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am while I can. Tha can ax me iverything after. Now let me be, let me be!'
And softly, he laid his hand over her mound of Venus, on the soft brown maiden-hair, and himself-sat still and naked on the bed, his face motionless in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless, and in the invisible flame of another consciousness, he sat with his hand on her, and waited for the turn.
After a while, he reached for his shirt and put it on, dressed himself swiftly in silence, looked at her once as she still lay naked and faintly golden like a Gloire de Dijon rose on the bed, and was gone. She heard him downstairs opening the door.
And still she lay musing, musing. It was very hard to go: to go out of his arms. He called from the foot of the stairs: `Half past seven!' She sighed, and got out of bed. The bare little room! Nothing in it at all but the small chest of drawers and the smallish bed. But the board floor was scrubbed clean. And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books about Bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a reader after all.
The sun fell on her naked limbs through the gable window. Outside she saw the dog Flossie roaming round. The hazel-brake was misted with green, and dark-green dogs-mercury under. It was a clear clean morning with birds flying and triumphantly singing. If only she could stay! If only there weren't the other ghastly world of smoke and iron! If only he would make her a world.
She came downstairs, down the steep, narrow wooden stairs. Still she would be content with this little house, if only it were in a world of its own.
He was washed and fresh, and the fire was burning. `Will you eat anything?' he said.
She followed him into the scullery, and combed her hair before the handbreadth of mirror by the back door. Then she was ready to go.
She stood in the little front garden, looking at the dewy flowers, the grey bed of pinks in bud already.
`I would like to have all the rest of the world disappear,' she said, `and live with you here.'
`It won't disappear,' he said.
They went almost in silence through the lovely dewy wood. But they were together in a world of their own.
It was bitter to her to go on to Wragby.
`I want soon to come and live with you altogether,' she said as she left him.
She got home quietly and unremarked, and went up to her room.
There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast-tray. `Father is going to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June 17th. You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don't want to waste time at Wragby, it's an awful place. I shall probably stay the night at Retford with the Colemans, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then we could start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in Grantham. It is no use our spending 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?'
`By the twentieth of July at the latest.'
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
`You won't let me down, now, will you?' he said.
`While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'
`I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'
`Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
`And then when I come back,' she said, `I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
`You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.
`I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'
`Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'
`Or don't you want to?' she asked.
`I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'
`Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't it?'
`But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to have complications.'
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.
`And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?'
`Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'
`What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.'
`And did you mind very much when he died?'
`I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes.'
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.
`You seem to have such a lot behind you,' she said.
`Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble.'
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
`And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?'
`No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. `The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each---'
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
`No,' said he. `He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way.'
`The common people too, the working people?'
`All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking!---It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.'
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone.
`But won't it ever come to an end?' she said.
`Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane, and they'll make their grand ~auto da fe. You know auto da fe means act of faith? Ay, well, they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up.'
`I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years' time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. The thunder was rolling further away.
`Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! te deum laudamus!'
Connie laughed, but not very happily.
`Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists,' she said. `You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.'
`So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would.'
`I'm not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don't mind.'
`But if you have a child?' she said.
`Why,' he said at last. `It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.'
`No! Don't say it! Don't say it!' she pleaded. `I think I'm going to have one. Say you'll he pleased.' She laid her hand on his.
`I'm pleased for you to be pleased,' he said. `But for me it seems a ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.
`Ah no!' she said, shocked. `Then you can't ever really want me! You can't want me, if you feel that!'
Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the threshing of the rain.
`It's not quite true!' she whispered. `It's not quite true! There's another truth.' She felt he was bitter now partly because she was leaving him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased her.
She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly and pressed her arm round his warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.
`Tell me you want a child, in hope!' she murmured, pressing her face against his belly. `Tell me you do!'
`Why!' he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing consciousness and relaxation going through his body. `Why I've thought sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They're workin' bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think o' nowt but th' money. When it comes ter wants, we want but little. Let's not live for money---'
She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up. The rain beat bruisingly outside.
`Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to make a bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it! Bit by bit, let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's drop the whole industrial life an' go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th' king. The least little bit o' money'll really do. Just make up your mind to it, an' you've got out o' th' mess.' He paused, then went on:
`An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's clumsy, he's ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yourselves! one shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be.---An' in time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An' not have many children, because the world is overcrowded.
`But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at yourselves! That's workin' for money!---Hark at yourselves! That's working for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible. That's because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at yourselves!'
There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a little icy.
`You've got four kinds of hair,' she said to him. `On your chest it's nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little brush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!'
He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on his groin.
`Ay! That's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?'
`Oh, I do, terribly!' she said.
`Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather doubt.'
The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of departing storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he was really talking to himself not to her. Despair seemed to come down on him completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She knew her leaving him, which he had only just realized inside himself had plunged him back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed keen animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured in the greenish light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the eurhythmic dance movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.
He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful cowering female nakedness in flight.
She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened herself and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal.
He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.
`Come in,' he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower, gathering forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching him fleeing away from her.
When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet head and full, trickling, naïve haunches, she looked another creature.
He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child. Then he rubbed himself having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet hair.
`We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!' he said.
She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.
`No!' she said, her eyes wide. `It's not a towel, it's a sheet.' And she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.
Still panting with their exertions, each wrapped in an army blanket, but the front of the body open to the fire, they sat on a log side by side before the blaze, to get quiet. Connie hated the feel of the blanket against her skin. But now the sheet was all wet.
She dropped her blanket and kneeled on the clay hearth, holding her head to the fire, and shaking her hair to dry it. He watched the beautiful curving drop of her haunches. That fascinated him today. How it sloped with a rich down-slope to the heavy roundness of her buttocks! And in between, folded in the secret warmth, the secret entrances!
He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves and the globe-fullness.
`Tha's got such a nice tail on thee,' he said, in the throaty caressive dialect. `Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! An' ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha'rt not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha's got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It's a bottom as could hold the world up, it is!'
All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.
`An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'
Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he went on unmoved.
`Tha'rt real, tha art! Tha'art real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha shits an' here tha pisses: an' I lay my hand on 'em both an' like thee for it. I like thee for it. Tha's got a proper, woman's arse, proud of itself. It's none ashamed of itself this isna.'
He laid his hand close and firm over her secret places, in a kind of close greeting.
`I like it,' he said. `I like it! An' if I only lived ten minutes, an' stroked thy arse an' got to know it, I should reckon I'd lived one life, see ter! Industrial system or not! Here's one o' my lifetimes.'
She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. `Kiss me!' she whispered.
And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their minds, and at last she was sad.
She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fire-glow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.
`Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,' he said. `They have no houses.'
`Not even a hut!' she murmured.
With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mound of Venus.
`There!' he said. `There's forget-me-nots in the right place!'
She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.
`Doesn't it look pretty!' she said.
And he stuck a pink campion-bud among the hair.
`There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the bull-rushes.'
`You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?' she asked wistfully, looking up into his face.
But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite blank.
`You do as you wish,' he said.
`But I won't go if you don't wish it,' she said, clinging to him.
There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire. The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said nothing.
`Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford. I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to---,' she resumed.
`To let them think a few lies,' he said.
`Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?'
`I don't care what they think.'
`I do! I don't want them handling me with their unpleasant cold minds, not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm finally gone.'
`But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?'
`Oh, I must come back,' she said: and there was silence.
`And would you have a child in Wragby?' he asked.
She closed her arm round his neck.
`If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to,' she said.
`Anywhere! away! But right away from Wragby.'
`But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're once gone?' he said.
`Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully. Besides, I come back to you, really.'
`To your husband's game-keeper?'
`I don't see that that matters,' she said.
`No?' He mused a while. `And when would you think of going away again, then; finally? When exactly?'
`Oh, I don't know. I'd come back from Venice. And then we'd prepare everything.'
`Oh, I'd tell Clifford. I'd have to tell him.'
He remained silent. She put her arms round his neck.
`Don't make it difficult for me,' she pleaded.
`For me to go to Venice and arrange things.'
A little smile, half a grin, flickered on his face.
`I don't make it difficult,' he said. `I only want to find out just what you are after. But you don't really know yourself. You want to take time: get away and look at it. I don't blame you. I think you're wise. You may prefer to stay mistress of Wragby. I don't blame you. I've no Wragbys to offer. In fact, you know what you'll get out of me. No, no, I think you're right! I really do! And I'm not keen on coming to live on you, being kept by you. There's that too.'
She felt somehow as if he were giving her tit for tat.
`But you want me, don't you?' she asked.
`You know I do. That's evident.'
`Quite! And when do you want me?'
`You know we can arrange it all when I come back. Now I'm out of breath with you. I must get calm and clear.'
`But you trust me, don't you?' she said.
She heard the mockery in his tone.
`Tell me then,' she said flatly; `do you think it would be better if I don't go to Venice?'
`I'm sure it's better if you do go to Venice,' he replied in the cool, slightly mocking voice.
`You know it's next Thursday?' she said.
She now began to muse. At last she said:
`And we shall know better where we are when I come back, shan't we?'
The curious gulf of silence between them!
`I've been to the lawyer about my divorce,' he said, a little constrainedly.
`Have you!' she said. `And what did he say?'
`He said I ought to have done it before; that may be a difficulty. But since I was in the army, he thinks it will go through all right. If only it doesn't bring her down on my head!'
`Yes! she is served with a notice: so is the man she lives with, the co-respondent.'
`Isn't it hateful, all the performances! I suppose I'd have to go through it with Clifford.'
`And of course,' he said, `I have to live an exemplary life for the next six or eight months. So if you go to Venice, there's temptation removed for a week or two, at least.'
`Am I temptation!' she said, stroking his face. `I'm so glad I'm temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We can think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been thinking, I must come to you for another night before I go. I must come once more to the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?'
`Isn't that when your sister will be there?'
`Yes! But she said we would start at tea-time. So we could start at tea-time. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you.
`But then she'd have to know.'
`Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible.'
`So you'd start off from Wragby at tea-time, as if you were going to London? Which way were you going?'
`And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive back here? Sounds very risky, to me.'
`Does it? Well, then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in the morning. It's quite easy.'
`I'll wear goggles and a veil.'
`Well,' he said. `You please yourself as usual.'
`Oh yes! It'd please me all right,' he said a little grimly. `I might as well smite while the iron's hot.'
`Do you know what I thought?' she said suddenly. `It suddenly came to me. You are the "Knight of the Burning Pestle"!'
`Ay! And you? Are you the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar?'
`Yes!' she said. `Yes! You're Sir Pestle and I'm Lady Mortar.'
`All right, then I'm knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady Jane.'
`Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I'm my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must have flowers too. Yes!'
She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis.
`There!' she said. `Charming! Charming! Sir John!'
And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast.
`And you won't forget me there, will you?' She kissed him on the breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple, kissing him again.
`Make a calendar of me!' he said. He laughed, and the flowers shook from his breast.
He rose, and opened the door of the hut. Flossie, lying in the porch, got up and looked at him.
The rain had ceased. There was a wet, heavy, perfumed stillness. Evening was approaching.
