Lady Chatterley's Lover

Chapter 1



Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new
little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is
now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the
obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had
brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live
and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month
on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be
shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits.
Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was
twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to
grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then
he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower
half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,
Wragby Hall, the family `seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now a
baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start
housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys
on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed.
Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the
war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford
came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he
could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled
chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could
drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of
which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent
left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might
say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue,
challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were
very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from
Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight
vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how
proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much
hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone.
There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown
hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had
big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come
from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once
well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the
cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists
and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might
be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to
Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also
in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist
conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one
was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were
at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of
art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among
the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and
artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better,
since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy
youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and
they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in
the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows,
free to do as they liked, and---above all---to say what they liked. It was
the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love
was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the
time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately
and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of
course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was
so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were
so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of
herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only a
sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in
love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he
had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a
girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement
of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's
life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and subjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of
the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it
were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better,
something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The
beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any
sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind
women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A
woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably
turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion.
But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That
the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into
account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away.
Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather
she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to
hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend
himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the
connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her
tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came,
and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless
he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly
interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the
unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever
young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had
never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men
to talk to!---had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what
a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It
marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer
vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the
last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to
show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda
was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had
had the love experience.
L'amour avait possи par lю, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mot a nervous
invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be
`free', and to `fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a
woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as
a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own mind or
soul that she could not get rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm,
who left his nervously hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost,
while he went his own way.
So the girls were `free', and went back to Dresden, and their music,
and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young men,
and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of mental
attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and
wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's
young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for
their young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.
Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is,
the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more
blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her
expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward,
the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more
hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took the
sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude
to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. And
afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence.
Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is
how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they
hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again,
for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are
discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman
do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after
having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas
of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters wept,
and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot them. They
didn't exist any more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington
housemixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood for
`freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a
well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of
voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly
married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same
Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family
job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with
him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort of
society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or
would be, the real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what
they're talking about, or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything,
so far. Her `friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two,
who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities of
coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had
become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so he could mock at
everything more becomingly in uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was
well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but
still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's
daughter.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more `society',
was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease in the
narrow `great world', that is, landed aristocracy society, but he was shy
and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of
the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he
was just a little bit frightened of middle-and lower-class humanity, and of
foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralysing way, conscious
of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege.
Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid
fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer world
of chaos than he was master of himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or
perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in
the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any
sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one
supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort
especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals
altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous,
though it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous:
certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army
or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as
far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were
ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous,
chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them
into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending
more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley---Emma---came down to London from the Midlands to
do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey
and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir, laughed
outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But
Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite
true. But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At
least people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about
something. They believed in something.
They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children. In all
these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But
Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities were ridiculous
ab ovo, not because of toffee or Tommies.
And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous
fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till things
developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here.
And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant young laughed no more.
In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was
terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey, and child of
Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew
that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was ridiculous. Now
he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also
splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?
Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense,
withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and
his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut off he was,
so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable,
that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for
England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St
George: and he never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled
timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.
And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his
father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any further
ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and
the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For willy-nilly he took
his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and
horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in
the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously
isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the
weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or
because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial
Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their
own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their
father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely
mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that
it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt
his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of
the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon
with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two
people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he
and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which
was beyond sex, and beyond a man's `satisfaction`. Clifford anyhow was not
just keen on his `satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the
intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an
accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes
which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law
Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.


Chapter 2



Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss
Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was
living in a little flat in London.
Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle
of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place
without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather line old park
of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of
Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy
distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which
began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a
long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick
houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank
dreariness.
Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex
downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the
utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left
it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather
dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the
pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and
the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank
was burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put
it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often,
the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the
earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of
something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna
from the skies of doom.
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful,
but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the
rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and
quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain.
It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror;
she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the
morning it rained.
Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had
a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else
they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard,
shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was
something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the
thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on
the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious.
