`And you talk so coldly about sex,' she said. `You talk as if you had
only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.'
She was protesting nervously against him.
`Nay!' he said. `I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a
woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and
satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never
happened. It takes two.'
`But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in
me,' she said.
`I don't know what believing in a woman means.'
`That's it, you see!'
She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he
was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.
`But what do you believe in?' she insisted.
`I don't know.'
`Nothing, like all the men I've ever known,' she said.
They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said:
`Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I
believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm
heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it
warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted
fucking that is death and idiocy.'
`But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.
`I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes
just now.'
`Oh!' she said, kissing him mockingly. `Let's have them sautиes.' He
laughed, and sat erect.
`It's a fact!' he said. `Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But
the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good,
sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar.
Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a
dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love
fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and
mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own
self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being
together with a man.'
`But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything
to you.'
`Ay! Very well then!' he said, moving as if he wanted to rise. `Let's
keep apart then. I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking.'
She slid away from him, and he stood up.
`And do you think I want it?' she said.
`I hope you don't,' he replied. `But anyhow, you go to bed an' I'll
sleep down here.'
She looked at him. He was pale, his brows were sullen, he was as
distant in recoil as the cold pole. Men were all alike.
`I can't go home till morning,' she said.
`No! Go to bed. It's a quarter to one.'
`I certainly won't,' she said.
He went across and picked up his boots.
`Then I'll go out!' he said.
He began to put on his boots. She stared at him.
`Wait!' she faltered. `Wait! What's come between us?'
He was bent over, lacing his boot, and did not reply. The moments
passed. A dimness came over her, like a swoon. All her consciousness died,
and she stood there wide-eyed, looking at him from the unknown, knowing
nothing any more.
He looked up, because of the silence, and saw her wide-eyed and lost.
And as if a wind tossed him he got up and hobbled over to her, one shoe off
and one shoe on, and took her in his arms, pressing her against his body,
which somehow felt hurt right through. And there he held her, and there she
remained.
Till his hands reached blindly down and felt for her, and felt under
the clothing to where she was smooth and warm.
`Ma lass!' he murmured. `Ma little lass! Dunna let's light! Dunna let's
niver light! I love thee an' th' touch on thee. Dunna argue wi' me! Dunna!
Dunna! Dunna! Let's be together.'
She lifted her face and looked at him.
`Don't be upset,' she said steadily. `It's no good being upset. Do you
really want to be together with me?'
She looked with wide, steady eyes into his face. He stopped, and went
suddenly still, turning his face aside. All his body went perfectly still,
but did not withdraw.
Then he lifted his head and looked into her eyes, with his odd, faintly
mocking grin, saying: `Ay-ay! Let's be together on oath.'
`But really?' she said, her eyes filling with tears. `Ay really! Heart
an' belly an' cock.'
He still smiled faintly down at her, with the flicker of irony in his
eyes, and a touch of bitterness.
She was silently weeping, and he lay with her and went into her there
on the hearthrug, and so they gained a measure of equanimity. And then they
went quickly to bed, for it was growing chill, and they had tired each other
out. And she nestled up to him, feeling small and enfolded, and they both
went to sleep at once, fast in one sleep. And so they lay and never moved,
till the sun rose over the wood and day was beginning.
Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He
listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It
would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He
had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep
and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes,
smiling unconsciously into his face.
`Are you awake?' she said to him.
He was looking into her eyes. He smiled, and kissed her. And suddenly
she roused and sat up.
`Fancy that I am here!' she said.
She looked round the whitewashed little bedroom with its sloping
ceiling and gable window where the white curtains were closed. The room was
bare save for a little yellow-painted chest of drawers, and a chair: and the
smallish white bed in which she lay with him.
`Fancy that we are here!' she said, looking down at him. He was lying
watching her, stroking her breasts with his fingers, under the thin
nightdress. When he was warm and smoothed out, he looked young and handsome.
His eyes could look so warm. And she was fresh and young like a flower.
`I want to take this off!' she said, gathering the thin batiste
nightdress and pulling it over her head. She sat there with bare shoulders
and longish breasts faintly golden. He loved to make her breasts swing
softly, like bells.
`You must take off your pyjamas too,' she said.
`Eh, nay!'
`Yes! Yes!' she commanded.
And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the
trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as
milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly
beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.
Gold of sunshine touched the closed white curtain. She felt it wanted
to come in.
`Oh, do let's draw the curtains! The birds are singing so! Do let the
sun in,' she said.
He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin,
and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and looking
out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful
with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and
delicate and yet strong.
There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
`But you are beautiful!' she said. `So pure and fine! Come!' She held
her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
`No!' she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her
dropping breasts. `Let me see you!'
He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun
through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly
and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud
of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
`How strange!' she said slowly. `How strange he stands there! So big!
and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?'
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed.
Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of
the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid
in a little cloud.
`So proud!' she murmured, uneasy. `And so lordly! Now I know why men
are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit
terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!---' She caught her lower
lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not
change.---`Ay!' he said at last, in a little voice. `Ay ma lad! tha're theer
right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an' ta'es no
count O' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt O' me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh
well, tha're more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want
her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha
comes up smilin'.---Ax 'er then! Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, O ye
gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt,
that's what tha're after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an'
th' cunt O' lady Jane!---'
`Oh, don't tease him,' said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed
towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing
him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the
stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man
fast.
`Lie down!' he said. `Lie down! Let me come!' He was in a hurry now.
And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to
uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallos.
`And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!' she said,
taking the soft small penis in her hand. `Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his
own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must
never insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine!
And so lovely and innocent!' And she held the penis soft in her hand.