He went out and down the little path in the opposite direction from the riding. Connie watched his thin, white figure, and it looked to her like a ghost, an apparition moving away from her.
When she could see it no more, her heart sank. She stood in the door of the hut, with a blanket round her, looking into the drenched, motionless silence.
But he was coming back, trotting strangely, and carrying flowers. She was a little afraid of him, as if he were not quite human. And when he came near, his eyes looked into hers, but she could not understand the meaning.
He had brought columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle in small bud. He fastened fluffy young oak-sprays round her breasts, sticking in tufts of bluebells and campion: and in her navel he poised a pink campion flower, and in her maiden-hair were forget-me-nots and woodruff.
`That's you in all your glory!' he said. `Lady Jane, at her wedding with John Thomas.'
And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.
`This is John Thomas marryin' Lady Jane,' he said. `An' we mun let Constance an' Oliver go their ways. Maybe---'
He spread out his hand with a gesture, and then he sneezed, sneezing away the flowers from his nose and his navel. He sneezed again.
`Maybe what?' she said, waiting for him to go on.
He looked at her a little bewildered.
`Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,' she insisted.
`Ay, what was I going to say?'
He had forgotten. And it was one of the disappointments of her life, that he never finished.
A yellow ray of sun shone over the trees.
`Sun!' he said. `And time you went. Time, my Lady, time! What's that as flies without wings, your Ladyship? Time! Time!'
`Say goodnight! to John Thomas,' he said, looking down at his penis. `He's safe in the arms of creeping Jenny! Not much burning pestle about him just now.'
And he put his flannel shirt over his head.
`A man's most dangerous moment,' he said, when his head had emerged, `is when he's getting into his shirt. Then he puts his head in a bag. That's why I prefer those American shirts, that you put on like a jacket.' She still stood watching him. He stepped into his short drawers, and buttoned them round the waist.
`Look at Jane!' he said. `In all her blossoms! Who'll put blossoms on you next year, Jinny? Me, or somebody else? "Good-bye, my bluebell, farewell to you!" I hate that song, it's early war days.' He then sat down, and was pulling on his stockings. She still stood unmoving. He laid his hand on the slope of her buttocks. `Pretty little Lady Jane!' he said. `Perhaps in Venice you'll find a man who'll put jasmine in your maiden-hair, and a pomegranate flower in your navel. Poor little lady Jane!'
`Don't say those things!' she said. `You only say them to hurt me.'
He dropped his head. Then he said, in dialect:
`Ay, maybe I do, maybe I do! Well then, I'll say nowt, an' ha' done wi't. But tha mun dress thysen, all' go back to thy stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand. Time's up! Time's up for Sir John, an' for little Lady Jane! Put thy shimmy on, Lady Chatterley! Tha might be anybody, standin' there be-out even a shimmy, an' a few rags o' flowers. There then, there then, I'll undress thee, tha bob-tailed young throstle.' And he took the leaves from her hair, kissing her damp hair, and the flowers from her breasts, and kissed her breasts, and kissed her navel, and kissed her maiden-hair, where he left the flowers threaded. `They mun stop while they will,' he said. `So! There tha'rt bare again, nowt but a bare-arsed lass an' a bit of a Lady Jane! Now put thy shimmy on, for tha mun go, or else Lady Chatterley's goin' to be late for dinner, an' where 'ave yer been to my pretty maid!'
She never knew how to answer him when he was in this condition of the vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little ignominiously home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously home.
He would accompany her to the broad riding. His young pheasants were all right under the shelter.
When he and she came out on to the riding, there was Mrs Bolton faltering palely towards them.
`Oh, my Lady, we wondered if anything had happened!'
Mrs Bolton looked into the man's face, that was smooth and new-looking with love. She met his half-laughing, half-mocking eyes. He always laughed at mischance. But he looked at her kindly.
`Evening, Mrs Bolton! Your Ladyship will be all right now, so I can leave you. Good-night to your Ladyship! Good-night, Mrs Bolton!'
Connie arrived home to an ordeal of cross-questioning. Clifford had been out at tea-time, had come in just before the storm, and where was her ladyship? Nobody knew, only Mrs Bolton suggested she had gone for a walk into the wood. Into the wood, in such a storm! Clifford for once let himself get into a state of nervous frenzy. He started at every flash of lightning, and blenched at every roll of thunder. He looked at the icy thunder-rain as if it dare the end of the world. He got more and more worked up.
Mrs Bolton tried to soothe him.
`She'll be sheltering in the hut, till it's over. Don't worry, her Ladyship is all right.'
`I don't like her being in the wood in a storm like this! I don't like her being in the wood at all! She's been gone now more than two hours. When did she go out?'
`A little while before you came in.'
`I didn't see her in the park. God knows where she is and what has happened to her.'
`Oh, nothing's happened to her. You'll see, she'll be home directly after the rain stops. It's just the rain that's keeping her.'
But her ladyship did not come home directly the rain stopped. In fact time went by, the sun came out for his last yellow glimpse, and there still was no sign of her. The sun was set, it was growing dark, and the first dinner-gong had rung.
`It's no good!' said Clifford in a frenzy. `I'm going to send out Field and Betts to find her.'
`Oh don't do that!' cried Mrs Bolton. `They'll think there's a suicide or something. Oh don't start a lot of talk going. Let me slip over to the hut and see if she's not there. I'll find her all right.'
So, after some persuasion, Clifford allowed her to go.
And so Connie had come upon her in the drive, alone and palely loitering.
`You mustn't mind me coming to look for you, my Lady! But Sir Clifford worked himself up into such a state. He made sure you were struck by lightning, or killed by a falling tree. And he was determined to send Field and Betts to the wood to find the body. So I thought I'd better come, rather than set all the servants agog.
She spoke nervously. She could still see on Connie's face the smoothness and the half-dream of passion, and she could feel the irritation against herself.
`Quite!' said Connie. And she could say no more.
The two women plodded on through the wet world, in silence, while great drops splashed like explosions in the wood. Ben they came to the park, Connie strode ahead, and Mrs Bolton panted a little. She was getting plumper.
`How foolish of Clifford to make a fuss!' said Connie at length, angrily, really speaking to herself.
`Oh, you know what men are! They like working themselves up. But he'll be all right as soon as he sees your Ladyship.'
Connie was very angry that Mrs Bolton knew her secret: for certainly she knew it.
Suddenly Constance stood still on the path.
`It's monstrous that I should have to be followed!' she said, her eyes flashing.
`Oh! your Ladyship, don't say that! He'd certainly have sent the two men, and they'd have come straight to the hut. I didn't know where it was, really.'
Connie flushed darker with rage, at the suggestion. Yet, while her passion was on her, she could not lie. She could not even pretend there was nothing between herself and the keeper. She looked at the other woman, who stood so sly, with her head dropped: yet somehow, in her femaleness, an ally.
`Oh well!' she said. `I fit is so it is so. I don't mind!'
`Why, you're all right, my Lady! You've only been sheltering in the hut. It's absolutely nothing.'
They went on to the house. Connie marched in to Clifford's room, furious with him, furious with his pale, over-wrought fee and prominent eyes.
`I must say, I don't think you need send the servants after me,' she burst out.
`My God!' he exploded. `Where have you been, woman, You've been gone hours, hours, and in a storm like this! What the hell do you go to that-bloody wood for? What have you been up to? It's hours even since the rain stopped, hours! Do you know what time it is? You're enough to drive anybody mad. Where have you been? What in the name of hell have you been doing?'
`And what if I don't choose to tell you?' She pulled her hat from her head and shook her hair.
He lied at her with his eyes bulging, and yellow coming into the whites. It was very bad for him to get into these rages: Mrs Bolton had a weary time with him, for days after. Connie felt a sudden qualm.
But really!' she said, milder. `Anyone would think I'd been I don't know where! I just sat in the hut during all the storm, and made myself a little fire, and was happy.'
She spoke now easily. After all, why work him up any more!
He looked at her suspiciously.
And look at your hair!' he said; `look at yourself!'
`Yes!' she replied calmly. `I ran out in the rain with no clothes on.'
`Why? To like a shower bath from the rain?'
`And how did you dry yourself?'
`On an old towel and at the fire.'
He still stared at her in a dumbfounded way.
`And supposing anybody came,' he said.
`Who? Why, anybody! And Mellors. Does he come? He must come in the evenings.'
`Yes, he came later, when it had cleared up, to feed the pheasants with corn.'
She spoke with amazing nonchalance. Mrs Bolton, who was listening in the next room, heard in sheer admiration. To think a woman could carry it off so naturally!
`And suppose he'd come while you were running about in the rain with nothing on, like a maniac?'
`I suppose he'd have had the fright of his life, and cleared out as fast as he could.'
Clifford still stared at her transfixed. What he thought in his under-consciousness he would never know. And he was too much taken aback to form one clear thought in his upper consciousness. He just simply accepted what she said, in a sort of blank. And he admired her. He could not help admiring her. She looked so flushed and handsome and smooth: love smooth.
`At least,' he said, subsiding, `you'll be lucky if you've got off without a severe cold.'
`Oh, I haven't got a cold,' she replied. She was thinking to herself of the other man's words: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! She wished, she dearly wished she could tell Clifford that this had been said her, during the famous thunderstorm. However! She bore herself rather like an offended queen, and went upstairs to change.
That evening, Clifford wanted to be nice to her. He was reading one of the latest scientific-religious books: he had a streak of a spurious sort of religion in him, and was egocentrically concerned with the future of his own ego. It was like his habit to make conversation to Connie about some book, since the conversation between them had to be made, almost chemically. They had almost chemically to concoct it in their heads.
`What do you think of this, by the way?' he said, reaching for his book. `You'd have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain, if only we have a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah, here it is!---"The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending."'
Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.
`And if it spiritually ascends,' she said, `what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?'
`Ah!' he said. `Take the man for what he means. Ascending is the opposite of his wasting, I presume.'
`Spiritually blown out, so to speak!'
`No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is anything in it?'
`Physically wasting?' she said. `I see you getting fatter, and I'm sot wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He's not to me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered Eve wasn't really much bigger, if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?'
`Well, hear how he goes on: "It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will he represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity."'
She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said:
`What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means he's a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!'
`Oh, but listen! Don't interrupt the great man's solemn words!---"The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable part, and will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend."---There, that's how he winds up!'
Connie sat listening contemptuously.
`He's spiritually blown out,' she said. `What a lot of stuff! Unnimaginables, and types of order in graves, and realms of abstract forms, and creativity with a shifty character, and God mixed up with forms of order! Why, it's idiotic!'
`I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak,' said Clifford. `Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending.'
`Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below.'
`Do you like your physique?' he asked.
`I love it!' And through her mind went the words: It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is!
`But that is really rather extraordinary, because there's no denying it's an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn't take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind.'
`Supreme pleasure?' she said, looking up at him. `Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.'
`The life of the body,' he said, `is just the life of the animals.'
`And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But it's not true! the human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And It will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.'
`My dear, you speak as if you were ushering it all in! True, you am going away on a holiday: but don't please be quite so indecently elated about it. Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.'