There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no
deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car up a
dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the
park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the house spread
its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering,
like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a welcome.
There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,
none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely stared;
the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded
awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of
resentment on either side. At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle
of resentment that came from the village. Then she hardened herself to it,
and it became a sort of tonic, something to live up to. It was not that she
and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species
altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as
is perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent. But in the Midlands and the
industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take
place. You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the
common pulse of humanity.
Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract.
In the flesh it was---You leave me alone!---on either side.
The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and
reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent---You leave me
alone!---of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all Methodists. The
miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore
was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other
man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic preaching and praying
concern.
This stubborn, instinctive---We think ourselves as good as you, if you
are Lady Chatterley!---puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The
curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives met her
overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of---Oh dear me! I am somebody now,
with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not as good as
her for all that!---which she always heard twanging in the women's
half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it. It was
hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.
Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went
by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax
figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and
contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was
altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own
class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. And he was
neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like
the pit-bank and Wragby itself.
But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was
lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For he had
to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just
as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the
careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just
as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern
ladylike young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad
shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same
time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His
manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and
self-effacing, almost tremulous.
Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He
was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and
flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately.
But she could not help feeling how little connexion he really had with
people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects
rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw
phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid
of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And
their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs.
He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope,
or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with
anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of
family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie
felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was
nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.
Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big
and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a
wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in
which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost
thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all.
Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very
personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and
yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary
and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the
whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely
an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to
modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.
Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted
everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in
the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to
Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as if the
whole of his being were in his stories.
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He
talked everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and
she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body
and sex had to rouse up and pass into theme stories of his. This thrilled
her and absorbed her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the
house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, arid the
dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could hardly call her a
parlour-maid, or even a woman...who waited at table, had been in the house
for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was
awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these
endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical
cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook,
an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest
the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty
good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict
honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of
feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused
street.
What could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone. Miss
Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and triumphed,
finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie for ousting her from
her union in consciousness with her brother. It was she, Emma, who should be
bringing forth the stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories,
something new in the world, that they, the Chatterleys, had put there. There
was no other standard. There was no organic connexion with the thought and
expression that had gone before. Only something new in the world: the
Chatterley books, entirely personal.
Connie's father, where he paid a flying visit to Wragby, and in private
to his daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart, but there's nothing
in it. It won't last! Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had
done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, still-wondering blue
eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing in it? If the
critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost famous, and it even
brought in money...what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in
Clifford's writing? What else could there be?
For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the
moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily
belonging to one another.
It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: `I hope,
Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.'
`A demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely. `Why? Why not?'
`Unless you like it, of course!' said her father hastily. To Clifford
he said the same, when the two men were alone: `I'm afraid it doesn't quite
suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.'
`A half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of
it.
He thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry and
offended.
`In what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked stiffly.
`She's getting thin...angular. It's not her style. She's not the
pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.'
`Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.
He wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge
business...the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring
himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate
enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but
bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag
in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that
something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she
were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and
wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know,
doesn't exist.
Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living
their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had
never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and wrestled in the
throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really
happening, really in the void.
And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was
non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants...but spectral, not really
existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined
the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicking the brown leaves
of autumn, and picking the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or
rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her
like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody
had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or
words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact! Only this
life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae
of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and
they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they
last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the
moment is the appearance of reality.
Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he
invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers,
people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being
asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But
why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong
with it?
She was hostess to these people...mostly men. She was hostess also to
Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy,
country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling,
brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was
considered a little old-fashioned and `womanly'. She was not a `little
pilchard sort of fish', like a boy, with a boy's flat breast and little
buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart.
So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her
indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest
sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was
quiet and vague, she had no contact with them and intended to have none.
Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.
His relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the kindliness
indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for you
unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no contact. She
let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel they had no need to
draw their steel in readiness. She had no real connexion with them.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so
beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his
books. She entertained...there were always people in the house. Time went on
as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven.


Chapter 3



Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her
disconnexion, a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It
twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them, it jerked her spine
when she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It
thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must
jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made
her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner.