He laughed.
`Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love,' he said.
`Of course!' she said. `Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart
simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite
different!'
`That's John Thomas's hair, not mine!' he said.
`John Thomas! John Thomas!' and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that
was beginning to stir again.
`Ay!' said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. `He's got his
root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do
wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I
wouldn't have him killed.'
`No wonder men have always been afraid of him!' she said. `He's rather
terrible.'
The quiver was going through the man's body, as the stream of
consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was
helpless, as the penis in slow soft undulations filled and surged and rose
up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious
towering fashion. The woman too trembled a little as she watched.
`There! Take him then! He's thine,' said the man.
And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of
unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the
curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away
with the last, blind flush of extremity.
He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o'clock. It was
Monday morning. He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts
pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.
She had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul
washed transparent.
`You must get up, mustn't you?' he muttered.
`What time?' came her colourless voice.
`Seven-o'clock blowers a bit sin'.'
`I suppose I must.'
She was resenting as she always did, the compulsion from outside.
He sat up and looked blankly out of the window. `You do love me, don't
you?' she asked calmly. He looked down at her.
`Tha knows what tha knows. What dost ax for!' he said, a little
fretfully.
`I want you to keep me, not to let me go,' she said.
His eyes seemed full of a warm, soft darkness that could not think.
`When? Now?'
`Now in your heart. Then I want to come and live with you, always,
soon.'
He sat naked on the bed, with his head dropped, unable to think.
`Don't you want it?' she asked.
`Ay!' he said.
Then with the same eyes darkened with another flame of consciousness,
almost like sleep, he looked at her.
`Dunna ax me nowt now,' he said. `Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee
when tha lies theer. A woman's a lovely thing when 'er's deep ter fuck, and
cunt's good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an' th' shape on thee, an' th' womanness
on thee. Ah luv th' womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi' my bas an' wi' my
heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma'e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am
while I can. Tha can ax me iverything after. Now let me be, let me be!'
And softly, he laid his hand over her mound of Venus, on the soft brown
maiden-hair, and himself-sat still and naked on the bed, his face motionless
in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless, and in
the invisible flame of another consciousness, he sat with his hand on her,
and waited for the turn.
After a while, he reached for his shirt and put it on, dressed himself
swiftly in silence, looked at her once as she still lay naked and faintly
golden like a Gloire de Dijon rose on the bed, and was gone. She heard him
downstairs opening the door.
And still she lay musing, musing. It was very hard to go: to go out of
his arms. He called from the foot of the stairs: `Half past seven!' She
sighed, and got out of bed. The bare little room! Nothing in it at all but
the small chest of drawers and the smallish bed. But the board floor was
scrubbed clean. And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some
books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books
about Bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the
electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes
of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a
reader after all.
The sun fell on her naked limbs through the gable window. Outside she
saw the dog Flossie roaming round. The hazel-brake was misted with green,
and dark-green dogs-mercury under. It was a clear clean morning with birds
flying and triumphantly singing. If only she could stay! If only there
weren't the other ghastly world of smoke and iron! If only he would make her
a world.
She came downstairs, down the steep, narrow wooden stairs. Still she
would be content with this little house, if only it were in a world of its
own.
He was washed and fresh, and the fire was burning. `Will you eat
anything?' he said.
`No! Only lend me a comb.'
She followed him into the scullery, and combed her hair before the
handbreadth of mirror by the back door. Then she was ready to go.
She stood in the little front garden, looking at the dewy flowers, the
grey bed of pinks in bud already.
`I would like to have all the rest of the world disappear,' she said,
`and live with you here.'
`It won't disappear,' he said.
They went almost in silence through the lovely dewy wood. But they were
together in a world of their own.
It was bitter to her to go on to Wragby.
`I want soon to come and live with you altogether,' she said as she
left him.
He smiled, unanswering.
She got home quietly and unremarked, and went up to her room.
There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast-tray. `Father is going
to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June 17th.
You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don't want to waste time at
Wragby, it's an awful place. I shall probably stay the night at Retford with
the Colemans, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then we could
start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in Grantham. It is no use our spending
an evening with Clifford. If he hates your going, it would be no pleasure to
him.'
So! She was being pushed round on the chess-board again.
Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn't feel safe
in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and free
to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the pits, and
wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his
coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he'd got it
out. He knew he ought to find some way of using it, or converting it, so
that he needn't sell it, or needn't have the chagrin of failing to sell it.
But if he made electric power, could he sell that or use it? And to convert
into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate. To keep industry alive
there must be more industry, like a madness.
It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he
was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in the
affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her, his very
inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.
He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind
of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the
loudspeaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled on
inside him like a kind of dream.
And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with
Mrs Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone
in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of
blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she
had gone to bed, he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the
morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as
much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.
She told Connie one day: `I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford
last night.'
`And did he take the money from you?' asked Connie aghast.
`Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!'
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The
upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton's wages a hundred a year, and she
could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really
going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
`Seventeenth!' he said. `And when will you be back?'
`By the twentieth of July at the latest.'
`Yes! the twentieth of July.'
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child,
but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
`You won't let me down, now, will you?' he said.
`How?'
`While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'
`I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'
`Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to
go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home
pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him
altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
`And then when I come back,' she said, `I can tell Clifford I must
leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you.
We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
`You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.
`No! Have you?'
`I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'
`Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'
`We might!' he said slowly.
`Or don't you want to?' she asked.
`I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'
`Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about
six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't
it?'
`It's riches to me.'
`Oh, how lovely it will be!'
`But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to
have complications.'
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and
there was a thunderstorm.
