could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her!
And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!
She knew now. At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this
phallic hunting Out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that
she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her
last and final nakedness, she was shameless.
What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted
sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming,
rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin
or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel
ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like
Clifford! Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating.
The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it,
really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his
mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer
fiery sensuality, not messiness.
Ah, God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and
sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed!
She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in
the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.
Till his rousing waked her completely. He was sitting up in bed,
looking down at her. She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate
knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to
her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how voluptuous and lovely
it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.
`Is it time to wake up?' she said.
`Half past six.'
She had to be at the lane-end at eight. Always, always, always this
compulsion on one!
`I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?' he said.
`Oh yes!'
Flossie whimpered gently below. He got up and threw off his pyjamas,
and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and
full of life, how beautiful it is! So she thought, as she watched him in
silence.
`Draw the curtain, will you?'
The sun was shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and
the wood stood bluey-fresh, in the nearness. She sat up in bed, looking
dreamily out through the dormer window, her naked arms pushing her naked
breasts together. He was dressing himself. She was half-dreaming of life, a
life together with him: just a life.
He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.
`Have I lost my nightie altogether?' she said.
He pushed his hand down in the bed, and pulled out the bit of flimsy
silk.
`I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,' he said.
But the night-dress was slit almost in two.
`Never mind!' she said. `It belongs here, really. I'll leave it.'
`Ay, leave it, I can put it between my legs at night, for company.
There's no name nor mark on it, is there?'
She slipped on the torn thing, and sat dreamily looking out of the
window. The window was Open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of
birds. Birds flew continuously past. Then she saw Flossie roaming out. It
was morning.
Downstairs she heard him making the fire, pumping water, going out at
the back door. By and by came the smell of bacon, and at length he came
upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He
set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn
nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his
plate on his knees.
`How good it is!' she said. `How nice to have breakfast together.'
He ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That
made her remember.
`Oh, how I wish I could stay here with you, and Wragby were a million
miles away! It's Wragby I'm going away from really. You know that, don't
you?'
`Ay!'
`And you promise we will live together and have a life together, you
and me! You promise me, don't you?'
`Ay! When we can.'
`Yes! And we will! we will, won't we?' she leaned over, making the tea
spill, catching his wrist.
`Ay!' he said, tidying up the tea.
`We can't possibly not live together now, can we?' she said
appealingly.
He looked up at her with his flickering grin.
`No!' he said. `Only you've got to start in twenty-five minutes.'
`Have I?' she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and rose to
his feet.
Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.
Silent, he put his plate on the tray and went downstairs. Constance
heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.
`Morning, Mr Mellors! Registered letter!'
`Oh ay! Got a pencil?'
`Here y'are!'
There was a pause.
`Canada!' said the stranger's voice.
`Ay! That's a mate o' mine out there in British Columbia. Dunno what
he's got to register.'
`'Appen sent y'a fortune, like.'
`More like wants summat.'
Pause.
`Well! Lovely day again!'
`Ay!'
`Morning!'
`Morning!'
After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.
`Postman,' he said.
`Very early!' she replied.
`Rural round; he's mostly here by seven, when he does come.
`Did your mate send you a fortune?'
`No! Only some photographs and papers about a place out there in
British Columbia.'
`Would you go there?'
`I thought perhaps we might.'
`Oh yes! I believe it's lovely!' But he was put out by the postman's
coming.
`Them damn bikes, they're on you afore you know where you are. I hope
he twigged nothing.'
`After all, what could he twig!'
`You must get up now, and get ready. I'm just goin' ter look round
outside.'
She saw him go reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went
downstairs and washed, and was ready by the time he came back, with the few
things in the little silk bag.
He locked up, and they set off, but through the wood, not down the
lane. He was being wary.
`Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him.
`Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather
short.
They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.
`And we will live together and make a life together, won't we?' she
pleaded.
`Ay!' he replied, striding on without looking round. `When t' time
comes! Just now you're off to Venice or somewhere.'
She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!
At last he stopped.
`I'll just strike across here,' he said, pointing to the right.
But she flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him.
`But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?' she whispered. `I
loved last night. But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?'
He kissed her and held her close for a moment. Then he sighed, and
kissed her again.
`I must go an' look if th' car's there.'
He strode over the low brambles and bracken, leaving a trail through
the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back.
`Car's not there yet,' he said. `But there's the baker's cart on t'
road.'
He seemed anxious and troubled.
`Hark!'