It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, abandon
Clifford, and lie prone in the bracken. To get away from the house...she
must get away from the house and everybody. The work was her one refuge, her
sanctuary.
But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no
connexion with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the
rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself...if it had any
such nonsensical thing.
Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way.
Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the
substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not
exist...which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it
was like beating her head against a stone.
Her father warned her again: `Why don't you get yourself a beau,
Connie? Do you all the good in the world.'
That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who
had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken
up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he
wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had
been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and
revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and
bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made
this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and
his corpse thrown into the refuse can.
Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down
Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best
tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.
Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment
in thyoung man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the
ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he
would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when
the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no
doubt do Clifford `good' over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of
kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way,
especially `over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable
what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most
nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction,
when he found he had been made ridiculous.
Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to
become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did not himself
know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a
first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty,
bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert
themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made,
used by all the other R. A.s who sold their pictures. Whereas Clifford
discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all kinds of people
at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined to build
himself a monument of a reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the
making.
Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a
manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at right of him something in
Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly...in fact,
he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply. To Clifford
this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man; to the amazing
success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed,
snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis'
heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute
himself to the bitch-goddess, Success also, if only she would have him.
Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors,
hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he
obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and
bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance:
that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let
such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been
much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now.
He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the
stage and to the front of it, with his plays. He had caught the public. And
he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren't... They never
would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he
didn't belong...among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the
various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!
Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car,
this Dublin mongrel.
There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn't put on airs
to himself, he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford
sensibly, briefly, practically, about all the things Clifford wanted to
know. He didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to
Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent
business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he
answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
`Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you
play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'
`But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.
`Oh, quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept
outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't
help it.'
`But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.
`Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a
writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no
question of that.'
`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.
`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public,
if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them
popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will
have to be...for the time being.'
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such
fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so
old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him
generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he
was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the
desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said
Clifford contemplatively.
`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
`And are you alone?' asked Connie.
`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek,
so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry.
Oh, yes, I must marry.'
`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'
He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I
find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an
Irishwoman...'
`Try an American,' said Clifford.
`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he
will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of
extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand
dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he
looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent,
enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and
the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that
momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the
Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming
through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of
sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion,
amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a
bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much
stupider!
Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his
full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He
was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the
English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even
love. Yet women sometimes fell for him...Englishwomen too.
He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which
would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead,
perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before
lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis,
restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine
November...day fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God!
What a place!
He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady
Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he
care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the
central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of
course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own
parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed things, or
had contact with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round
at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cиzanne.
`It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to the top.'
`Yes, I think so,' she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in
Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen
it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She
asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers...other people
were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened
she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about
himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in
his success.
`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a
lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few
moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'
`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.
`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are,
aren't you?'
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.
`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is
hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her
power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was
crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.
`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.
`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to
utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked
suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out
an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled
beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his
face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and dazed,
looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck,
feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could
not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the
defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.
Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing
eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the
answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman,
trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of
every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at
length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then,
with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her
breast.
When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their
suхde slippers, and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he
stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he
turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.
`And now, I suppose you'll hate me!' he said in a quiet, inevitable
way. She looked up at him quickly.
`Why should I?' she asked.
`They mostly do,' he said; then he caught himself up. `I mean...a woman
is supposed to.'
`This is the last moment when I ought to hate you,' she said
resentfully.
`I know! I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...' he
cried miserably.
She wondered why he should be miserable. `Won't you sit down again?'
she said. He glanced at the door.
`Sir Clifford!' he said, `won't he...won't he be...?' She paused a
moment to consider. `Perhaps!' she said. And she looked up at him. `I don't
want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I
don't think it's wrong, do you?'
`Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too infinitely good to me...I can
hardly bear it.'
He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be
sobbing.
`But we needn't let Clifford know, need we?' she pleaded. `It would
hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.'