`And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a
gentleman?'
`Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'
`Did you love him?'
`Yes! I loved him.'
`And did he love you?'
`Yes! In a way, he loved me.'
`Tell me about him.'
`What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army.
And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very
intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man
in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was
with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.'
`And did you mind very much when he died?'
`I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of
me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All
things do, as far as that goes.'
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being
in a little ark in the Flood.
`You seem to have such a lot behind you,' she said.
`Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am,
pegging on, and in for more trouble.'
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
`And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel
was dead?'
`No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. `The Colonel used to
say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty
times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give
them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented:
full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't
correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes
me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet
they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation
of ladylike prigs with half a ball each---'
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
`He hated them!'
`No,' said he. `He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a
difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish
and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that
way.'
`The common people too, the working people?'
`All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and
aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation
breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin
legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just
killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money,
money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old
human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve.
They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a
quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but
machine-fucking!---It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's
cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind,
and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.'
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even
then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It
made him feel so alone.
`But won't it ever come to an end?' she said.
`Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man
is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame
ones: then they'll all be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the
balls. Then they'll all be insane, and they'll make their grand ~auto da fe.
You know auto da fe means act of faith? Ay, well, they'll make their own
grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up.'
`You mean kill one another?'
`I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years'
time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be
ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. The thunder was rolling
further away.
`How nice!' she said.
`Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and
the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you
more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody,
intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all
frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their
intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical
progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye!
darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed
up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and
savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! te deum laudamus!'
Connie laughed, but not very happily.
`Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists,' she said.
`You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.'
`So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would.'
`Then why are you so bitter?'
`I'm not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don't mind.'
`But if you have a child?' she said.
He dropped his head.
`Why,' he said at last. `It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do,
to bring a child into this world.'
`No! Don't say it! Don't say it!' she pleaded. `I think I'm going to
have one. Say you'll he pleased.' She laid her hand on his.
`I'm pleased for you to be pleased,' he said. `But for me it seems a
ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.
`Ah no!' she said, shocked. `Then you can't ever really want me! You
can't want me, if you feel that!'
Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the
threshing of the rain.
`It's not quite true!' she whispered. `It's not quite true! There's
another truth.' She felt he was bitter now partly because she was leaving
him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased her.
She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his
navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly and pressed her arm round his
warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.
`Tell me you want a child, in hope!' she murmured, pressing her face
against his belly. `Tell me you do!'
`Why!' he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing
consciousness and relaxation going through his body. `Why I've thought
sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They're workin'
bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think o'
nowt but th' money. When it comes ter wants, we want but little. Let's not
live for money---'
She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her
hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up. The
rain beat bruisingly outside.
`Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for
us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to make a
bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it! Bit by bit,
let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's drop the whole
industrial life an' go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For
everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th' king. The least little
bit o' money'll really do. Just make up your mind to it, an' you've got out
o' th' mess.' He paused, then went on:
`An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he
moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's clumsy, he's
ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself I'd tell 'em: Look! look
at yourselves! one shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all
lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt
yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at
yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half
dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: appen
close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men
had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to
be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if
once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and
showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be
women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be.---An' in
time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would
hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An' not have many children,
because the world is overcrowded.
`But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at
yourselves! That's workin' for money!---Hark at yourselves! That's working
for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible.
That's because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your
girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because
you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move
nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at
yourselves!'
There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading
in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had
gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a
little icy.
`You've got four kinds of hair,' she said to him. `On your chest it's
nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is
hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little
brush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!'
He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on
his groin.
`Ay! That's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the
maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?'
She looked up at him.
`Oh, I do, terribly!' she said.
`Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by
its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The
moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see
the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men.
Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and
nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it
all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last
hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their
manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the
face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a
black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace,
an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather
doubt.'
The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly
came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of departing
storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he was really
talking to himself not to her. Despair seemed to come down on him
completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She knew her
leaving him, which he had only just realized inside himself had plunged him
back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel
curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got
up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and
underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed keen animal breasts
tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured in the greenish
light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little
laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and
running blurred in the rain with the eurhythmic dance movements she had
learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and
falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches,
swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping
again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of
homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.
He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped
out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain.
Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all
wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes
blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging
movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping
her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back
leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful
cowering female nakedness in flight.
She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked
arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened
herself and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He
pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh
that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them
till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand
and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the
rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the
roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and
sharp and finished, like an animal.
He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.
`Come in,' he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran
straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower, gathering
forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching
him fleeing away from her.
When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already
started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and
fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and
her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet
head and full, trickling, naоve haunches, she looked another creature.
He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child.
Then he rubbed himself having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing
up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet
hair.
`We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!'
he said.
She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.
`No!' she said, her eyes wide. `It's not a towel, it's a sheet.' And
she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.
Still panting with their exertions, each wrapped in an army blanket,
but the front of the body open to the fire, they sat on a log side by side
before the blaze, to get quiet. Connie hated the feel of the blanket against
her skin. But now the sheet was all wet.
She dropped her blanket and kneeled on the clay hearth, holding her
head to the fire, and shaking her hair to dry it. He watched the beautiful
curving drop of her haunches. That fascinated him today. How it sloped with
a rich down-slope to the heavy roundness of her buttocks! And in between,
folded in the secret warmth, the secret entrances!
He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves
and the globe-fullness.
`Tha's got such a nice tail on thee,' he said, in the throaty caressive
dialect. `Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest
woman's arse as is! An' ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha'rt
not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha's got a
real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It's a bottom
as could hold the world up, it is!'