They heard a car softly hoot as it came nearer. It slowed up on the
bridge.
She plunged with utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and
came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her.
`Here! Go through there!' he said, pointing to a gap. `I shan't come
out.
She looked at him in despair. But he kissed her and made her go. She
crept in sheer misery through the holly and through the wooden fence,
stumbled down the little ditch and up into the lane, where Hilda was just
getting out of the car in vexation.
`Why you're there!' said Hilda. `Where's he?'
`He's not coming.'
Connie's face was running with tears as she got into the car with her
little bag. Hilda snatched up the motoring helmet with the disfiguring
goggles.
`Put it on!' she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long
motoring coat, and she sat down, a goggling inhuman, unrecognizable
creature. Hilda started the car with a businesslike motion. They heaved out
of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there
was no sight of him. Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting had
come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death.
`Thank goodness you'll be away from him for some time!' said Hilda,
turning to avoid Crosshill village.
`You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing
London, `you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and
if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'
`For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. `I've
never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving
himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their
self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any
man's little petsy-wetsy, nor his chair ю plaisir either. I wanted a
complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.
Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant
revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his
revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that
weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!
`I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with
everybody,' she said to her sister.
`I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.
`But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of
yourself.'
Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard of
insolence from that chit Connie.
`At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the
somebody else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in crude
anger.
`You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.
She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now,
though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the
dominion of other women. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given
another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other
women. How awful they were, women!
She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always
been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm
was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening, and they
liked going with him.
He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the
new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in
Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays away
from her as possible: just as with his first wife.
Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had
stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of a
healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured
selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality, it
seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit straight thighs.
Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because in his
strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power
of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which never dies,
once it is there.
Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to
her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live,
alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs in
black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff, or
well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either sensuality or
tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness that pranced
around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They were all daunted,
daunted out of existence.
But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females!
really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs! or
the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life!
Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!
But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and
blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking
they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's blind craving for
happiness, to be assured of happiness.
In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a
weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness. Oh!
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical
sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of
resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently
Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical
jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these flбneurs, the oglers, these
eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary, worn-out for lack of a
little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming women
knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they had that pull over
their jigging English sisters. But they knew even less of tenderness. Dry,
with the endless dry tension of will, they too were wearing out. The human
world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would turn fiercely destructive.
A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his conservative anarchy! Perhaps it
wouldn't be conservative much longer. Perhaps it would develop into a very
radical anarchy.
Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she
was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the
Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and English,
strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English that
are so hopeless abroad.
She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was
going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the Dolomites
down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving and being
mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.
And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself:
Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that I
don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't. It's rather
awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake of Lucerne
without ever noticing that there were even mountain and green water. I just
don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare at it? Why should
one? I refuse to.
No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or
Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real than
Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care if she
never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep. Wragby was more
real.
As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference. They
all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted
to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor
mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed and
squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people
mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?
No! said Connie to herself I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go
about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any
sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly
humiliating: it's such a failure.
She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor
crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot,
anyhow.
But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other
man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go,
or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people
and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh `enjoying oneself'! Another modern form
of sickness.
They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer
over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon
rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the
water, look dim.
At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the
address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very
good-looking, not at all impressive.
`Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier
for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'
He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain
exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible,
slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the
washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong, odour of
sewage.
But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either
side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right-angles to the Grand
Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above,
behind them.
`Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked,
rowing easy, and `wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue
handkerchief.
`Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her
curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.
`Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he
asked: `Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they
will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'
Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have
one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.
`What is there at the Villa? what boats?'
`There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But---' The but meant: they
won't be your property.
`How much do you charge?'
It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.
`Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.
`Less, Signora, less. The regular price---'
The sisters considered.
`Well,' said Hilda, `come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it.
What is your name?'
His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should
come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no card.
Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his hot,
southern blue eyes, then glanced again.
`Ah!' he said, lighting up. `Milady! Milady, isn't it?'
`Milady Costanza!' said Connie.
He nodded, repeating: `Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully
away in his blouse.
The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon
looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant, with
the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with dark
trees, walled in from the lagoon.
Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good
fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his
ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind of
person with no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate
her husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with
the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was now
more manageable.
The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters,
there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two daughters; a
young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince, and a youngish
English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being chaplain to Sir
Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was penniless, good-looking,
would make an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and basta!