`Me!' he said, almost fiercely; `he'll know nothing from me! You see if
he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!' he laughed hollowly, cynically, at
such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: `May I kiss your
hand arid go? I'll run into Sheffield I think, and lunch there, if I may,
and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don't hate
me?---and that you won't?'---he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.
`No, I don't hate you,' she said. `I think you're nice.'
`Ah!' he said to her fiercely, `I'd rather you said that to me than
said you love me! It means such a lot more...Till afternoon then. I've
plenty to think about till then.' He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.
`I don't think I can stand that young man,' said Clifford at lunch.
`Why?' asked Connie.
`He's such a bounder underneath his veneer...just waiting to bounce
us.'
`I think people have been so unkind to him,' said Connie.
`Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours doing
deeds of kindness?'
`I think he has a certain sort of generosity.'
`Towards whom?'
`I don't quite know.'
`Naturally you don't. I'm afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for
generosity.'
Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness
of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where
Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the
world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those
of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor
outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back
doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence?
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping, dogs with
lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if
you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.
The queer thing was, he didn't. He came back towards tea-time with a
large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog expression.
Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to disarm opposition,
because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?
His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though
through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel it,
perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and
their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery
in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very
presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an
assumed good manner.
Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery
and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was
perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive, aloof young fellow of the
previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically
playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them
for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not
forgotten. But he knew where he was...in the same old place outside, where
the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-making altogether
personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom
everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an
outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how
Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him;
just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was
also a necessity.
But occasional love, as a comfort arid soothing, was also a good thing,
and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly, poignantly
grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears.
Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing
with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his
outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.
He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the
candles in the hall:
`May I come?'
`I'll come to you,' she said.
`Oh, good!'
He waited for her a long time...but she came.
He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and
was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about
his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and
cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were in abeyance he
seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and
somehow struggling helplessly.
He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a
wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in
her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her
breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed,
disappointed, lost.
But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when
his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he
stayed firm inside her, giving to her, while she was active...wildly,
passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of
her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity,
he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.
`Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously, and she became quite still,
clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.
He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly
the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down
his external man.
He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever,
sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of
hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness
remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to
be hopeless. He rather hated hope. `Une immense espиrance a traversи la
terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:`---and it's darned-well
drowned everything worth having.'
Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And
all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She
couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't
ever quite love at all.
So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in
London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him
by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to
give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.
And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind
and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own
powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused
cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his
best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really
reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male
passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had,
he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were
gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed
for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might even have wished to get her
and Michaelis together again.


Chapter 4



Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She
was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it
to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford
did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But,
as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end. Mick couldn't keep
anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any
connexion, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his
major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the
sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if
you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good
fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to
see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't
mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was
a Brigadier-General. `The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from
having to face the battle of life,' he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as
Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life
of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and
didn't much matter. No one thinks of inquiring of another person at what
hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person
concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have `affairs'. All these
matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy,
have no interest for anyone else.
`The whole point about the sexual problem,' said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, `is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why
should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein liehe
problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd
be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of
misplaced curiosity.'
`Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point.'...Julia
was Hammond's wife.
`Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'
`You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?'
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
`Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'
`As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: `As a matter
of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to
self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army
definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how
inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It
is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of
course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing.
That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you...a vital little
dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be
unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful.
Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers'
trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs Arnold B. Hammond---just like a trunk on the
railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B. Hammond,
c/o Mrs Arnold B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The
life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite
right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for
success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.'
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of
his mind, and of his not being a time-server. None the less, he did want
success.
`It's quite true, you can't live without cash,' said May. `You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be
free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops
you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to
talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who
inclines us that way?'
`There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.
`Lascivious! well, why not---? I can't see I do a woman any more harm
by sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her about
the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why
not?'
`Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.
`Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?'
`But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.
`Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death.
Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me
disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?'
`I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.
`Not it! I don't over-eat myself and I don't over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'
`Not at all! You can marry.'
`How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental processes. I'm not properly
pivoted that way...and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot
and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women
sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody's moral
condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around
with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe
trunk.'
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
`It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes, `that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's
quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with
women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of
normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a
woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with any
interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in
common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...'