All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it
seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his
finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time,
with a soft little brush of fire.
`An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as
couldna shit nor piss.'
Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he
went on unmoved.
`Tha'rt real, tha art! Tha'art real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha
shits an' here tha pisses: an' I lay my hand on 'em both an' like thee for
it. I like thee for it. Tha's got a proper, woman's arse, proud of itself.
It's none ashamed of itself this isna.'
He laid his hand close and firm over her secret places, in a kind of
close greeting.
`I like it,' he said. `I like it! An' if I only lived ten minutes, an'
stroked thy arse an' got to know it, I should reckon I'd lived one life, see
ter! Industrial system or not! Here's one o' my lifetimes.'
She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. `Kiss me!'
she whispered.
And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their
minds, and at last she was sad.
She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her
ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them.
Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the
fire-glow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point
between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her
bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.
`Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,' he said. `They have no
houses.'
`Not even a hut!' she murmured.
With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine
brown fleece of the mound of Venus.
`There!' he said. `There's forget-me-nots in the right place!'
She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown
maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.
`Doesn't it look pretty!' she said.
`Pretty as life,' he replied.
And he stuck a pink campion-bud among the hair.
`There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the
bull-rushes.'
`You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?' she asked wistfully,
looking up into his face.
But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite
blank.
`You do as you wish,' he said.
And he spoke in good English.
`But I won't go if you don't wish it,' she said, clinging to him.
There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire.
The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said
nothing.
`Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford.
I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to---,' she resumed.
`To let them think a few lies,' he said.
`Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?'
`I don't care what they think.'
`I do! I don't want them handling me with their unpleasant cold minds,
not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm
finally gone.'
He was silent.
`But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?'
`Oh, I must come back,' she said: and there was silence.
`And would you have a child in Wragby?' he asked.
She closed her arm round his neck.
`If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to,' she said.
`Take you where to?'
`Anywhere! away! But right away from Wragby.'
`When?'
`Why, when I come back.'
`But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're
once gone?' he said.
`Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully.
Besides, I come back to you, really.'
`To your husband's game-keeper?'
`I don't see that that matters,' she said.
`No?' He mused a while. `And when would you think of going away again,
then; finally? When exactly?'
`Oh, I don't know. I'd come back from Venice. And then we'd prepare
everything.'
`How prepare?'
`Oh, I'd tell Clifford. I'd have to tell him.'
`Would you!'
He remained silent. She put her arms round his neck.
`Don't make it difficult for me,' she pleaded.
`Make what difficult?'
`For me to go to Venice and arrange things.'
A little smile, half a grin, flickered on his face.
`I don't make it difficult,' he said. `I only want to find out just
what you are after. But you don't really know yourself. You want to take
time: get away and look at it. I don't blame you. I think you're wise. You
may prefer to stay mistress of Wragby. I don't blame you. I've no Wragbys to
offer. In fact, you know what you'll get out of me. No, no, I think you're
right! I really do! And I'm not keen on coming to live on you, being kept by
you. There's that too.'
She felt somehow as if he were giving her tit for tat.
`But you want me, don't you?' she asked.
`Do you want me?'
`You know I do. That's evident.'
`Quite! And when do you want me?'
`You know we can arrange it all when I come back. Now I'm out of breath
with you. I must get calm and clear.'
`Quite! Get calm and clear!'
She was a little offended.
`But you trust me, don't you?' she said.
`Oh, absolutely!'
She heard the mockery in his tone.
`Tell me then,' she said flatly; `do you think it would be better if I
don't go to Venice?'
`I'm sure it's better if you do go to Venice,' he replied in the cool,
slightly mocking voice.
`You know it's next Thursday?' she said.
`Yes!'
She now began to muse. At last she said:
`And we shall know better where we are when I come back, shan't we?'
`Oh surely!'
The curious gulf of silence between them!
`I've been to the lawyer about my divorce,' he said, a little
constrainedly.
She gave a slight shudder.
`Have you!' she said. `And what did he say?'
`He said I ought to have done it before; that may be a difficulty. But
since I was in the army, he thinks it will go through all right. If only it
doesn't bring her down on my head!'
`Will she have to know?'
`Yes! she is served with a notice: so is the man she lives with, the
co-respondent.'
`Isn't it hateful, all the performances! I suppose I'd have to go
through it with Clifford.'
There was a silence.
`And of course,' he said, `I have to live an exemplary life for the
next six or eight months. So if you go to Venice, there's temptation removed
for a week or two, at least.'
`Am I temptation!' she said, stroking his face. `I'm so glad I'm
temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you
start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We can
think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been thinking,
I must come to you for another night before I go. I must come once more to
the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?'
`Isn't that when your sister will be there?'
`Yes! But she said we would start at tea-time. So we could start at
tea-time. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you.
`But then she'd have to know.'
`Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk
it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible.'
He was thinking of her plan.
`So you'd start off from Wragby at tea-time, as if you were going to
London? Which way were you going?'
`By Nottingham and Grantham.'
`And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive
back here? Sounds very risky, to me.'
`Does it? Well, then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at
Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in the
morning. It's quite easy.'
`And the people who see you?'
`I'll wear goggles and a veil.'
He pondered for some time.
`Well,' he said. `You please yourself as usual.'
`But wouldn't it please you?'
`Oh yes! It'd please me all right,' he said a little grimly. `I might
as well smite while the iron's hot.'
`Do you know what I thought?' she said suddenly. `It suddenly came to
only wanted your own pleasure and satisfaction.'
She was protesting nervously against him.
`Nay!' he said. `I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a
woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and
satisfaction of her unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never
happened. It takes two.'