`Why should I believe you, Clifford, when I feel that whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts, as you call them, and is rippling so happily there, like dawn. Why should I believe you, when I feel so very much the contrary?'
`Oh, exactly! And what has caused this extraordinary change in you? running out stark naked in the rain, and playing Bacchante? desire for sensation, or the anticipation of going to Venice?'
`Both! Do you think it is horrid of me to be so thrilled at going off?' she said.
`Rather horrid to show it so plainly.'
`Oh, don't trouble! You almost communicate a thrill to me. I almost feel that it is I who am going off.'
`We've gone over all that. And as a matter of fact, I suppose your greatest thrill comes from being able to say a temporary farewell to all this. Nothing so thrilling, for the moment, as Good-bye-to-all!---But every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.'
`I'm not going to enter any new bondages.'
`Don't boast, while the gods are listening,' he said.
`No! I won't boast!' she said.
But she was thrilled, none the less, to be going off: to feel bonds snap. She couldn't help it.
Clifford, who couldn't sleep, gambled all night with Mrs Bolton, till she was too sleepy almost to live.
And the day came round for Hilda to arrive. Connie had arranged with Mellors that if everything promised well for their night together, she would hang a green shawl out of the window. If there were frustration, a red one.
Mrs Bolton helped Connie to pack.
`It will be so good for your Ladyship to have a change.'
`I think it will. You don't mind having Sir Clifford on your hands alone for a time, do you?'
`Oh no! I can manage him quite all right. I mean, I can do all he needs me to do. Don't you think he's better than he used to be?'
`Oh much! You do wonders with him.'
`Do I though! But men are all alike: just babies, and you have to flatter them and wheedle them and let them think they're having their own way. Don't you find it so, my Lady?'
`I'm afraid I haven't much experience.'
Connie paused in her occupation.
`Even your husband, did you have to manage him, and wheedle him like a baby?' she asked, looking at the other woman.
`Well!' she said. `I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But he always knew what I was after, I must say that. But he generally gave in to me.'
`He was never the lord and master thing?'
`No! At least there'd be a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew I'd got to give in. But usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and master. But neither was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.'
`And what if you had held out against him?'
`Oh, I don't know, I never did. Even when he was in the wrong, if he was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted to break what was between us. And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he's really determined; whether you're in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something. But I must say, Ted 'ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on a thing, and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.'
`And that's how you are with all your patients?' asked Connie.
`Oh, That's different. I don't care at all, in the same way. I know what's good for them, or I try to, and then I just contrive to manage them for their own good. It's not like anybody as you're really fond of. It's quite different. Once you've been really fond of a man, you can be affectionate to almost any man, if he needs you at all. But it's not the same thing. You don't really care. I doubt, once you've really cared, if you can ever really care again.'
These words frightened Connie.
`Do you think one can only care once?' she asked.
`Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don't know what it means. Nor men either. But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.'
`And do you think men easily take offence?'
`Yes! If you wound them on their pride. But aren't women the same? Only our two prides are a bit different.'
Connie pondered this. She began again to have some misgiving about her gag away. After all, was she not giving her man the go-by, if only for a short time? And he knew it. That's why he was so queer and sarcastic.
Still! the human existence is a good deal controlled by the machine of external circumstance. She was in the power of this machine. She couldn't extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn't even want to.
Hilda arrived in good time on Thursday morning, in a nimble two-seater car, with her suit-case strapped firmly behind. She looked as demure and maidenly as ever, but she had the same will of her own. She had the very hell of a will of her own, as her husband had found out. But the husband was now divorcing her.
Yes, she even made it easy for him to do that, though she had no lover. For the time being, she was `off' men. She was very well content to be quite her own mistress: and mistress of her two children, whom she was going to bring up `properly', whatever that may mean.
Connie was only allowed a suit-case, also. But she had sent on a trunk to her father, who was going by train. No use taking a car to Venice. And Italy much too hot to motor in, in July. He was going comfortably by train. He had just come down from Scotland.
So, like a demure arcadian field-marshal, Hilda arranged the material part of the journey. She and Connie sat in the upstairs room, chatting.
`But Hilda!' said Connie, a little frightened. `I want to stay near here tonight. Not here: near here!'
Hilda fixed her sister with grey, inscrutable eyes. She seemed so calm: and she was so often furious.
`Where, near here?' she asked softly.
`Well, you know I love somebody, don't you?'
`I gathered there was something.'
`Well he lives near here, and I want to spend this last night with him must! I've promised.'
Hilda bent her Minerva-like head in silence. Then she looked up.
`Do you want to tell me who he is?' she said.
`He's our game-keeper,' faltered Connie, and she flushed vividly, like a shamed child.
`Connie!' said Hilda, lifting her nose slightly with disgust: a she had from her mother.
`I know: but he's lovely really. He really understands tenderness,' said Connie, trying to apologize for him.
Hilda, like a ruddy, rich-coloured Athena, bowed her head and pondered She was really violently angry. But she dared not show it, because Connie, taking after her father, would straight away become obstreperous and unmanageable.
It was true, Hilda did not like Clifford: his cool assurance that he was somebody! She thought he made use of Connie shamefully and impudently. She had hoped her sister would leave him. But, being solid Scotch middle class, she loathed any `lowering' of oneself or the family. She looked up at last.
`I shan't,' cried Connie, flushed red. `He's quite the exception. I really love him. He's lovely as a lover.'
`You'll get over him quite soon,' she said, `and live to be ashamed of yourself because of him.'
`I shan't! I hope I'm going to have a child of his.'
`Connie!' said Hilda, hard as a hammer-stroke, and pale with anger.
`I shall if I possibly can. I should be fearfully proud if I had a child by him.'
It was no use talking to her. Hilda pondered.
`And doesn't Clifford suspect?' she said.
`I've no doubt you've given him plenty of occasion for suspicion,' said Hilda.
`And tonight's business seems quite gratuitous folly. Where does the man live?'
`In the cottage at the other end of the wood.'
`I don't know. Older than me.'
Hilda became more angry at every reply, angry as her mother used to be, in a kind of paroxysm. But still she hid it.
`I would give up tonight's escapade if I were you,' she advised calmly.
`I can't! I must stay with him tonight, or I can't go to Venice at all. I just can't.'
Hilda heard her father over again, and she gave way, out of mere diplomacy. And she consented to drive to Mansfield, both of them, to dinner, to bring Connie back to the lane-end after dark, and to fetch her from the lane-end the next morning, herself sleeping in Mansfield, only half an hour away, good going.
But she was furious. She stored it up against her sister, this balk in her plans.
Connie flung an emerald-green shawl over her window-sill.
On the strength of her anger, Hilda warmed toward Clifford.
After all, he had a mind. And if he had no sex, functionally, all the better: so much the less to quarrel about! Hilda wanted no more of that sex business, where men became nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had less to put up with than many women if she did but know it.
And Clifford decided that Hilda, after all, was a decidedly intelligent woman, and would make a man a first-rate helpmate, if he were going in for politics for example. Yes, she had none of Connie's silliness, Connie was more a child: you had to make excuses for her, because she was not altogether dependable.
There was an early cup of tea in the hall, where doors were open to let in the sun. Everybody seemed to be panting a little.
`Good-bye, Connie girl! Come back to me safely.'
`Good-bye, Clifford! Yes, I shan't be long.' Connie was almost tender.
`Good-bye, Hilda! You will keep an eye on her, won't you?'
`I'll even keep two!' said Hilda. `She shan't go very far astray.'
`Good-bye, Mrs Bolton! I know you'll look after Sir Clifford nobly.'
`I'll do what I can, your Ladyship.'
`And write to me if there is any news, and tell me about Sir Clifford, how he is.'
`Very good, your Ladyship, I will. And have a good time, and come back and cheer us up.'
Everybody waved. The car went off Connie looked back and saw Clifford, sitting at the top of the steps in his house-chair. After all, he was her husband: Wragby was her home: circumstance had done it.
Mrs Chambers held the gate and wished her ladyship a happy holiday. The car slipped out of the dark spinney that masked the park, on to the highroad where the colliers were trailing home. Hilda turned to the Crosshill Road, that was not a main road, but ran to Mansfield. Connie put on goggles. They ran beside the railway, which was in a cutting below them. Then they crossed the cutting on a bridge.
`That's the lane to the cottage!' said Connie.
Hilda glanced at it impatiently.
`It's a frightful pity we can't go straight off!' she said. We could have been in Pall Mall by nine o'clock.'
`I'm sorry for your sake,' said Connie, from behind her goggles.
They were soon at Mansfield, that once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town. Hilda stopped at the hotel named in the motor-car book, and took a room. The whole thing was utterly uninteresting, and she was almost too angry to talk. However, Connie had to tell her something of the man's history.
`He! He! What name do you call him by? You only say he,' said Hilda.
`I've never called him by any name: nor he me: which is curious, when you come to think of it. Unless we say Lady Jane and John Thomas. But his name is Oliver Mellors.'
`And how would you like to be Mrs Oliver Mellors, instead of Lady Chatterley?'
There was nothing to be done with Connie. And anyhow, if the man had been a lieutenant in the army in India for four or five years, he must be more or less presentable. Apparently he had character. Hilda began to relent a little.
`But you'll be through with him in awhile,' she said, `and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can't mix up with the working people.'
`But you are such a socialist! you're always on the side of the working classes.'
`I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.'
Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.
The nondescript evening in the hotel dragged out, and at last they had a nondescript dinner. Then Connie slipped a few things into a little silk bag, and combed her hair once more.
`After all, Hilda,' she said, `love can be wonderful: when you feel you live, and are in the very middle of creation.' It was almost like bragging on her part.
`I suppose every mosquito feels the same,' said Hilda. `Do you think it does? How nice for it!'
The evening was wonderfully clear and long-lingering, even in the small town. It would be half-light all night. With a face like a mask, from resentment, Hilda started her car again, and the two sped back on their traces, taking the other road, through Bolsover.
Connie wore her goggles and disguising cap, and she sat in silence. Because of Hilda's Opposition, she was fiercely on the sidle of the man, she would stand by him through thick and thin.
They had their head-lights on, by the time they passed Crosshill, and the small lit-up train that chuffed past in the cutting made it seem like real night. Hilda had calculated the turn into the lane at the bridge-end. She slowed up rather suddenly and swerved off the road, the lights glaring white into the grassy, overgrown lane. Connie looked out. She saw a shadowy figure, and she opened the door.
`Here we are!' she said softly.
But Hilda had switched off the lights, and was absorbed backing, making the turn.
`Nothing on the bridge?' she asked shortly. `You're all right,' said the mall's voice. She backed on to the bridge, reversed, let the car run forwards a few yards along the road, then backed into the lane, under a wych-elm tree, crushing the grass and bracken. Then all the lights went out. Connie stepped down. The man stood under the trees.
`Did you wait long?' Connie asked.
They both waited for Hilda to get out. But Hilda shut the door of the car and sat tight.
`This is my sister Hilda. Won't you come and speak to her? Hilda! This is Mr Mellors.'
The keeper lifted his hat, but went no nearer.
`Do walk down to the cottage with us, Hilda,' Connie pleaded. `It's not far.'
`People do leave them on the lanes. You have the key.'