The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere. The clergyman
was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily he had left his wife
and two children at home. And the Guthries, the family of four, were good
solid Edinburgh middle class, enjoying everything in a solid fashion, and
daring everything while risking nothing.
Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more
or less their own sort, substantial, hut boring: and the girls wanted
husbands. The chaplain was not a had fellow, but too deferential. Sir
Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his joviality,
but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young women.
Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of it, poor thing,
and who watched every other woman with a cold watchfulness that had become
her second nature, and who said cold, nasty little things which showed what
an utterly low opinion she had of all human nature. She was also quite
venomously overbearing with the servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way.
And she skilfully behaved so that Sir Alexander should think that he was
lord and monarch of the whole caboosh, with his stout, would-be-genial
paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.
Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian
lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the
morning he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his `site'. A little later,
Lady Cooper would he rowed off into the heart of the city, with
sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate watercolour painter, and
the house was full of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges,
medieval facades, and so on. A little later the Guthries, the prince, the
countess, Sir Alexander, and sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would go off
to the Lido, where they would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half
past one.
The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this did
not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father took them
to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He took them to all
the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with them on warm evenings
in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he took them to the theatre,
to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fйtes, there were dances.
This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of
sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of
seals come up for mating. Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and
trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches,
too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too
many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too
much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too
many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls:
too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment!
Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens
of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up like a
bad penny. `Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream or
something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis almost
sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of the mass of
human flesh.
It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all
the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in
hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm
nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what
they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a
drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment!
Enjoyment!
Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women,
speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the women.
How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she getting out of
it?---The men were like great dogs in white flannel trousers, waiting to be
patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster some woman's stomach against
their own, in jazz.
Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the
stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from the
visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could break
loose and ignore `the creature'. He had been merely made use of. Poor Connie
was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she simply couldn't plaster
her stomach against some `creature's' stomach. She hated the conglomerate
mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there was hardly enough water to wet
them all. She disliked Sir Alexander and Lady Cooper. She did not want
Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.
The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across
the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could bathe
quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.
Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long
way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice:
affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians are
not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often
affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted
to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute
himself to them, if they wanted hint: he secretly hoped they would want him.
They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very handy, as
he was just going to be married. He told them about his marriage, and they
were suitably interested.
He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably
meant business: business being l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help him,
for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two ladies, two
mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was justly proud of
them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and gave him orders, he
rather hoped it would be the young milady who would select hint for l'amore.
She would give more money too.
The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier,
so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola man,
a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from the
islands.
Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of
little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a little
like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive, loquacious,
and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with a strength and
ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were ladies, remote from
him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.
He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and
rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a man as
Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the
easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those sweet
Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like in
the back of that labyrinth of a town.
Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes
man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog,
wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!
Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water.
Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness!
Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.
Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He did
not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He was a
little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather doggy
Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus refused
the devil's money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker, master of the
whole situation.
Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind
of stupor, to lind letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He wrote
very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for this
reason Connie found them not very interesting.
She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping
saltiness of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but
health, health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she was
lulled away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was pregnant. She
knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and sea-bathing and
lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away, away in a gondola,
was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another fullness of health,
satisfying and stupefying.
She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten
days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and the
fullness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was in a sort
of stupor of well-being.
From which a letter of Clifford roused her.
We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife
of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself
unwelcome. He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it, however,
that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer fair lady firmly
established in his bed, in puris naturalibus; or one should say, in impuris
naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable to evict
the somewhat man-handled Venus from his couch, he beat a retreat and
retired, it is said, to his mother's house in Tevershall. Meanwhile the
Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims is her
home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.
I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I
had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our ibis,
our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have repeated it had
she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the wood if that woman's
going to be about!
I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white
hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains. But
I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality. However, it suits
his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows
older. Only youth has a taste of immortality---
This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied ell being with
vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she ad got to be bothered by that
beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter from
Mellors. They had agreed not to write at all, but now she wanted to hear
from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child that was
coming. Let him write!
But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low
people were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence,
compared to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a clear
sky was almost the most important thing in life.
She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote
to Mrs Bolton for exact information.
Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa
Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola, and
he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet, almost
taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.
She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:
You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford.
He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful. Of
course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is a dull
house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence among us once
more.
About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems
his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her sitting
on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was come back to
him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his legal wife, and he
wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have anything to do with her,
and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not go in himself; he went back
into the wood without ever opening the door.