`But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in
me,' she said.
`I don't know what believing in a woman means.'
`That's it, you see!'
She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he
was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further.
`But what do you believe in?' she insisted.
`I don't know.'
`Nothing, like all the men I've ever known,' she said.
They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said:
`Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I
believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm
heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it
warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted
fucking that is death and idiocy.'
`But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.
`I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes
just now.'
`Oh!' she said, kissing him mockingly. `Let's have them sautиes.' He
laughed, and sat erect.
`It's a fact!' he said. `Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But
the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good,
sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar.
Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a
dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love
fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and
mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own
self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being
together with a man.'
`But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything
to you.'
`Ay! Very well then!' he said, moving as if he wanted to rise. `Let's
keep apart then. I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking.'
She slid away from him, and he stood up.
`And do you think I want it?' she said.
`I hope you don't,' he replied. `But anyhow, you go to bed an' I'll
sleep down here.'
She looked at him. He was pale, his brows were sullen, he was as
distant in recoil as the cold pole. Men were all alike.
`I can't go home till morning,' she said.
`No! Go to bed. It's a quarter to one.'
`I certainly won't,' she said.
He went across and picked up his boots.
`Then I'll go out!' he said.
He began to put on his boots. She stared at him.
`Wait!' she faltered. `Wait! What's come between us?'
He was bent over, lacing his boot, and did not reply. The moments
passed. A dimness came over her, like a swoon. All her consciousness died,
and she stood there wide-eyed, looking at him from the unknown, knowing
nothing any more.
He looked up, because of the silence, and saw her wide-eyed and lost.
And as if a wind tossed him he got up and hobbled over to her, one shoe off
and one shoe on, and took her in his arms, pressing her against his body,
which somehow felt hurt right through. And there he held her, and there she
remained.
Till his hands reached blindly down and felt for her, and felt under
the clothing to where she was smooth and warm.
`Ma lass!' he murmured. `Ma little lass! Dunna let's light! Dunna let's
niver light! I love thee an' th' touch on thee. Dunna argue wi' me! Dunna!
Dunna! Dunna! Let's be together.'
She lifted her face and looked at him.
`Don't be upset,' she said steadily. `It's no good being upset. Do you
really want to be together with me?'
She looked with wide, steady eyes into his face. He stopped, and went
suddenly still, turning his face aside. All his body went perfectly still,
but did not withdraw.
Then he lifted his head and looked into her eyes, with his odd, faintly
mocking grin, saying: `Ay-ay! Let's be together on oath.'
`But really?' she said, her eyes filling with tears. `Ay really! Heart
an' belly an' cock.'
He still smiled faintly down at her, with the flicker of irony in his
eyes, and a touch of bitterness.
She was silently weeping, and he lay with her and went into her there
on the hearthrug, and so they gained a measure of equanimity. And then they
went quickly to bed, for it was growing chill, and they had tired each other
out. And she nestled up to him, feeling small and enfolded, and they both
went to sleep at once, fast in one sleep. And so they lay and never moved,
till the sun rose over the wood and day was beginning.
Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He
listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It
would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He
had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep
and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes,
smiling unconsciously into his face.
`Are you awake?' she said to him.
He was looking into her eyes. He smiled, and kissed her. And suddenly
she roused and sat up.
`Fancy that I am here!' she said.
She looked round the whitewashed little bedroom with its sloping
ceiling and gable window where the white curtains were closed. The room was
bare save for a little yellow-painted chest of drawers, and a chair: and the
smallish white bed in which she lay with him.
`Fancy that we are here!' she said, looking down at him. He was lying
watching her, stroking her breasts with his fingers, under the thin
nightdress. When he was warm and smoothed out, he looked young and handsome.
His eyes could look so warm. And she was fresh and young like a flower.
`I want to take this off!' she said, gathering the thin batiste
nightdress and pulling it over her head. She sat there with bare shoulders
and longish breasts faintly golden. He loved to make her breasts swing
softly, like bells.
`You must take off your pyjamas too,' she said.
`Eh, nay!'
`Yes! Yes!' she commanded.
And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the
trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as
milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly
beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.
Gold of sunshine touched the closed white curtain. She felt it wanted
to come in.
`Oh, do let's draw the curtains! The birds are singing so! Do let the
sun in,' she said.
He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin,
and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and looking
out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful
with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and
delicate and yet strong.
There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
`But you are beautiful!' she said. `So pure and fine! Come!' She held
her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
`No!' she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her
dropping breasts. `Let me see you!'
He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun
through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly
and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud
of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
`How strange!' she said slowly. `How strange he stands there! So big!
and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?'
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed.
Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of
the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid
in a little cloud.
`So proud!' she murmured, uneasy. `And so lordly! Now I know why men
are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit
terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!---' She caught her lower
lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not
change.---`Ay!' he said at last, in a little voice. `Ay ma lad! tha're theer
right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an' ta'es no
count O' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt O' me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh
well, tha're more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want
her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha
comes up smilin'.---Ax 'er then! Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, O ye
gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt,
that's what tha're after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an'
th' cunt O' lady Jane!---'
`Oh, don't tease him,' said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed
towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing
him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the
stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man
fast.
`Lie down!' he said. `Lie down! Let me come!' He was in a hurry now.
And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to
uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallos.
`And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!' she said,
taking the soft small penis in her hand. `Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his
own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must
never insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine!
And so lovely and innocent!' And she held the penis soft in her hand.
He laughed.
`Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love,' he said.
`Of course!' she said. `Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart
simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite
different!'
`That's John Thomas's hair, not mine!' he said.