Hilda was silent, deliberating. Then she looked backwards down the lane.
`Can I back round the bush?' she said.
She backed slowly round the curve, out of sight of the road, locked the car, and got down. It was night, but luminous dark. The hedges rose high and wild, by the unused lane, and very dark seeming. There was a fresh sweet scent on the air. The keeper went ahead, then came Connie, then Hilda, and in silence. He lit up the difficult places with a flash-light torch, and they went on again, while an owl softly hooted over the oaks, and Flossie padded silently around. Nobody could speak. There was nothing to say.
At length Connie saw the yellow light of the house, and her heart beat fast. She was a little frightened. They trailed on, still in Indian file.
He unlocked the door and preceded them into the warm but bare little room. The fire burned low and red in the grate. The table was set with two plates and two glasses on a proper white table-cloth for Once. Hilda shook her hair and looked round the bare, cheerless room. Then she summoned her courage and looked at the man.
He was moderately tall, and thin, and she thought him good-looking. He kept a quiet distance of his own, and seemed absolutely unwilling to speak.
`Do sit down, Hilda,' said Connie.
`Do!' he said. `Can I make you tea or anything, or will you drink a glass of beer? It's moderately cool.'
`Beer for me, please!' said Hilda, with a mock sort of shyness. He looked at her and blinked.
He took a blue jug and tramped to the scullery. When he came back with the beer, his face had changed again.
Connie sat down by the door, and Hilda sat in his seat, with the back to the wall, against the window corner.
`That is his chair,' said Connie softly.' And Hilda rose as if it had burnt her.
`Sit yer still, sit yer still! Ta'e ony cheer as yo'n a mind to, none of us is th' big bear,' he said, with complete equanimity.
And he brought Hilda a glass, and poured her beer first from the blue jug.
`As for cigarettes,' he said, `I've got none, but 'appen you've got your own. I dunna smoke, mysen. Shall y' eat summat?' He turned direct to Connie. `Shall t'eat a smite o' summat, if I bring it thee? Tha can usually do wi' a bite.' He spoke the vernacular with a curious calm assurance, as if he were the landlord of the Inn.
`What is there?' asked Connie, flushing.
`Boiled ham, cheese, pickled wa'nuts, if yer like.---Nowt much.'
`Yes,' said Connie. `Won't you, Hilda?'
`Why do you speak Yorkshire?' she said softly.
`That! That's non Yorkshire, that's Derby.'
He looked back at her with that faint, distant grin.
`Derby, then! Why do you speak Derby? You spoke natural English at first.'
`Did Ah though? An' canna Ah change if Ah'm a mind to 't? Nay, nay, let me talk Derby if it suits me. If yo'n nowt against it.'
`It sounds a little affected,' said Hilda.
`Ay, 'appen so! An' up i' Tevershall yo'd sound affected.' He looked again at her, with a queer calculating distance, along his cheek-bone: as if to say: Yi, an' who are you?
He tramped away to the pantry for the food.
The sisters sat in silence. He brought another plate, and knife and fork. The he said:
`An' if it's the same to you, I s'll ta'e my coat off like I allers do.'
And he took off his coat, and hung it on the peg, then sat down to table in his shirt-sleeves: a shirt of thin, cream-coloured flannel.
`'Elp yerselves!' he said. `'Elp yerselves! Dunna wait f'r axin'!' He cut the bread, then sat motionless. Hilda felt, as Connie once used to, his power of silence and distance. She saw his smallish, sensitive, loose hand on the table. He was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! acting!
`Still!' she said, as she took a little cheese. `It would be more natural if you spoke to us in normal English, not in vernacular.'
He looked at her, feeling her devil of a will.
`Would it?' he said in the normal English. `Would it? Would anything that was said between you and me be quite natural, unless you said you wished me to hell before your sister ever saw me again: and unless I said something almost as unpleasant back again? Would anything else be natural?'
`Oh yes!' said Hilda. `Just good manners would be quite natural.'
`Second nature, so to speak!' he said: then he began to laugh. `Nay,' he said. `I'm weary o' manners. Let me be!'
Hilda was frankly baffled and furiously annoyed. After all, he might show that he realized he was being honoured. Instead of which, with his play-acting and lordly airs, he seemed to think it was he who was conferring the honour. Just impudence! Poor misguided Connie, in the man's clutches!
The three ate in silence. Hilda looked to see what his table-manners were like. She could not help realizing that he was instinctively much more delicate and well-bred than herself. She had a certain Scottish clumsiness. And moreover, he had all the quiet self-contained assurance of the English, no loose edges. It would be very difficult to get the better of him.
But neither would he get the better of her.
`And do you really think,' she said, a little more humanly, `it's worth the risk.'
`This escapade with my sister.'
He flickered his irritating grin.
`Yo' maun ax 'er!' Then he looked at Connie.
`Tha comes o' thine own accord, lass, doesn't ter? It's non me as forces thee?'
`I wish you wouldn't cavil, Hilda.'
`Naturally I don't want to. But someone has to think about things. You've got to have some sort of continuity in your life. You can't just go making a mess.'
`Eh, continuity!' he said. `An' what by that? What continuity ave yer got i' your life? I thought you was gettin' divorced. What continuity's that? Continuity o' yer own stubbornness. I can see that much. An' what good's it goin' to do yer? You'll be sick o' yer continuity afore yer a fat sight older. A stubborn woman an er own self-will: ay, they make a fast continuity, they do. Thank heaven, it isn't me as `as got th' 'andlin' of yer!'
`What right have you to speak like that to me?' said Hilda.
`Right! What right ha' yo' ter start harnessin' other folks i' your continuity? Leave folks to their own continuities.'
`My dear man, do you think I am concerned with you?' said Hilda softly.
`Ay,' he said. `Yo' are. For it's a force-put. Yo' more or less my sister-in-law.'
`Still far from it, I assure you.
`Not a' that far, I assure you. I've got my own sort o' continuity, back your life! Good as yours, any day. An' if your sister there comes ter me for a bit o' cunt an' tenderness, she knows what she's after. She's been in my bed afore: which you 'aven't, thank the Lord, with your continuity.' There was a dead pause, before he added: `---Eh, I don't wear me breeches arse-forrards. An' if I get a windfall, I thank my stars. A man gets a lot of enjoyment out o' that lass theer, which is more than anybody gets out o' th' likes o' you. Which is a pity, for you might appen a' bin a good apple, 'stead of a handsome crab. Women like you needs proper graftin'.'
He was looking at her with an odd, flickering smile, faintly sensual and appreciative.
`And men like you,' she said, `ought to be segregated: justifying their own vulgarity and selfish lust.'
`Ay, ma'am! It's a mercy there's a few men left like me. But you deserve what you get: to be left severely alone.'
Hilda had risen and gone to the door. He rose and took his coat from the peg.
`I can find my way quite well alone,' she said.
`I doubt you can't,' he replied easily.
They tramped in ridiculous file down the lane again, in silence. An owl still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it.
The car stood untouched, a little dewy. Hilda got in and started the engine. The other two waited.
`All I mean,' she said from her entrenchment, `is that I doubt if you'll find it's been worth it, either of you!'
`One man's meat is another man's poison,' he said, out of the darkness. `But it's meat an' drink to me.
`Don't make me wait in the morning,'
The car rose slowly on to the highroad, then slid swiftly away, leaving the night silent.
Connie timidly took his arm, and they went down the lane. He did not speak. At length she drew him to a standstill.
`Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down,' he said.
That amused her. She still kept hold of his arm, and they went quickly down the lane, in silence. She was so glad to be with him, just now. She shivered, knowing that Hilda might have snatched her away. He was inscrutably silent.
When they were in the cottage again, she almost jumped with pleasure, that she should be free of her sister.
`But you were horrid to Hilda,' she said to him.
`She should ha' been slapped in time.'
He didn't answer, went round doing the evening chores, with a quiet, inevitable sort of motion. He was outwardly angry, but not with her. So Connie felt. And his anger gave him a peculiar handsomeness, an inwardness and glisten that thrilled her and made her limbs go molten.
Still he took no notice of her.
Till he sat down and began to unlace his boots. Then he looked up at her from under his brows, on which the anger still sat firm.
`Shan't you go up?' he said. `There's a candle!'
He jerked his head swiftly to indicate the candle burning on the table. She took it obediently, and he watched the full curve of her hips as she went up the first stairs.
It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.
Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.
She had often wondered what Abélard meant, when he said that in their year of love he and Héloïse had passed through all the stages and refinements of passion. The same thing, a thousand years ago: ten thousand years ago! The same on the Greek vases, everywhere! The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.
In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep Organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.
And what a reckless devil the man was! really like a devil! One had to be strong to bear him. But it took some getting at, the core of the physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her!
And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it! She knew now. At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this phallic hunting Out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her last and final nakedness, she was shameless.
What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like Clifford! Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating. The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it, really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer fiery sensuality, not messiness.
Ah, God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.
Till his rousing waked her completely. He was sitting up in bed, looking down at her. She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how voluptuous and lovely it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.
`Is it time to wake up?' she said.
She had to be at the lane-end at eight. Always, always, always this compulsion on one!
`I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?' he said.
Flossie whimpered gently below. He got up and threw off his pyjamas, and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and full of life, how beautiful it is! So she thought, as she watched him in silence.
The sun was shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and the wood stood bluey-fresh, in the nearness. She sat up in bed, looking dreamily out through the dormer window, her naked arms pushing her naked breasts together. He was dressing himself. She was half-dreaming of life, a life together with him: just a life.
He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.
`Have I lost my nightie altogether?' she said.
He pushed his hand down in the bed, and pulled out the bit of flimsy silk.
`I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,' he said.
But the night-dress was slit almost in two.
`Never mind!' she said. `It belongs here, really. I'll leave it.'
`Ay, leave it, I can put it between my legs at night, for company. There's no name nor mark on it, is there?'
She slipped on the torn thing, and sat dreamily looking out of the window. The window was Open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of birds. Birds flew continuously past. Then she saw Flossie roaming out. It was morning.
Downstairs she heard him making the fire, pumping water, going out at the back door. By and by came the smell of bacon, and at length he came upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his plate on his knees.
`How good it is!' she said. `How nice to have breakfast together.'
He ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That made her remember.
`Oh, how I wish I could stay here with you, and Wragby were a million miles away! It's Wragby I'm going away from really. You know that, don't you?'
`And you promise we will live together and have a life together, you and me! You promise me, don't you?'
`Yes! And we will! we will, won't we?' she leaned over, making the tea spill, catching his wrist.
`Ay!' he said, tidying up the tea.
`We can't possibly not live together now, can we?' she said appealingly.
He looked up at her with his flickering grin.
`No!' he said. `Only you've got to start in twenty-five minutes.'
`Have I?' she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and rose to his feet.
Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.
Silent, he put his plate on the tray and went downstairs. Constance heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.
`Morning, Mr Mellors! Registered letter!'
`Canada!' said the stranger's voice.
`Ay! That's a mate o' mine out there in British Columbia. Dunno what he's got to register.'
`'Appen sent y'a fortune, like.'
After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.
`Rural round; he's mostly here by seven, when he does come.