But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he
went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without a rag
on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he must take
her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His mother told me
about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd die rather than ever
live with her again, so he took his things and went straight to his mother's
on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night and went to the wood next day
through the park, never going near the cottage. It seems he never saw his
wife that day. But the day after she was at her brother Pan's at Beggarlee,
swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd beers
having women at the cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his
drawer, and gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know
what all. Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking
in Mr Mellors' bedroom early one morning, and a motor-car had been in the
lane.
Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through the
park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was no end of
talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and fetched
away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the handle of the
pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back to Stacks Gate she
went and lodged with that Mrs Swain at Beggarlee, because her brother Dan's
wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going to old Mrs Mellors' house, to
catch him, and she began swearing he'd got in bed with her in the cottage
and she went to a lawyer to make him pay her an allowance. She's grown
heavy, and more common than ever, and as strong as a bull. And she goes
about saying the most awful things about him, how he has women at the
cottage, and how he behaved to her when they were married, the low, beastly
things he did to her, and I don't know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the
mischief a woman can do, once she starts talking. And no matter how low she
may be, there'll be some as will believe her, and some of the dirt will
stick. I'm sure the way she makes out that Mr Mellors was one of those low,
beastly men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to
believe things against anybody, especially things like that. She declared
she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if he was
so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But of course
she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older than he is. And
these common, violent women always go partly insane whets the change of life
comes upon them---
This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming in
for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for not
having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married her.
Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the last
night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all that
sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting. It
would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps
really common, really low.
She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the
Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she now
dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the keeper.
How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt a craving for
utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening respectability of
the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair, how unspeakably
humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and its unclean bite. She
almost wished she could get rid of the child again, and be quite clear. In
short, she fell into a state of funk.
As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able
to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the
drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty's
Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted him to
remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they were Hilda's.
She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say
she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and told
Forbes the history of the man.
`Oh,' said Forbes, `you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled
the man down and done him its. If he has refused to creep up into the middle
classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up for his own
sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't let you be,
straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you like. In fact the
more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But if you believe in your
own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one
insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and
they'll kill you before they'll let you have it. You'll see, they'll hound
that man down. And what's he done, after all? If he's made love to his wife
all ends on, hasn't he a right to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see,
even a low bitch like that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the
mob against sex, to pull him down. You have a snivel and feel sinful or
awful about your sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound
the poor devil down.'
Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done,
after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite
pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural
sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
No no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with
tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it
were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his
voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his
hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places,
like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little
flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh, no! I mustn't go back on
it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him,
through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it me. And I
won't go back on it.
She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note
to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to him:
I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is
making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will
all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and I
do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is
only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days'
time, and I do hope everything will be all right.
A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.
I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the
sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby
misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of
sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So
please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing
you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.
I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer
specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures human
beings are. Some of them might Just as well have a hundred legs, like a
centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has
been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent. One
doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is oneself.
The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball.
Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb,
seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives.
All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as
if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.
She is preoccupied with tie Mellors scandal, and if I will let her
begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which even
then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is against the
wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts. I have been to
the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this world, and when,
released from the current of gossip, I slowly rise to the surface again, I
look at the daylight its wonder that it ever should be.
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the
surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees
are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding
ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping
through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of
the ether, where there is true air. I am convinced that the air we normally
breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the
light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It is our
mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life of our
fellow-men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal destiny is
to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again into the bright
ether, bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into real light. Then one
realizes one's eternal nature.
When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to the
depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal appetite
makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of the dense into
the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can tell the whole
process. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward plunge, down,
horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.
I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the
truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and greater
dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously enough,
the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers' wives behind her,
gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.
I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house,
having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own
daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but
the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly,
and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her
reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed
grandmother.
The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has
aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually
buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married
couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a
weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter
being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always
had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use
his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, `in the Italian way', well that is a
And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!
She knew now. At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this
phallic hunting Out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that
she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her
last and final nakedness, she was shameless.
What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted
sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming,
rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin
or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel
ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like
Clifford! Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating.
The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it,
really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his
mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer
fiery sensuality, not messiness.
Ah, God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and
sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed!
She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in
the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.
Till his rousing waked her completely. He was sitting up in bed,
looking down at her. She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate
knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to
her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how voluptuous and lovely
it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.
`Is it time to wake up?' she said.
`Half past six.'
She had to be at the lane-end at eight. Always, always, always this
compulsion on one!