`John Thomas! John Thomas!' and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that
was beginning to stir again.
`Ay!' said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. `He's got his
root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do
wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I
wouldn't have him killed.'
`No wonder men have always been afraid of him!' she said. `He's rather
terrible.'
The quiver was going through the man's body, as the stream of
consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was
helpless, as the penis in slow soft undulations filled and surged and rose
up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious
towering fashion. The woman too trembled a little as she watched.
`There! Take him then! He's thine,' said the man.
And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of
unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the
curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away
with the last, blind flush of extremity.
He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o'clock. It was
Monday morning. He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts
pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.
She had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul
washed transparent.
`You must get up, mustn't you?' he muttered.
`What time?' came her colourless voice.
`Seven-o'clock blowers a bit sin'.'
`I suppose I must.'
She was resenting as she always did, the compulsion from outside.
He sat up and looked blankly out of the window. `You do love me, don't
you?' she asked calmly. He looked down at her.
`Tha knows what tha knows. What dost ax for!' he said, a little
fretfully.
`I want you to keep me, not to let me go,' she said.
His eyes seemed full of a warm, soft darkness that could not think.
`When? Now?'
`Now in your heart. Then I want to come and live with you, always,
soon.'
He sat naked on the bed, with his head dropped, unable to think.
`Don't you want it?' she asked.
`Ay!' he said.
Then with the same eyes darkened with another flame of consciousness,
almost like sleep, he looked at her.
`Dunna ax me nowt now,' he said. `Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee
when tha lies theer. A woman's a lovely thing when 'er's deep ter fuck, and
cunt's good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an' th' shape on thee, an' th' womanness
on thee. Ah luv th' womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi' my bas an' wi' my
heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma'e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am
while I can. Tha can ax me iverything after. Now let me be, let me be!'
And softly, he laid his hand over her mound of Venus, on the soft brown
maiden-hair, and himself-sat still and naked on the bed, his face motionless
in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless, and in
the invisible flame of another consciousness, he sat with his hand on her,
and waited for the turn.
After a while, he reached for his shirt and put it on, dressed himself
swiftly in silence, looked at her once as she still lay naked and faintly
golden like a Gloire de Dijon rose on the bed, and was gone. She heard him
downstairs opening the door.
And still she lay musing, musing. It was very hard to go: to go out of
his arms. He called from the foot of the stairs: `Half past seven!' She
sighed, and got out of bed. The bare little room! Nothing in it at all but
the small chest of drawers and the smallish bed. But the board floor was
scrubbed clean. And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some
books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books
about Bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the
electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes
of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a
reader after all.
The sun fell on her naked limbs through the gable window. Outside she
saw the dog Flossie roaming round. The hazel-brake was misted with green,
and dark-green dogs-mercury under. It was a clear clean morning with birds
flying and triumphantly singing. If only she could stay! If only there
weren't the other ghastly world of smoke and iron! If only he would make her
a world.
She came downstairs, down the steep, narrow wooden stairs. Still she
would be content with this little house, if only it were in a world of its
own.
He was washed and fresh, and the fire was burning. `Will you eat
anything?' he said.
`No! Only lend me a comb.'
She followed him into the scullery, and combed her hair before the
handbreadth of mirror by the back door. Then she was ready to go.
She stood in the little front garden, looking at the dewy flowers, the
grey bed of pinks in bud already.
`I would like to have all the rest of the world disappear,' she said,
`and live with you here.'
`It won't disappear,' he said.
They went almost in silence through the lovely dewy wood. But they were
together in a world of their own.
It was bitter to her to go on to Wragby.
`I want soon to come and live with you altogether,' she said as she
left him.
He smiled, unanswering.
She got home quietly and unremarked, and went up to her room.
There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast-tray. `Father is going
to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June 17th.
You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don't want to waste time at
Wragby, it's an awful place. I shall probably stay the night at Retford with
the Colemans, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then we could
start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in Grantham. It is no use our spending
an evening with Clifford. If he hates your going, it would be no pleasure to
him.'
So! She was being pushed round on the chess-board again.
Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn't feel safe
in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and free
to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the pits, and
wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his
coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he'd got it
out. He knew he ought to find some way of using it, or converting it, so
that he needn't sell it, or needn't have the chagrin of failing to sell it.
But if he made electric power, could he sell that or use it? And to convert
into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate. To keep industry alive
there must be more industry, like a madness.
It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he
was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in the
affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her, his very
inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.
He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind
of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the
loudspeaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled on
inside him like a kind of dream.
And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with
Mrs Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone
in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of
blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she
had gone to bed, he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the
morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as
much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.
She told Connie one day: `I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford
last night.'
`And did he take the money from you?' asked Connie aghast.
`Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!'
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The
upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton's wages a hundred a year, and she
could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really
going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
`Seventeenth!' he said. `And when will you be back?'
`By the twentieth of July at the latest.'
`Yes! the twentieth of July.'
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child,
but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
`You won't let me down, now, will you?' he said.
`How?'
`While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'
`I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'
`Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to
go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home
pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him
altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
`And then when I come back,' she said, `I can tell Clifford I must
leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you.
We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
`You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.
`No! Have you?'
`I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'
`Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'
`We might!' he said slowly.
`Or don't you want to?' she asked.
`I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'
`Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about
six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't
it?'
`It's riches to me.'
`Oh, how lovely it will be!'
`But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to
have complications.'
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and
there was a thunderstorm.
`And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a
gentleman?'
`Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'
`Did you love him?'
`Yes! I loved him.'
`And did he love you?'
`Yes! In a way, he loved me.'