`Did your mate send you a fortune?'
`No! Only some photographs and papers about a place out there in British Columbia.'
`Oh yes! I believe it's lovely!' But he was put out by the postman's coming.
`Them damn bikes, they're on you afore you know where you are. I hope he twigged nothing.'
`After all, what could he twig!'
`You must get up now, and get ready. I'm just goin' ter look round outside.'
She saw him go reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went downstairs and washed, and was ready by the time he came back, with the few things in the little silk bag.
He locked up, and they set off, but through the wood, not down the lane. He was being wary.
`Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him.
`Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather short.
They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.
`And we will live together and make a life together, won't we?' she pleaded.
`Ay!' he replied, striding on without looking round. `When t' time comes! Just now you're off to Venice or somewhere.'
She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!
`I'll just strike across here,' he said, pointing to the right.
But she flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him.
`But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?' she whispered. `I loved last night. But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?'
He kissed her and held her close for a moment. Then he sighed, and kissed her again.
`I must go an' look if th' car's there.'
He strode over the low brambles and bracken, leaving a trail through the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back.
`Car's not there yet,' he said. `But there's the baker's cart on t' road.'
He seemed anxious and troubled.
They heard a car softly hoot as it came nearer. It slowed up on the bridge.
She plunged with utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her.
`Here! Go through there!' he said, pointing to a gap. `I shan't come out.
She looked at him in despair. But he kissed her and made her go. She crept in sheer misery through the holly and through the wooden fence, stumbled down the little ditch and up into the lane, where Hilda was just getting out of the car in vexation.
`Why you're there!' said Hilda. `Where's he?'
Connie's face was running with tears as she got into the car with her little bag. Hilda snatched up the motoring helmet with the disfiguring goggles.
`Put it on!' she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long motoring coat, and she sat down, a goggling inhuman, unrecognizable creature. Hilda started the car with a businesslike motion. They heaved out of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there was no sight of him. Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death.
`Thank goodness you'll be away from him for some time!' said Hilda, turning to avoid Crosshill village.
`You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing London, `you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'
`For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. `I've never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any man's little petsy-wetsy, nor his chair à plaisir either. I wanted a complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.
Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!
`I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with everybody,' she said to her sister.
`I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.
`But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself.'
Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard of insolence from that chit Connie.
`At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the somebody else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in crude anger.
`You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.
She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now, though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the dominion of other women. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women. How awful they were, women!
She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening, and they liked going with him.
He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays away from her as possible: just as with his first wife.
Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of a healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality, it seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit straight thighs. Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because in his strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which never dies, once it is there.
Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live, alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs in black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff, or well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either sensuality or tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness that pranced around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They were all daunted, daunted out of existence.
But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females! really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs! or the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life! Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!
But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's blind craving for happiness, to be assured of happiness.
In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness. Oh! Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these flâneurs, the oglers, these eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary, worn-out for lack of a little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming women knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they had that pull over their jigging English sisters. But they knew even less of tenderness. Dry, with the endless dry tension of will, they too were wearing out. The human world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would turn fiercely destructive. A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his conservative anarchy! Perhaps it wouldn't be conservative much longer. Perhaps it would develop into a very radical anarchy.
Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and English, strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English that are so hopeless abroad.
She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the Dolomites down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving and being mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.
And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself: Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that I don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't. It's rather awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake of Lucerne without ever noticing that there were even mountain and green water. I just don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare at it? Why should one? I refuse to.
No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real than Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care if she never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep. Wragby was more real.
As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference. They all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?
No! said Connie to herself I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.
She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow.
But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh `enjoying oneself'! Another modern form of sickness.
They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the water, look dim.
At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking, not at all impressive.
`Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'
He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong, odour of sewage.
But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right-angles to the Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above, behind them.
`Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked, rowing easy, and `wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief.
`Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.
`Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he asked: `Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'
Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.
`What is there at the Villa? what boats?'
`There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But---' The but meant: they won't be your property.
It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.
`Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.
`Less, Signora, less. The regular price---'
`Well,' said Hilda, `come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it. What is your name?'
His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no card. Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his hot, southern blue eyes, then glanced again.
`Ah!' he said, lighting up. `Milady! Milady, isn't it?'
`Milady Costanza!' said Connie.
He nodded, repeating: `Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully away in his blouse.
The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant, with the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with dark trees, walled in from the lagoon.
Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind of person with no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate her husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was now more manageable.
The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters, there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two daughters; a young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince, and a youngish English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being chaplain to Sir Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was penniless, good-looking, would make an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and basta! The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere. The clergyman was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily he had left his wife and two children at home. And the Guthries, the family of four, were good solid Edinburgh middle class, enjoying everything in a solid fashion, and daring everything while risking nothing.
Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more or less their own sort, substantial, hut boring: and the girls wanted husbands. The chaplain was not a had fellow, but too deferential. Sir Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his joviality, but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young women. Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of it, poor thing, and who watched every other woman with a cold watchfulness that had become her second nature, and who said cold, nasty little things which showed what an utterly low opinion she had of all human nature. She was also quite venomously overbearing with the servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way. And she skilfully behaved so that Sir Alexander should think that he was lord and monarch of the whole caboosh, with his stout, would-be-genial paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.
Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the morning he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his `site'. A little later, Lady Cooper would he rowed off into the heart of the city, with sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate watercolour painter, and the house was full of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges, medieval facades, and so on. A little later the Guthries, the prince, the countess, Sir Alexander, and sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would go off to the Lido, where they would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half past one.
The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this did not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father took them to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He took them to all the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with them on warm evenings in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he took them to the theatre, to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fêtes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of seals come up for mating. Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches, too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls: too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment!
Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up like a bad penny. `Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream or something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis almost sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of the mass of human flesh.
It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!
Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women, speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the women. How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she getting out of it?---The men were like great dogs in white flannel trousers, waiting to be patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster some woman's stomach against their own, in jazz.
Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from the visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could break loose and ignore `the creature'. He had been merely made use of. Poor Connie was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she simply couldn't plaster her stomach against some `creature's' stomach. She hated the conglomerate mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there was hardly enough water to wet them all. She disliked Sir Alexander and Lady Cooper. She did not want Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.
The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could bathe quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.
Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice: affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute himself to them, if they wanted hint: he secretly hoped they would want him. They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very handy, as he was just going to be married. He told them about his marriage, and they were suitably interested.
He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably meant business: business being l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help him, for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two ladies, two mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was justly proud of them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and gave him orders, he rather hoped it would be the young milady who would select hint for l'amore. She would give more money too.
The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier, so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola man, a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from the islands.
Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a little like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive, loquacious, and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with a strength and ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were ladies, remote from him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.
He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a man as Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those sweet Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like in the back of that labyrinth of a town.
Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog, wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!
Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water. Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness! Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.
Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He did not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He was a little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather doggy Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus refused the devil's money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker, master of the whole situation.
Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind of stupor, to lind letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He wrote very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for this reason Connie found them not very interesting.
She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping saltiness of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but health, health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she was lulled away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was pregnant. She knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and sea-bathing and lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away, away in a gondola, was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another fullness of health, satisfying and stupefying.
She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and the fullness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was in a sort of stupor of well-being.
From which a letter of Clifford roused her.
We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself unwelcome. He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it, however, that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer fair lady firmly established in his bed, in puris naturalibus; or one should say, in impuris naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable to evict the somewhat man-handled Venus from his couch, he beat a retreat and retired, it is said, to his mother's house in Tevershall. Meanwhile the Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims is her home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.
I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our ibis, our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have repeated it had she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the wood if that woman's going to be about!
I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains. But I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality. However, it suits his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality---
This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied ell being with vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she ad got to be bothered by that beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter from Mellors. They had agreed not to write at all, but now she wanted to hear from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child that was coming. Let him write!
But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low people were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence, compared to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a clear sky was almost the most important thing in life.
She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote to Mrs Bolton for exact information.
Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola, and he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet, almost taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.
She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:
You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford. He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful. Of course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is a dull house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence among us once more.
About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her sitting on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was come back to him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his legal wife, and he wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have anything to do with her, and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not go in himself; he went back into the wood without ever opening the door.
But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without a rag on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he must take her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His mother told me about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd die rather than ever live with her again, so he took his things and went straight to his mother's on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night and went to the wood next day through the park, never going near the cottage. It seems he never saw his wife that day. But the day after she was at her brother Pan's at Beggarlee, swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd beers having women at the cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his drawer, and gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know what all. Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking in Mr Mellors' bedroom early one morning, and a motor-car had been in the lane.
Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through the park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was no end of talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and fetched away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the handle of the pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back to Stacks Gate she went and lodged with that Mrs Swain at Beggarlee, because her brother Dan's wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going to old Mrs Mellors' house, to catch him, and she began swearing he'd got in bed with her in the cottage and she went to a lawyer to make him pay her an allowance. She's grown heavy, and more common than ever, and as strong as a bull. And she goes about saying the most awful things about him, how he has women at the cottage, and how he behaved to her when they were married, the low, beastly things he did to her, and I don't know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the mischief a woman can do, once she starts talking. And no matter how low she may be, there'll be some as will believe her, and some of the dirt will stick. I'm sure the way she makes out that Mr Mellors was one of those low, beastly men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to believe things against anybody, especially things like that. She declared she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if he was so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But of course she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older than he is. And these common, violent women always go partly insane whets the change of life comes upon them---
This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming in for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for not having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married her. Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the last night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all that sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting. It would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps really common, really low.
She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she now dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the keeper. How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt a craving for utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening respectability of the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair, how unspeakably humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and its unclean bite. She almost wished she could get rid of the child again, and be quite clear. In short, she fell into a state of funk.
As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty's Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted him to remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they were Hilda's.
She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and told Forbes the history of the man.
`Oh,' said Forbes, `you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled the man down and done him its. If he has refused to creep up into the middle classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up for his own sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't let you be, straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you like. In fact the more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But if you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you have it. You'll see, they'll hound that man down. And what's he done, after all? If he's made love to his wife all ends on, hasn't he a right to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see, even a low bitch like that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the mob against sex, to pull him down. You have a snivel and feel sinful or awful about your sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound the poor devil down.'
Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done, after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
No no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh, no! I mustn't go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it me. And I won't go back on it.
She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to him:
I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and I do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days' time, and I do hope everything will be all right.
A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.
I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.
I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures human beings are. Some of them might Just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent. One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is oneself.
The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball. Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.
She is preoccupied with tie Mellors scandal, and if I will let her begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which even then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is against the wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts. I have been to the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this world, and when, released from the current of gossip, I slowly rise to the surface again, I look at the daylight its wonder that it ever should be.
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air. I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It is our mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life of our fellow-men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal destiny is to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again into the bright ether, bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into real light. Then one realizes one's eternal nature.
When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to the depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal appetite makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of the dense into the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can tell the whole process. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward plunge, down, horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.
I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and greater dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously enough, the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers' wives behind her, gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.
I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house, having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly, and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed grandmother.
The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, `in the Italian way', well that is a matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else.