`If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you
ought to sleep with her,' said May. `It's the only decent thing, to go to
bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the Only
decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put your tongue
between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the
other way.'
`No,' said Hammond. `It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do, with
a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'
`Maybe it does...and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy,
married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's
going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what
I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
`Go it, you two minds!' he said. `Look at me...I don't do any high and
pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry
nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after
the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him
from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the
straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an
English Man of Letters before he's done. A.B.C. from top to toe. Then
there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you
think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?'
Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
`Well!' he said, `being myself hors de combat, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter.'
`Not at all,' said Dukes; `the top of you's by no means hors de combat.
You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your
ideas.'
`Well,' stammered Clifford, `even then I don't suppose I have much
idea...I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand for
what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for one
another, it is a great thing.'
`What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.
`Oh...it perfects the intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.
`Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's natural for
me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season. Unfortunately no
woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself; and am
none the worse for it...I hope so, anyway, for how should I know? Anyhow
I've no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works to
write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in the army...'
Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be
quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations
of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn't get
on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much
more hedgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence,
and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired
by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a
mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a
little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.
How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get
anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say,
especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and
touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was
great fun! But what cold minds!
And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for
Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a
little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel
and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk
round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind.
Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of
it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there,
amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies, as she
called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused, and proud too,
that even their talking they could not do, without her silent presence. She
had an immense respect for thought...and these men, at least, tried to think
honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike
talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't
say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either.
But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across him.
He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies had
against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more
or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least.
There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation
drifted again to love.
`Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in kindred something-or-other'---
said Tommy Dukes. `I'd like to know what the tie is...The tie that
binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that,
there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things
about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world.
Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust
apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by
saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to
flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has
been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer
spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to
bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other
little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer
Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples
little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No,
there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in
spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'
`I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.
`My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the
spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they are poison; when I
begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then poor Clifford
is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me,
then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done.'
`Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.
`I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about
one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'
`And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he
did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had
such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so ex
cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.
Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
`That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,'
said Hammond.
`They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
`I wasn't talking about knowledge...I was talking about the mental
life,' laughed Dukes. `Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the
consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain
and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the
reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and
make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the
world needs criticizing today...criticizing to death. Therefore let's live
the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But,
mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an
Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck
the apple. You've severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the
organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental
life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree.
And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural
necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.'
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
`Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.
`So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.
`But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
`Bravo!' roared Charlie. `What do you think of Bolshevism?'
`Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.
`I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.
`Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, `is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.
`Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he
must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the
Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be
mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many
different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a
machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate...hate of the
bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'
`Absolutely!' said Tommy. `But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-owner's
ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was
hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these
Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up...but it's all part of the life of
the mind, it's a logical development.'
`I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses,' said Hammond.
`My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure
mind...exclusively.'
`At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.
`Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment.
`But this thing can't go on...this hate business. There must be a
reaction...' said Hammond.
`Well, we've been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate's a growing
thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to
life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force
according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula, like a
machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the roost turns
into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians
are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'
`But there are many other ways,' said Hammond, `than the Soviet way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'
`Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if
you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted;
but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted. So I even
consider our far-famed mental life half-witted. We're all as cold as
cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're all of us Bolshevists,
only we give it another name. We think we're gods...men like gods! It's just
the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if
one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the
same thing: they're both too good to be true.'
Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
`You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'
`You lovely lad!' said Tommy. `No, my cherub, nine times out of ten,
no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with
swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two
collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property,
make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I
don't believe in it at all!'
`But you do believe in something?'
`Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say "shit!" in front of a
lady.'
`Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.
Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. `You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never
lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front
of my mother or my aunt...they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really
intelligent, I'm only a "mental-lifer". It would be wonderful to be
intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and
unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do?---to any
really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his
penis...he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God!
when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started
it.'
`There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up
and speaking at last.
The men resented it...she should have pretended to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.
`My God! "If they be not nice to me What care I how nice they be?"
`No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not
going to start forcing myself to it...My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and
lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be quite
happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure!