`I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?' he said.
`Oh yes!'
Flossie whimpered gently below. He got up and threw off his pyjamas,
and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and
full of life, how beautiful it is! So she thought, as she watched him in
silence.
`Draw the curtain, will you?'
The sun was shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and
the wood stood bluey-fresh, in the nearness. She sat up in bed, looking
dreamily out through the dormer window, her naked arms pushing her naked
breasts together. He was dressing himself. She was half-dreaming of life, a
life together with him: just a life.
He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.
`Have I lost my nightie altogether?' she said.
He pushed his hand down in the bed, and pulled out the bit of flimsy
silk.
`I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,' he said.
But the night-dress was slit almost in two.
`Never mind!' she said. `It belongs here, really. I'll leave it.'
`Ay, leave it, I can put it between my legs at night, for company.
There's no name nor mark on it, is there?'
She slipped on the torn thing, and sat dreamily looking out of the
window. The window was Open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of
birds. Birds flew continuously past. Then she saw Flossie roaming out. It
was morning.
Downstairs she heard him making the fire, pumping water, going out at
the back door. By and by came the smell of bacon, and at length he came
upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He
set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn
nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his
plate on his knees.
`How good it is!' she said. `How nice to have breakfast together.'
He ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That
made her remember.
`Oh, how I wish I could stay here with you, and Wragby were a million
miles away! It's Wragby I'm going away from really. You know that, don't
you?'
`Ay!'
`And you promise we will live together and have a life together, you
and me! You promise me, don't you?'
`Ay! When we can.'
`Yes! And we will! we will, won't we?' she leaned over, making the tea
spill, catching his wrist.
`Ay!' he said, tidying up the tea.
`We can't possibly not live together now, can we?' she said
appealingly.
He looked up at her with his flickering grin.
`No!' he said. `Only you've got to start in twenty-five minutes.'
`Have I?' she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and rose to
his feet.
Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.
Silent, he put his plate on the tray and went downstairs. Constance
heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.
`Morning, Mr Mellors! Registered letter!'
`Oh ay! Got a pencil?'
`Here y'are!'
There was a pause.
`Canada!' said the stranger's voice.
`Ay! That's a mate o' mine out there in British Columbia. Dunno what
he's got to register.'
`'Appen sent y'a fortune, like.'
`More like wants summat.'
Pause.
`Well! Lovely day again!'
`Ay!'
`Morning!'
`Morning!'
After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.
`Postman,' he said.
`Very early!' she replied.
`Rural round; he's mostly here by seven, when he does come.
`Did your mate send you a fortune?'
`No! Only some photographs and papers about a place out there in
British Columbia.'
`Would you go there?'
`I thought perhaps we might.'
`Oh yes! I believe it's lovely!' But he was put out by the postman's
coming.
`Them damn bikes, they're on you afore you know where you are. I hope
he twigged nothing.'
`After all, what could he twig!'
`You must get up now, and get ready. I'm just goin' ter look round
outside.'
She saw him go reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went
downstairs and washed, and was ready by the time he came back, with the few
things in the little silk bag.
He locked up, and they set off, but through the wood, not down the
lane. He was being wary.
`Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him.
`Ay! But there's the rest o'times to think on,' he replied, rather
short.
They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.
`And we will live together and make a life together, won't we?' she
pleaded.
`Ay!' he replied, striding on without looking round. `When t' time
comes! Just now you're off to Venice or somewhere.'
She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!
At last he stopped.
`I'll just strike across here,' he said, pointing to the right.
But she flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him.
`But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?' she whispered. `I
loved last night. But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?'
He kissed her and held her close for a moment. Then he sighed, and
kissed her again.
`I must go an' look if th' car's there.'
He strode over the low brambles and bracken, leaving a trail through
the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back.
`Car's not there yet,' he said. `But there's the baker's cart on t'
road.'
He seemed anxious and troubled.
`Hark!'
They heard a car softly hoot as it came nearer. It slowed up on the
bridge.
She plunged with utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and
came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her.
`Here! Go through there!' he said, pointing to a gap. `I shan't come
out.
She looked at him in despair. But he kissed her and made her go. She
crept in sheer misery through the holly and through the wooden fence,
stumbled down the little ditch and up into the lane, where Hilda was just
getting out of the car in vexation.
`Why you're there!' said Hilda. `Where's he?'
`He's not coming.'