However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists, and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if one is to believe all accounts.
The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the top of her voice, that her husband has been `keeping' women down at the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the woman.
I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual, with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody care for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can isn't there. But I heard that in the village the women call away their children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade in person. He goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish ballad: `Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!'
I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that he had no power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course. `Ay,' he said. `folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.'
He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate nor respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle again. `It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin' a cod atween my legs.'
These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think it would be as well if the man left the place.
I asked him fit was true that he entertained ladies down at the cottage, and all he said was: `Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?' I told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he replied: `Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women.'---When I pressed him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: `Surely you might ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.' As a matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be hard to beat.
I asked him fit would be easy for him to find another job. He said: `If you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd be easy as wink.' So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of next week, and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I would give him a month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd rather I kept my money, as I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him what he meant, and he said: `You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me.'
Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows her face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol, because she merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will soon become normal again.
Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away by the end of the month.
So you see, we arc deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.
The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better when she received the following from Mellors:
The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She noticed the glass and the back-board in the square bedroom. Unfortunately, on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials, several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded no clue until she broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an autobiography of the actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page. After this, for some days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the rector, Mr Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had a mortal fear of the police.
Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course it was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem. But he didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a disreputable character also walked about with my breeches' buttons undone, and I as good as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.
I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square, will either give me a room or will find one for me.
Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha---
There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She resented that too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had said to Clifford: `Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.
So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that would soon die down.
She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her again. But she said to him: `I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.'
So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He wanted to be with her.
`Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, `how very little people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'
Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.
`Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. `The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' `And,' she thought to herself, `like you, Duncan.'
She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would bring her to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland's hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.
Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda, offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy into which Hilda always entered ponderously.
Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the Orient Express, in spite of Connie's dislike of trains de luxe, the atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it would make the journey to Paris shorter.
Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for the grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.
`A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,' said her father, noticing her glumness.
`I'm not sure I shall go back to Wragby,' she said, with startling abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue eyes took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is not quite clear.
`You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'
`No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'
He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was getting none of hers to shoulder.
`How's that, all at once?' he asked.
It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.
`How do you know?' said her father.
`But not Clifford's child, of course?'
She rather enjoyed tormenting him.
`Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.
`I don't know. That's the point.'
`No patching it up with Clifford?'
`I suppose Clifford would take it,' said Connie. `He told me, after last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long as I went about it discreetly.'
`Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I suppose it'll be all right.'
`In what way?' said Connie, looking into her father's eyes. They were big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in them, a look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.
`You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put another baronet in Wragby.'
Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.
`But I don't think I want to,' she said.
`Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the truth from me, my child, it's this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and, externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you'll get very little out of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won't get much out of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's an amusing thing to do.'
And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.
`I hope you had a real man at last,' he said to her after a while, sensually alert.
`I did. That's the trouble. There aren't many of them about,' she said.
`No, by God!' he mused. `There aren't! Well, my dear, to look at you, he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn't make trouble for you?'
`Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.'
`Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.'
Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.
He drove with her to Hartland's hotel, and saw her installed: then went round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.
She found a letter from Mellors.
I won't come round to your hotel, but I'll wait for you outside the Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.
There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the cut-to-pattern class thing.
`Ah, there you are! How well you look!'
She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman's now alert instinct for happiness, she registered it at once. `I'm happy when he's there!' Not all the sunshine of Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.
`Was it horrid for you?' she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and kiss it. But she did not quite dare.
`People are always horrid,' he said.
`I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.'
`Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said you felt like that.'
He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had suffered bitterly.
She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.
`And did you miss me?' she asked.
`I was glad you were out of it.'
`But did people believe about you and me?' she asked.
`No! I don't think so for a moment.'
`I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But naturally it made him want to see the last of me.'
The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.
`Say you're glad!' she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she could not understand.
`But aren't you glad?' she persisted.
`I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.'
`But you needn't be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have it as his own, he'd be glad.'
She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.
`Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?' she asked.
He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered on his face.
`You wouldn't have to tell him who the father was?'
`Oh!' she said; `he'd take it even then, if I wanted him to.'
`Ay!' he said at last, to himself. `I suppose he would.'
There was silence. A big gulf was between them.
`But you don't want me to go back to Clifford, do you?' she asked him.
`What do you want yourself?' he replied.
`I want to live with you,' she said simply.
In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with those haunted eyes.
`If it's worth it to you,' he said. `I've got nothing.'
`You've got more than most men. Come, you know it,' she said.
`In one way, I know it.' He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he resumed: `They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it's not that. I'm not a woman not because I don't want to shoot birds, neither because I don't want to make money, or get on. I could have got on in the army, easily, but I didn't like the army. Though I could manage the men all right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy fear of me when I got mad. No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead: absolutely fool-dead. I like men, and men like me. But I can't stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That's why I can't get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?'
`But why offer anything? It's not a bargain. It's just that we love one another,' she said.
`Nay, nay! It's more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life won't go down the proper gutters, it just won't. So I'm a bit of a waste ticket by myself. And I've no business to take a woman into my life, unless my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it's going to be an isolated life, and if she's a genuine woman. I can't be just your male concubine.'
`Why, because I can't. And you would soon hate it.'
`As if you couldn't trust me,' she said.
The grin flickered on his face.
`The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with you. I'm not just my Lady's fucker, after all.'
`You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I'm something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else's seeing it.'
`And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?'
He paused a long time before replying:
She too stayed to think about it.
`And what is the point of your existence?'
`I tell you, it's invisible. I don't believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there's got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big change from what now is.'
`And what will the real future have to be like?'
`God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of rage. But what it really amounts to, I don't know.'
`Shall I tell you?' she said, looking into his face. `Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?'
`It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.'
The grin came flickering on his face.
`Ay!' he said. `You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need.'
`Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.
He looked at her a long time before he answered.
`It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'
`But isn't there tenderness in me?' she said wistfully.
He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.
`Ay! It comes an' goes, like in me.'
`But can't you trust it between you and me?' she asked, gazing anxiously at him.
She saw his face all softening down, losing its armour. `Maybe!' he said. They were both silent.
`I want you to hold me in your arms,' she said. `I want you to tell me you are glad we are having a child.'
She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards her.
`I suppose we can go to my room,' he said. `Though it's scandalous again.'
But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.
They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself on a gas ring. It was small, but decent and tidy.
She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in the soft first flush of her pregnancy.
`I ought to leave you alone,' he said.
`No!' she said. `Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.'
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked body, the only home she had ever known.
`Then I'll keep thee,' he said. `If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee.'
`And say you're glad about the child,' she repeated.
`Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there.'
But that was more difficult for him.
`I've a dread of puttin' children i' th' world,' he said. `I've such a dread o' th' future for 'em.'
`But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its future already. Kiss it!'
He quivered, because it was true. `Be tender to it, and that will be its future.'---At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus within the womb.
`Oh, you love me! You love me!' she said, in a little cry like one of her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to do, to e into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none, he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his tenderness from her on that account. `I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings,' he said to himself, `and the touch of tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she's a tender, aware woman.' And as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than procreative.
She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.
`Did you hate Bertha Coutts?' she asked him.
`Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn't it rather terrible, when you've been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is it?'
`I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always, always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against me, like vitriol in my face.'
`But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?'
`No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage, she must try to bully me.'
`But she must have loved you.'
`No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.'
`But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to make you.'
`My God, it was bloody making.'
`But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.'
`How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it's fearful, and she should be shot at last.'
`And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?'
`Ay!---the same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again. I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never, never could stand it if she came down on me and you.'
`Then we can't be together?' she said.
`Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September; then till March.'
`But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,' she said.
`I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,' he said.
`It's not being very tender to them,' she said.
`Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'
`But you wouldn't do it,' she said.
`I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot them.'
`Then perhaps it is just as well you daren't.'
Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack had been too grim.---This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then there was an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn't one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New York.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Connie confided in her father.
`You see, Father, he was Clifford's game-keeper: but he was an officer in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier again.'
Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed, the conceit of self-abasement.
`Where did your game-keeper spring from?' asked Sir Malcolm irritably.
`He was a collier's son in Tevershall. But he's absolutely presentable.'
The knighted artist became more angry.
`Looks to me like a gold-digger,' he said. `And you're a pretty easy gold-mine, apparently.'
`No, Father, it's not like that. You'd know if you saw him. He's a man. Clifford always detested him for not being humble.'
`Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.'
What Sir Malcolm could not bear was the scandal of his daughter's having an intrigue with a game-keeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he minded the scandal.
`I care nothing about the fellow. He's evidently been able to get round you all right. But, by God, think of all the talk. Think of your step-mother how she'll take it!'
`I know,' said Connie. `Talk is beastly: especially if you live in society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we might perhaps say it was another man's child, and not mention Mellors' name at all.'
`Another man's! What other man's?'
`Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life.'
`And he's a fairly well-known artist. And he's fond of me.'
`Well I'm damned! Poor Duncan! And what's he going to get out of it?'
`I don't know. But he might rather like it, even.'
`He might, might he? Well, he's a funny man if he does. Why, you've never even had an affair with him, have you?'
`No! But he doesn't really want it. He only loves me to be near him, but not to touch him.'
`He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only I never wanted to.'
`God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.'
`Still, you wouldn't mind so much the talk about him?'
`My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!'
`I know! It's sickening! But what can I do?'
`Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he's lived too long.'
`Come, Father, if you haven't done a good deal of contriving and conniving in your time, you may talk.'
`But it was different, I assure you.'
Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about her sister and a game-keeper. Too, too humiliating!
`Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and have no scandal?' said Connie.
But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if Connie was going with the man, she'd better be able to marry him. This was Hilda's opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn't sure. The affair might still blow over.
`But will you see him, Father?'
Poor Sir Malcolm! he was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: a lunch in a private room at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.
Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whisky, Mellors also drank. And they talked all the while about India, on which the young man was well informed.
This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:
`Well, young man, and what about my daughter?'
The grin flickered on Mellors' face.
`Well, Sir, and what about her?'
`You've got a baby in her all right.'
`I have that honour!' grinned Mellors.
`Honour, by God!' Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. `Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?'
`I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!' He rolled his eyes to heaven. `But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it. Oh, she's a nice girl, she's a nice girl, and I knew she'd be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A game-keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now, look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking seriously, you know!'
Speaking seriously, they didn't get very far. Mellors, though a little tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as intelligent as possible: which isn't saying much.
`So you're a game-keeper! Oh, you're quite right! That sort of game is worth a man's while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she's going to come up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?'
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
`As much as that! Well, you've another good twenty years, by the look of you. Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a good cod on you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter. Game-keeper! Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you! But look here, seriously, what are we going to do about it? The world's full of blasted old women.'
Seriously, they didn't do anything about it, except establish the old free-masonry of male sensuality between them.
`And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely on me. Game-keeper! Christ, but it's rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows the girl's got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income, moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I'll leave her what I've got. By God, I will. She deserves it for showing spunk, in a world of old women. I've been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for seventy years, and haven't managed it yet. But you're the man, I can see that.'
`I'm glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion, that I'm the monkey.'
`Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all the old women?'
They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day.
The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet place.
`It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round,' said Hilda.