What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'
`It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.
`Yes, life is all too simple!'


Chapter 5



On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie
went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in
his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.
The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round
the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the
top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure,
always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.
The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay
bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the
wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with
sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld
had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured
on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour,
with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot
of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.
Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel
thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge
rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went
trailing off over the little sky.
Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into
the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets
of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood
hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country.
But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road
from Mansfield swerved round to the north.
In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground
keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little
birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed
off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now
Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place
inviolate, shut off from the world.
The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was
nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here
and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots,
lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the
brushwood and rubbish.
This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where
the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over
the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie
had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It
let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.
This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till
he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir
Geoffrey.
Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very
jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding
downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the
bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of
knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
`I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
`Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.
`I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'
`Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to
notice.
`I want this wood perfect...untouched. I want nobody to trespass in
it,' said Clifford.
There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a
blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs
against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown
bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been
deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered,
still remembered.
Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
`I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.
`But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.
`Quite!' said Clifford. `But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!'
`Must one?' said Connie. `If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'
`If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. `And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling
for it, must preserve it.'
There was a sad pause. `Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.
`For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One
may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was
a pause.
`What tradition?' asked Connie.
`The tradition of England! of this!'
`Yes,' she said slowly.
`That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he
said.
Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
`I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.
He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
`It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he
said. `If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the
place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to
rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth
considering?'
Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an `it'
to him. It...it...it!
`But what about the other man?' she asked.
`Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very
deeply?...You had that lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing almost. It
seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in
our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they?
Where...Where are the snows of yesteryear?...It's what endures through one's
life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and
development. But what do the occasional connexions matter? And the
occasional sexual connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them
ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What
does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the
living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice.
You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of
each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional
excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing...that's what we live by...not
the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two
people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one
another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the
simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick
to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going
to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'
Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so
she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her
marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through
years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions,
and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come
home again.
`And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.
`Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'
She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the
wrong sort of fellow.
`But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of
fellow,' she said.
`No,' he replied. `You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care
for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'
She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so
absolutely wrong.
`And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him
almost furtively.
`Not at all, I'd better not know...But you do agree with me, don't you,
that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived
together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven to?
After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of
life the slow building up of an integral personality, through the years?
living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack
of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love-affair. If
lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you
possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life,
that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that
together...don't you think?...if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and
at the same time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our
steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'
Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right
theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life with
him she...hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself
into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?
Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with
him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an
adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could
one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes,
gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of
course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and
no's! Like the straying of butterflies.
`I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'
`But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'
`Oh yes! I think I do, really.'
She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and
was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man
with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if
about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning
downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had frightened Connie, he
seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That was how she had seen him,
like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.
He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters...the old style, with
a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly
downhill.
`Mellors!' called Clifford.
The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a
soldier!
`Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it
easier,' said Clifford.
The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with
the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He was
moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie at all,
only at the chair.
`Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?'
`No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.
The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair
hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her feel
shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand
and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He
remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.
`But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.
`Eight months, Madam...your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.
`And do you like it?'
She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony,
perhaps with impudence.
`Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'
He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take
hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy
broad drag of the dialect...perhaps also in mockery, because there had been
no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman. Anyhow, he was a
curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of himself.
Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark hazel
thicket.
`Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.
`No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't
really strong enough for the uphill work.' The man glanced round for his
dog...a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly moved its
tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came into his eyes
for a moment, then faded away, and his face was expressionless. They went
fairly quickly down the slope, the man with his hand on the rail of the
chair, steadying it. He looked like a free soldier rather than a servant.
And something about him reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.
When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward, and
opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men looked
at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a curious, cool
wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked like. And she saw in his
blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain
warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?
Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came
quickly, courteously, to close it.
`Why did you run to open?' asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. `Mellors would have done it.'
`I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie. `And leave you to
run after us?' said Clifford.
`Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'
Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise of the
knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted lips. He was
rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail and
quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.
Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over; the
small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed
in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was going to snow.
All grey, all grey! the world looked worn out.