`Tell me about him.'
`What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army.
And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very
intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man
in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was
with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.'
`And did you mind very much when he died?'
`I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of
me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All
things do, as far as that goes.'
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being
in a little ark in the Flood.
`You seem to have such a lot behind you,' she said.
`Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am,
pegging on, and in for more trouble.'
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
`And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel
was dead?'
`No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. `The Colonel used to
say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty
times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give
them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented:
full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't
correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes
me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet
they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation
of ladylike prigs with half a ball each---'
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
`He hated them!'
`No,' said he. `He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a
difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish
and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that
way.'
`The common people too, the working people?'
`All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and
aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation
breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin
legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just
killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money,
money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old
human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve.
They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a
quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but
machine-fucking!---It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's
cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind,
and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.'
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even
then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It
made him feel so alone.
`But won't it ever come to an end?' she said.
`Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man
is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame
ones: then they'll all be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the
balls. Then they'll all be insane, and they'll make their grand ~auto da fe.
You know auto da fe means act of faith? Ay, well, they'll make their own
grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up.'
`You mean kill one another?'
`I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years'
time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be
ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. The thunder was rolling
further away.
`How nice!' she said.
`Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and
the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you
more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody,
intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all
frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their
intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical
progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye!
darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed
up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and
savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! te deum laudamus!'
Connie laughed, but not very happily.
`Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists,' she said.
`You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end.'
`So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would.'
`Then why are you so bitter?'
`I'm not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don't mind.'
`But if you have a child?' she said.
He dropped his head.
`Why,' he said at last. `It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do,
to bring a child into this world.'
`No! Don't say it! Don't say it!' she pleaded. `I think I'm going to
have one. Say you'll he pleased.' She laid her hand on his.
`I'm pleased for you to be pleased,' he said. `But for me it seems a
ghastly treachery to the unborn creature.
`Ah no!' she said, shocked. `Then you can't ever really want me! You
can't want me, if you feel that!'
Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the
threshing of the rain.
`It's not quite true!' she whispered. `It's not quite true! There's
another truth.' She felt he was bitter now partly because she was leaving
him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased her.
She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his
navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly and pressed her arm round his
warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.
`Tell me you want a child, in hope!' she murmured, pressing her face
against his belly. `Tell me you do!'
`Why!' he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing
consciousness and relaxation going through his body. `Why I've thought
sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They're workin'
bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think o'
nowt but th' money. When it comes ter wants, we want but little. Let's not
live for money---'
She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her
hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up. The
rain beat bruisingly outside.
`Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for
us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to make a
bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it! Bit by bit,
let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's drop the whole
industrial life an' go back. The least little bit o' money'll do. For
everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th' king. The least little
bit o' money'll really do. Just make up your mind to it, an' you've got out
o' th' mess.' He paused, then went on:
`An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he
moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's clumsy, he's
ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself I'd tell 'em: Look! look
at yourselves! one shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all
lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work? Spoilt
yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an' look at
yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half
dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: appen
close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men
had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to
be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if
once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and
showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be
women. It's because th' men aren't men, that th' women have to be.---An' in
time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful buildings, that would
hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An' not have many children,
because the world is overcrowded.
`But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at
yourselves! That's workin' for money!---Hark at yourselves! That's working
for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It's horrible.
That's because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your
girls! They don't care about you, you don't care about them. It's because
you've spent your time working an' caring for money. You can't talk nor move
nor live, you can't properly be with a woman. You're not alive. Look at
yourselves!'
There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading
in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had
gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a
little icy.
`You've got four kinds of hair,' she said to him. `On your chest it's
nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is
hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little
brush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!'
He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on
his groin.
`Ay! That's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the
maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?'
She looked up at him.
`Oh, I do, terribly!' she said.
`Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by
its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The
moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see
the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men.
Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and
nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it
all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last
hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their
manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the
face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a
black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace,
an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather
doubt.'
The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly
came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of departing
storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he was really
talking to himself not to her. Despair seemed to come down on him
completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She knew her
leaving him, which he had only just realized inside himself had plunged him
back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel
curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got
up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and
underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed keen animal breasts
tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured in the greenish
light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little
laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and
running blurred in the rain with the eurhythmic dance movements she had
learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and
falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches,
swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping
again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of
homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.
He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped
out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain.
Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all
wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes
blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging
movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping
her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back
leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful
cowering female nakedness in flight.
She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked
arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened
herself and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He
pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh
that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them
till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand
and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the
rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the
roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and
sharp and finished, like an animal.
He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.
`Come in,' he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran
straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower, gathering
forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching
him fleeing away from her.
When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already
started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and
fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and
her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet
head and full, trickling, naоve haunches, she looked another creature.
He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child.
Then he rubbed himself having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing
up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet
hair.
`We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!'
he said.
She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.
`No!' she said, her eyes wide. `It's not a towel, it's a sheet.' And
she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.
Still panting with their exertions, each wrapped in an army blanket,
but the front of the body open to the fire, they sat on a log side by side
before the blaze, to get quiet. Connie hated the feel of the blanket against
her skin. But now the sheet was all wet.
She dropped her blanket and kneeled on the clay hearth, holding her
head to the fire, and shaking her hair to dry it. He watched the beautiful
curving drop of her haunches. That fascinated him today. How it sloped with
a rich down-slope to the heavy roundness of her buttocks! And in between,
folded in the secret warmth, the secret entrances!
He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves
and the globe-fullness.