`I had a lot o' fun out of it,' said he.
`I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children.'
`The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,' said he.
`I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.'
`But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?' said he.
`If you'd been in her own class.'
`Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo.'
`I think,' said Hilda, `it will be best if she names quite another man as co-respondent and you stay out of it altogether.'
`But I thought I'd put my foot right in.'
`I mean in the divorce proceedings.'
He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him.
`We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,' said Hilda.
He looked in wonder at Connie.
`No, no!' she said hastily. `Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love.'
`Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of you?'
`Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a woman,' said Hilda.
`One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?'
`A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an artist.'
`Duncan Forbes!' he said at once, for Connie had talked to him. `And how would you shift the blame on to him?'
`They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment.'
`Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,' he said.
`What else do you suggest?' said Hilda. `If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with.'
`We could go right away,' he said.
`There is no right away for Connie,' said Hilda. `Clifford is too well known.'
Again the silence of pure frustration.
`The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?'
He was silent for a long time.
`How are you going about it for us?' he said.
`We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co-respondent: then we must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.'
`Sounds like a lunatic asylum.'
`Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.;
`Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,' he said, grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.
`Well!' he said at last. `I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.'
He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.
`Ma lass!' he said. `The world's goin' to put salt on thy tail.'
`Not if we don't let it,' she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent game-keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra-modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane on the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the game-keeper would say. He knew already Connie's and Hilda's opinions.
`It is like a pure bit of murder,' said Mellors at last; a speech Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.
`And who is murdered?' asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.
`Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.'
A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of dislike in the other man's voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!
Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the wing, at the pictures.
`Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,' sneered the artist.
`Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.'
In another wave of hate the artist's face looked yellow. But with a sort of silent hauteur he turned the pictures to the wall.
`I think we may go to the dining-room,' he said. And they trailed off, dismally.
`I don't at all mind posing as the father of Connie's child. But only on the condition that she'll come and pose as a model for me. I've wanted her for years, and she's always refused.' He uttered it with the dark finality of an inquisitor announcing an auto da fe.
`Ah!' said Mellors. `You only do it on condition, then?'
`Quite! I only do it on that condition.' The artist tried to put the utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too much.
`Better have me as a model at the same time,' said Mellors. `Better do us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a blacksmith, before I was a game-keeper.'
`Thank you,' said the artist. `I don't think Vulcan has a figure that interests me.'
`Not even if it was tubified and titivated up?'
There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.
It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words were wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the women.
`You didn't like him, but he's better than that, really. He's really kind,' Connie explained as they left.
`He's a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,' said Mellors.
`And will you go and be a model to him?'
`Oh, I don't really mind any more. He won't touch me. And I don't mind anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.'
`But he'll only shit on you on canvas.'
`I don't care. He'll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I don't mind if he does that. I wouldn't have him touch me, not for anything. But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty staring, let him stare. He can make as many empty tubes and corrugations out of me as he likes. It's his funeral. He hated you for what you said: that his tubified art is sentimental and self-important. But of course it's true.'
Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really in love with another man, and do hope you will divorce me. I am staying at present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with us. I'm awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly. You don't really need me any more, and I can't bear to come back to Wragby. I'm awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and find someone better. I'm not really the right person for you, I am too impatient and selfish, I suppose. But I can't ever come back to live with you again. And I feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your sake. But if you don't let yourself get worked up, you'll see you won't mind so frightfully. You didn't really care about me personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.
Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him, He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.
And that is how we are, By strength of will we cut of four inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs Bolton a terrible shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.
`Why, Sir Clifford, whatever's the matter?'
No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and felt his face, took his pulse.
`Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!'
`Oh dear, oh dear! Then I'll telephone to Sheffield for Dr Carrington, and Dr Lecky may as well run round straight away.'
She was moving to the door, when he said in a hollow tone:
She stopped and gazed at him. His face was yellow, blank, and like the face of an idiot.
`Do you mean you'd rather I didn't fetch the doctor?'
`Yes! I don't want him,' came the sepulchral voice.
`Oh, but Sir Clifford, you're ill, and I daren't take the responsibility. I must send for the doctor, or I shall be blamed.'
A pause: then the hollow voice said:
`I'm not ill. My wife isn't coming back.'---It was as if an image spoke.
`Not coming back? you mean her ladyship?' Mrs Bolton moved a little nearer to the bed. `Oh, don't you believe it. You can trust her ladyship to come back.'
The image in the bed did not change, but it pushed a letter over the counterpane.
`Read it!' said the sepulchral voice.
`Why, if it's a letter from her ladyship, I'm sure her ladyship wouldn't want me to read her letter to you, Sir Clifford. You can tell me what she says, if you wish.'
`Read it!' repeated the voice.
`Why, if I must, I do it to obey you, Sir Clifford,' she said. And she read the letter.
`Well, I am surprised at her ladyship,' she said. `She promised so faithfully she'd come back!'
The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.
She was a little impatient of Sir Clifford. Any man in his senses must have known his wife was in love with somebody else, and was going to leave him. Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn't admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared himself for it: or if he would have admitted it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it wasn't so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had now brought on that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which is a form of insanity. `It comes', she thought to herself, hating him a little, `because he always thinks of himself. He's so wrapped up in his own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he's like a mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!'
But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated.
The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady in Tennyson, he must weep or he must die.
So Mrs Bolton began to weep first. She covered her face with her hand and burst into little wild sobs. `I would never have believed it of her ladyship, I wouldn't!' she wept, suddenly summoning up all her old grief and sense of woe, and weeping the tears of her own bitter chagrin. Once she started, her weeping was genuine enough, for she had had something to weep for.
Clifford thought of the way he had been betrayed by the woman Connie, and in a contagion of grief, tears filled his eyes and began to run down his cheeks. He was weeping for himself. Mrs Bolton, as soon as she saw the tears running over his blank face, hastily wiped her own wet cheeks on her little handkerchief, and leaned towards him.
`Now, don't you fret, Sir Clifford!' she said, in a luxury of emotion. `Now, don't you fret, don't, you'll only do yourself an injury!'
His body shivered suddenly in an indrawn breath of silent sobbing, and the tears ran quicker down his face. She laid her hand on his arm, and her own tears fell again. Again the shiver went through him, like a convulsion, and she laid her arm round his shoulder. `There, there! There, there! Don't you fret, then, don't you! Don't you fret!' she moaned to him, while her own tears fell. And she drew him to her, and held her arms round his great shoulders, while he laid his face on her bosom and sobbed, shaking and hulking his huge shoulders, whilst she softly stroked his dusky-blond hair and said: `There! There! There! There then! There then! Never you mind! Never you mind, then!'
And he put his arms round her and clung to her like a child, wetting the bib of her starched white apron, and the bosom of her pale-blue cotton dress, with his tears. He had let himself go altogether, at last.
So at length she kissed him, and rocked him on her bosom, and in her heart she said to herself: `Oh, Sir Clifford! Oh, high and mighty Chatterleys! Is this what you've come down to!' And finally he even went to sleep, like a child. And she felt worn out, and went to her own room, where she laughed and cried at once, with a hysteria of her own. It was so ridiculous! It was so awful! Such a come-down! So shameful! And it was so upsetting as well.
After this, Clifford became like a child with Mrs Bolton. He would hold her h, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly kissed him, he said! `Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!' And when she sponged his great blond body, he would say the same! `Do kiss me!' and she would lightly kiss his body, anywhere, half in mockery.
And he lay with a queer, blank face like a child, with a bit of the wonderment of a child. And he would gaze on her with wide, childish eyes, in a relaxation of madonna-worship. It was sheer relaxation on his part, letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish position that was really perverse. And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation, the exultation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.
Mrs Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him. And they drew into a closer physical intimacy, an intimacy of perversity, when he was a child stricken with an apparent candour and an apparent wonderment, that looked almost like a religious exaltation: the perverse and literal rendering of: `except ye become again as a little child'.---While she was the Magna Mater, full of power and potency, having the great blond child-man under her will and her stroke entirely.
The curious thing was that when this child-man, which Clifford was now and which he had been becoming for years, emerged into the world, it was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be. This perverted child-man was now a real business-man; when it was a question of affairs, he was an absolute he-man, sharp as a needle, and impervious as a bit of steel. When he was out among men, seeking his own ends, and `making good' his colliery workings, he had an almost uncanny shrewdness, hardness, and a straight sharp punch. It was as if his very passivity and prostitution to the Magna Mater gave him insight into material business affairs, and lent him a certain remarkable inhuman force. The wallowing in private emotion, the utter abasement of his manly self, seemed to lend him a second nature, cold, almost visionary, business-clever. In business he was quite inhuman.
And in this Mrs Bolton triumphed. `How he's getting on!' she would say to herself in pride. `And that's my doing! My word, he'd never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.'
At the same time, in some corner of her weird female soul, how she despised him and hated him! He was to her the fallen beast, the squirming monster. And while she aided and abetted him all she could, away in the remotest corner of her ancient healthy womanhood she despised him with a savage contempt that knew no bounds. The merest tramp was better than he.
His behaviour with regard to Connie was curious. He insisted on seeing her again. He insisted, moreover, on her coming to Wragby. On this point he was finally and absolutely fixed. Connie had promised to come back to Wragby, faithfully.
`But is it any use?' said Mrs Bolton. `Can't you let her go, and be rid of her?'
`No! She said she was coming back, and she's got to come.'
Mrs Bolton opposed him no more. She knew what she was dealing with.
I needn't tell you what effect your letter has had on me [he wrote to Connie to London]. Perhaps you can imagine it if you try, though no doubt you won't trouble to use your imagination on my behalf.
I can only say one thing in answer: I must see you personally, here at Wragby, before I can do anything. You promised faithfully to come back to Wragby, and I hold you to the promise. I don't believe anything nor understand anything until I see you personally, here under normal circumstances. I needn't tell you that nobody here suspects anything, so your return would be quite normal. Then if you feel, after we have talked things over, that you still remain in the same mind, no doubt we can come to terms.
Connie showed this letter to Mellors.
`He wants to begin his revenge on you,' he said, handing the letter back.
Connie was silent. She was somewhat surprised to find that she was afraid of Clifford. She was afraid to go near him. She was afraid of him as if he were evil and dangerous.
`Nothing, if you don't want to do anything.'
She replied, trying to put Clifford off. He answered:
If you don't come back to Wragby now, I shall consider that you are coming back one day, and act accordingly. I shall just go on the same, and wait for you here, if I wait for fifty years.
She was frightened. This was bullying of an insidious sort. She had no doubt he meant what he said. He would not divorce her, and the child would be his, unless she could find some means of establishing its illegitimacy.
After a time of worry and harassment, she decided to go to Wragby. Hilda would go with her. She wrote this to Clifford. He replied:
I shall not welcome your sister, but I shall not deity her the door. I have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her.
They went to Wragby. Clifford was away when they arrived. Mrs Bolton received them.
`Oh, your Ladyship, it isn't the happy home-coming we hoped for, is it!' she said.
So this woman knew! How much did the rest of the servants know or suspect?
She entered the house, which now she hated with every fibre in her body. The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim.