The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for
Connie.
`Not tired, are you?' he said.
`Oh, no!' she said.
But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But
the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn
out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.
They came to the house, and around to the back, where there were no
steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled
house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms. Then Connie lifted
the burden of his dead legs after him.
The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he saw
Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair,
Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
`Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors,' said Clifford casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
`Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
`Nothing, good morning!'
`Good morning, Sir.'
`Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill...I
hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper
outside the door.
His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.
`Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: `Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'
`Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.
`Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.
`Yes, but where did he come from?'
`Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'
`And was he a collier himself?'
`Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was
keeper here for two years before the war...before he joined up. My father
always had a good Opinion of him, so when he came back, and went to the pit
for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really
very glad to get him...its almost impossible to find a good man round here
for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the people.'
`And isn't he married?'
`He was. But his wife went off with...with various men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'
`So this man is alone?'
`More or less! He has a mother in the village...and a child, I
believe.'
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground,
but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the
body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise,
which Only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
So it was with Clifford. Once he was `well', once he was back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been so deep as to be
numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to assert itself in a
spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still was alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as it were,
command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her having a
child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all the brilliant
words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They were not the leafy
words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a
manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in
abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of
unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep...the
bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living
blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood,
deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life that affected her. Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to
feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a
habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became
utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only
reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His
photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had
become in four or five years one of the best known of the young
`intellectuals'. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see.
Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and
motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like
puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and
playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird
and it was nothing. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the
bottom of Connie's soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of
nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!
Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play;
already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of nothingness.
It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the passion for making a
display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money
that Michaelis was after. Clifford had never been primarily out for money,
though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of
success. And success was what they wanted. They wanted, both of them, to
make a real display...a man's own very display of himself that should
capture for a time the vast populace.
It was strange...the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the
thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the
bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed
again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage. He
invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede
gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a great
success. Even Connie was thrilled...thrilled to what bit of marrow she had
left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill, was really
wonderful...and quite beautiful, in Connie's eyes. She saw in him that
ancient motionlessness of a race that can't be disillusioned any more, an
extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure. On the far side of his supreme
prostitution to the bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory
mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply
carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of
Michaelis' life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even Clifford
was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can put it.
So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited him
in the night...and he had not known where to find her. Coquetry!...at his
moment of triumph.
He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play...did she
think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the last
thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised it
rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew it was
nothing.
`Look here!' he said suddenly at last. `Why don't you and I make a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'
`But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
`Oh that!...he'll divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
`But I am married already,' she said. `I can't leave Clifford, you
know.'
`Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
`Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
`Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But
that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic. `Now I consider,' he added, `I can give a woman the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
`And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
`Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of good
time.'
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even
her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been
thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn't `go off'. She just
sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her
almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her
to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say
Yes!---who can tell?
`I should have to think about it,' she said. `I couldn't say now. It
may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how
disabled he is...'
`Oh damn it all! If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I
might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest
of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing
but disabilities to recommend him...'
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:
`You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'
`All right!' she said.
He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he
had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had
finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically
kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self-offering,
till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost
sneering little voice:
`You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'
This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life.
Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real
mode of intercourse.
`What do you mean?' she said.
`You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own
exertions.'
She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment
when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of
love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished
almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
`But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.
He laughed grimly: `I want it!' he said. `That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'
`But don't you?' she insisted.
He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or else
they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to bring
themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She
was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
`But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
`Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he
started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!


Chapter 6



`Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
`Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
Connie pondered this.
`Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
`I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this
moment?'
`Yes, talking...'
`And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'
`Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'
`A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time
love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually
exclusive.'
`But they shouldn't be!'
`No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in
wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I
don't love them and desire them. The two things don't happen at the same
time in me.'
`I think they ought to.'
`All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.
Connie considered this. `It isn't true,' she said. `Men can love women
and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them without talking, and
being friendly and intimate. How can they?'
`Well,' he said, `I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking
to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction,
sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you
are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special
case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate
them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.
`But doesn't it make you sad?'
`Why should it? Not a bit! I l