`Tha's got such a nice tail on thee,' he said, in the throaty caressive
dialect. `Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest
woman's arse as is! An' ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha'rt
not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha's got a
real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It's a bottom
as could hold the world up, it is!'
All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it
seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his
finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time,
with a soft little brush of fire.
`An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as
couldna shit nor piss.'
Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he
went on unmoved.
`Tha'rt real, tha art! Tha'art real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha
shits an' here tha pisses: an' I lay my hand on 'em both an' like thee for
it. I like thee for it. Tha's got a proper, woman's arse, proud of itself.
It's none ashamed of itself this isna.'
He laid his hand close and firm over her secret places, in a kind of
close greeting.
`I like it,' he said. `I like it! An' if I only lived ten minutes, an'
stroked thy arse an' got to know it, I should reckon I'd lived one life, see
ter! Industrial system or not! Here's one o' my lifetimes.'
She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. `Kiss me!'
she whispered.
And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their
minds, and at last she was sad.
She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her
ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them.
Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the
fire-glow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point
between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her
bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.
`Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,' he said. `They have no
houses.'
`Not even a hut!' she murmured.
With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine
brown fleece of the mound of Venus.
`There!' he said. `There's forget-me-nots in the right place!'
She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown
maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.
`Doesn't it look pretty!' she said.
`Pretty as life,' he replied.
And he stuck a pink campion-bud among the hair.
`There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the
bull-rushes.'
`You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?' she asked wistfully,
looking up into his face.
But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite
blank.
`You do as you wish,' he said.
And he spoke in good English.
`But I won't go if you don't wish it,' she said, clinging to him.
There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire.
The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said
nothing.
`Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford.
I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to---,' she resumed.
`To let them think a few lies,' he said.
`Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?'
`I don't care what they think.'
`I do! I don't want them handling me with their unpleasant cold minds,
not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm
finally gone.'
He was silent.
`But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?'
`Oh, I must come back,' she said: and there was silence.
`And would you have a child in Wragby?' he asked.
She closed her arm round his neck.
`If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to,' she said.
`Take you where to?'
`Anywhere! away! But right away from Wragby.'
`When?'
`Why, when I come back.'
`But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're
once gone?' he said.
`Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully.
Besides, I come back to you, really.'
`To your husband's game-keeper?'
`I don't see that that matters,' she said.
`No?' He mused a while. `And when would you think of going away again,
then; finally? When exactly?'
`Oh, I don't know. I'd come back from Venice. And then we'd prepare
everything.'
`How prepare?'
`Oh, I'd tell Clifford. I'd have to tell him.'
`Would you!'
He remained silent. She put her arms round his neck.
`Don't make it difficult for me,' she pleaded.
`Make what difficult?'
`For me to go to Venice and arrange things.'
A little smile, half a grin, flickered on his face.
`I don't make it difficult,' he said. `I only want to find out just
what you are after. But you don't really know yourself. You want to take
time: get away and look at it. I don't blame you. I think you're wise. You
may prefer to stay mistress of Wragby. I don't blame you. I've no Wragbys to
offer. In fact, you know what you'll get out of me. No, no, I think you're
right! I really do! And I'm not keen on coming to live on you, being kept by
you. There's that too.'
She felt somehow as if he were giving her tit for tat.
`But you want me, don't you?' she asked.
`Do you want me?'
`You know I do. That's evident.'
`Quite! And when do you want me?'
`You know we can arrange it all when I come back. Now I'm out of breath
with you. I must get calm and clear.'
`Quite! Get calm and clear!'
She was a little offended.
`But you trust me, don't you?' she said.
`Oh, absolutely!'
She heard the mockery in his tone.
`Tell me then,' she said flatly; `do you think it would be better if I
don't go to Venice?'
`I'm sure it's better if you do go to Venice,' he replied in the cool,
slightly mocking voice.
`You know it's next Thursday?' she said.
`Yes!'
She now began to muse. At last she said:
`And we shall know better where we are when I come back, shan't we?'
`Oh surely!'
The curious gulf of silence between them!
`I've been to the lawyer about my divorce,' he said, a little
constrainedly.
She gave a slight shudder.
`Have you!' she said. `And what did he say?'
`He said I ought to have done it before; that may be a difficulty. But
since I was in the army, he thinks it will go through all right. If only it
doesn't bring her down on my head!'
`Will she have to know?'
`Yes! she is served with a notice: so is the man she lives with, the
co-respondent.'
`Isn't it hateful, all the performances! I suppose I'd have to go
through it with Clifford.'
There was a silence.
`And of course,' he said, `I have to live an exemplary life for the
next six or eight months. So if you go to Venice, there's temptation removed
for a week or two, at least.'
`Am I temptation!' she said, stroking his face. `I'm so glad I'm
temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you
start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We can
think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been thinking,
I must come to you for another night before I go. I must come once more to
the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?'
`Isn't that when your sister will be there?'
`Yes! But she said we would start at tea-time. So we could start at
tea-time. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you.
`But then she'd have to know.'
`Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk
it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible.'
He was thinking of her plan.
`So you'd start off from Wragby at tea-time, as if you were going to
London? Which way were you going?'
`By Nottingham and Grantham.'
`And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive
back here? Sounds very risky, to me.'
`Does it? Well, then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at
Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in the
morning. It's quite easy.'
`And the people who see you?'
`I'll wear goggles and a veil.'
He pondered for some time.
`Well,' he said. `You please yourself as usual.'
`But wouldn't it please you?'
`Oh yes! It'd please me all right,' he said a little grimly. `I might
as well smite while the iron's hot.'
`Do you know what I thought?' she said suddenly. `It suddenly came to