`I can't stay long here,' she whispered to Hilda, terrified.
And she suffered going into her own bedroom, re-entering into possession as if nothing had happened. She hated every minute inside the Wragby walls.
They did not meet Clifford till they went down to dinner. He was dressed, and with a black tie: rather reserved, and very much the superior gentleman. He behaved perfectly politely during the meal and kept a polite sort of conversation going: but it seemed all touched with insanity.
`How much do the servants know?' asked Connie, when the woman was out of the room.
`Of your intentions? Nothing whatsoever.'
`Mrs Bolton is not exactly one of the servants,' he said.
There was tension till after coffee, when Hilda said she would go up to her room.
Clifford and Connie sat in silence when she had gone. Neither would begin to speak. Connie was so glad that he wasn't taking the pathetic line, she kept him up to as much haughtiness as possible. She just sat silent and looked down at her hands.
`I suppose you don't at all mind having gone back on your word?' he said at last.
`I can't help it,' she murmured.
He looked at her with curious cold rage. He was used to her. She was as it were embedded in his will. How dared she now go back on him, and destroy the fabric of his daily existence? How dared she try to cause this derangement of his personality?
`And for what do you want to go back on everything?' he insisted.
`Love!' she said. It was best to be hackneyed.
`Love of Duncan Forbes? But you didn't think that worth having, when you met me. Do you mean to say you now love him better than anything else in life?'
`Possibly! Possibly you may have whims. But you still have to convince me of the importance of the change. I merely don't believe in your love of Duncan Forbes.'
`But why should you believe in it? You have only to divorce me, not to believe in my feelings.'
`And why should I divorce you?'
`Because I don't want to live here any more. And you really don't want me.'
`Pardon me! I don't change. For my part, since you are my wife, I should prefer that you should stay under my roof in dignity and quiet. Leaving aside personal feelings, and I assure you, on my part it is leaving aside a great deal, it is bitter as death to me to have this order of life broken up, here in Wragby, and the decent round of daily life smashed, just for some whim of yours.'
After a time of silence she said:
`I can't help it. I've got to go. I expect I shall have a child.'
`And is it for the child's sake you must go?' he asked at length.
`And why? Is Duncan Forbes so keen on his spawn?'
`Surely keener than you would be,' she said.
`But really? I want my wife, and I see no reason for letting her go. If she likes to bear a child under my roof, she is welcome, and the child is welcome: provided that the decency and order of life is preserved. Do you mean to tell me that Duncan Forbes has a greater hold over you? I don't believe it.'
`But don't you see,' said Connie. `I must go away from you, and I must live with the man I love.'
`No, I don't see it! I don't give tuppence for your love, nor for the man you love. I don't believe in that sort of cant.'
`Do you? My dear Madam, you are too intelligent, I assure you, to believe in your own love for Duncan Forbes. Believe me, even now you really care more for me. So why should I give in to such nonsense!'
She felt he was right there. And she felt she could keep silent no longer.
`Because it isn't Duncan that I do love,' she said, looking up at him.
`We only said it was Duncan, to spare your feelings.'
`Yes! Because who I really love, and it'll make you hate me, is Mr Mellors, who was our game-keeper here.'
If he could have sprung out of his chair, he would have done so. His face went yellow, and his eyes bulged with disaster as he glared at her.
Then he dropped back in the chair, gasping and looking up at the ceiling.
`Do you mean to say you re telling me the truth?' he asked, looking gruesome.
`And when did you begin with him?'
He was silent like some beast in a trap.
`And it was you, then, in the bedroom at the cottage?'
So he had really inwardly known all the time.
He still leaned forward in his chair, gazing at her like a cornered beast.
`My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!'
`Why?' she ejaculated faintly.
`That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my servants! My God, my God, is there any end to the beastly lowness of women!'
He was beside himself with rage, as she knew he would be.
`And you mean to say you want to have a child to a cad like that?'
`You're going to! You mean you're sure! How long have you been sure?'
He was speechless, and the queer blank look of a child came over him again.
`You'd wonder,' he said at last, `that such beings were ever allowed to be born.'
He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious, he couldn't even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connexion with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.
`And do you mean to say you'd marry him?---and bear his foul name?' he asked at length.
He was again as if dumbfounded.
`Yes!' he said at last. `That proves that what I've always thought about you is correct: you're not normal, you're not in your right senses. You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.'
Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.
`So don't you think you'd better divorce me and have done with it?' she said.
`No! You can go where you like, but I shan't divorce you,' he said idiotically.
He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.
`Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?' she said.
`I care nothing about the child.'
`But if it's a boy it will be legally your son, and it will inherit your title, and have Wragby.'
`I care nothing about that,' he said.
`But you must! I shall prevent the child from being legally yours, if I can. I'd so much rather it were illegitimate, and mine: if it can't be Mellors'.'
`And won't you divorce me?' she said. `You can use Duncan as a pretext! There'd be no need to bring in the real name. Duncan doesn't mind.'
`I shall never divorce you,' he said, as if a nail had been driven in.
`But why? Because I want you to?'
`Because I follow my own inclination, and I'm not inclined to.'
It was useless. She went upstairs and told Hilda the upshot.
`Better get away tomorrow,' said Hilda, `and let him come to his senses.'
So Connie spent half the night packing her really private and personal effects. In the morning she had her trunks sent to the station, without telling Clifford. She decided to see him only to say good-bye, before lunch.
`I must say good-bye to you, Mrs Bolton, you know why. But I can trust you not to talk.'
`Oh, you can trust me, your Ladyship, though it's a sad blow for us here, indeed. But I hope you'll be happy with the other gentleman.'
`The other gentleman! It's Mr Mellors, and I care for him. Sir Clifford knobs. But don't say anything to anybody. And if one day you think Sir Clifford may be willing to divorce me, let me know, will you? I should like to be properly married to the man I care for.'
`I'm sure you would, my Lady. Oh, you can trust me. I'll be faithful to Sir Clifford, and I'll be faithful to you, for I can see you're both right in your own ways.'
`Thank you! And look! I want to give you this---may I?' So Connie left Wragby once more, and went on with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors went into the country and got work on a farm. The idea was, he should get his divorce, if possible, whether Connie got hers or not. And for six months he should work at farming, so that eventually he and Connie could have some small farm of their own, into which he could put his energy. For he would have to have some work, even hard work, to do, and he would have to make his own living, even if her capital started him.
So they would have to wait till spring was in, till the baby was born, till the early summer came round again.
The Grange Farm Old Heanor 29 September
I got on here with a bit of contriving, because I knew Richards, the company engineer, in the army. It is a farm belonging to Butler and Smitham Colliery Company, they use it for raising hay and oats for the pit-ponies; not a private concern. But they've got cows and pigs and all the rest of it, and I get thirty shillings a week as labourer. Rowley, the farmer, puts me on to as many jobs as he can, so that I can learn as much as possible between now and next Easter. I've not heard a thing about Bertha. I've no idea why she didn't show up at the divorce, nor where she is nor what she's up to. But if I keep quiet till March I suppose I shall be free. And don't you bother about Sir Clifford. He'll want to get rid of you one of these days. If he leaves you alone, it's a lot.
I've got lodging in a bit of an old cottage in Engine Row very decent. The man is engine-driver at High Park, tall, with a beard, and very chapel. The woman is a birdy bit of a thing who loves anything superior. King's English and allow-me! all the time. But they lost their only son in the war, and it's sort of knocked a hole in them. There's a long gawky lass of a daughter training for a school-teacher, and I help her with her lessons sometimes, so we're quite the family. But they're very decent people, and only too kind to me. I expect I'm more coddled than you are.
I like farming all right. It's not inspiring, but then I don't ask to be inspired. I'm used to horses, and cows, though they are very female, have a soothing effect on me. When I sit with my head in her side, milking, I feel very solaced. They have six rather fine Herefords. Oat-harvest is just over and I enjoyed it, in spite of sore hands and a lot of rain. I don't take much notice of people, but get on with them all right. Most things one just ignores.
The pits are working badly; this is a colliery district like Tevershall. only prettier. I sometimes sit in the Wellington and talk to the men. They grumble a lot, but they're not going to alter anything. As everybody says, the Notts-Derby miners have got their hearts in the right place. But the rest of their anatomy must be in the wrong place, in a world that has no use for them. I like them, but they don't cheer me much: not enough of the old fighting-cock in them. They talk a lot about nationalization, nationalization of royalties, nationalization of the whole industry. But you can't nationalize coal and leave all the other industries as they are. They talk about putting coal to new uses, like Sir Clifford is trying to do. It may work here and there, but not as a general thing. I doubt. Whatever you make you've got to sell it. The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. And they are doomed along with it. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there's not much conviction in them. There's no sort of conviction about anything, except that it's all a muddle and a hole. Even under a Soviet you've still got to sell coal: and that's the difficulty.
We've got this great industrial population, and they've got to be fed, so the damn show has to be kept going somehow. The women talk a lot more than the men, nowadays, and they are a sight more cock-sure. The men are limp, they feel a doom somewhere, and they go about as if there was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done in spite of all the talk, the young ones get mad because they've no money to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out. The pits are working two days, two and a half days a week, and there's no sign of betterment even for the winter. It means a man bringing up a family on twenty-five and thirty shillings. The women are the maddest of all. But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays.
If you could only tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily on twenty-five shillings. If the men wore scarlet trousers as I said, they wouldn't think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash. And amuse the women themselves, and be amused by the women. They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own emblems. Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend. But you can't do it. They're all one-track minds nowadays. Whereas the mass of people oughtn't even to try to think, because they can't. They should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He's the only god for the masses, forever. The few can go in for higher cults if they like. But let the mass be forever pagan.
But the colliers aren't pagan, far from it. They're a sad lot, a deadened lot of men: dead to their women, dead to life. The young ones scoot about on motor-bikes with girls, and jazz when they get a chance, But they're very dead. And it needs money. Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.
I'm sure you're sick of all this. But I don't want to harp on myself, and I've nothing happening to me. I don't like to think too much about you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But, of course, what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I'm frightened, really. I feel the devil in the air, and he'll try to get us. Or not the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of people, wanting money and hating life. Anyhow, I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out. There's a bad time coming. There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there's nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven't been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won't be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We'll be together next year. And though I'm frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it's the only thing in the world. I've got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And now the little flame is all I care about in my life. There's the baby, but that is a side issue. It's my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you. The old Pentecost isn't quite right. Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That's what I abide by, and will abide by, Cliffords and Berthas, colliery companies and governments and the money-mass of people all notwithstanding.
That's why I don't like to start thinking about you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don't want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can't help all the winters that have been. But this winter I'll stick to my little Pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won't let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn't let even the crocus be blown out. And if you're in Scotland and I'm in the Midlands, and I can't put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I've got something of you. My soul softly Naps in the little Pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it's a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.
So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river.
Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.
Never mind, never mind, we won't get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, and in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There's so much of you here with me, really, that it's a pity you aren't all here.
Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don't hear anything from him, never mind. He can't really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn't, we'll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing.
Now I can't even leave off writing to you.
But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.
Lady Chaterley's Lover - 1st Part here - 2nd Part here.