Connie's face was running with tears as she got into the car with her
little bag. Hilda snatched up the motoring helmet with the disfiguring
goggles.
`Put it on!' she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long
motoring coat, and she sat down, a goggling inhuman, unrecognizable
creature. Hilda started the car with a businesslike motion. They heaved out
of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there
was no sight of him. Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting had
come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death.
`Thank goodness you'll be away from him for some time!' said Hilda,
turning to avoid Crosshill village.
`You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing
London, `you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and
if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'
`For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. `I've
never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving
himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their
self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any
man's little petsy-wetsy, nor his chair ю plaisir either. I wanted a
complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.
Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant
revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his
revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that
weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!
`I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with
everybody,' she said to her sister.
`I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.
`But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of
yourself.'
Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard of
insolence from that chit Connie.
`At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the
somebody else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in crude
anger.
`You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.
She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now,
though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the
dominion of other women. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given
another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other
women. How awful they were, women!
She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always
been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm
was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening, and they
liked going with him.
He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the
new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in
Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays away
from her as possible: just as with his first wife.
Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had
stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of a
healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured
selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality, it
seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit straight thighs.
Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because in his
strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power
of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which never dies,
once it is there.
Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to
her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live,
alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs in
black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff, or
well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either sensuality or
tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness that pranced
around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They were all daunted,
daunted out of existence.
But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females!
really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs! or
the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life!
Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!
But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and
blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking
they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's blind craving for
happiness, to be assured of happiness.
In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a
weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness. Oh!
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical
sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of
resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently
Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical
jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these flбneurs, the oglers, these
eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary, worn-out for lack of a
little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming women
knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they had that pull over
their jigging English sisters. But they knew even less of tenderness. Dry,
with the endless dry tension of will, they too were wearing out. The human
world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would turn fiercely destructive.
A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his conservative anarchy! Perhaps it
wouldn't be conservative much longer. Perhaps it would develop into a very
radical anarchy.
Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she
was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the
Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and English,
strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English that
are so hopeless abroad.
She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was
going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the Dolomites
down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving and being
mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.
And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself:
Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that I
don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't. It's rather
awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake of Lucerne
without ever noticing that there were even mountain and green water. I just
don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare at it? Why should
one? I refuse to.
No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or
Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real than
Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care if she
never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep. Wragby was more
real.
As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference. They
all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted
to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor
mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed and
squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people
mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?
No! said Connie to herself I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go
about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any
sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly
humiliating: it's such a failure.
She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor
crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot,
anyhow.
But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other
man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go,
or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people
and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh `enjoying oneself'! Another modern form
of sickness.
They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer
over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon
rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the
water, look dim.
At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the
address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very
good-looking, not at all impressive.
`Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier
for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'
He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain
exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible,
slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the
washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong, odour of
sewage.
But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either
side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right-angles to the Grand
Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above,
behind them.
`Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked,
rowing easy, and `wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue
handkerchief.
`Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her
curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.
`Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he
asked: `Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they
will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'
Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have
one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.
`What is there at the Villa? what boats?'
`There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But---' The but meant: they
won't be your property.
`How much do you charge?'
It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.
`Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.
`Less, Signora, less. The regular price---'
The sisters considered.
`Well,' said Hilda, `come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it.
What is your name?'
His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should
come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no card.
Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his hot,
southern blue eyes, then glanced again.
`Ah!' he said, lighting up. `Milady! Milady, isn't it?'
`Milady Costanza!' said Connie.
He nodded, repeating: `Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully
away in his blouse.
The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon
looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant, with
the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with dark
trees, walled in from the lagoon.
Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good
fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his
ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind of
person with no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate
her husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with
the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was now
more manageable.
The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters,
there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two daughters; a
young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince, and a youngish
English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being chaplain to Sir
Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was penniless, good-looking,
would make an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and basta!
The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere. The clergyman
was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily he had left his wife
and two children at home. And the Guthries, the family of four, were good
solid Edinburgh middle class, enjoying everything in a solid fashion, and
daring everything while risking nothing.
Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more
or less their own sort, substantial, hut boring: and the girls wanted
husbands. The chaplain was not a had fellow, but too deferential. Sir
Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his joviality,
but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young women.
Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of it, poor thing,
and who watched every other woman with a cold watchfulness that had become
her second nature, and who said cold, nasty little things which showed what
an utterly low opinion she had of all human nature. She was also quite
venomously overbearing with the servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way.
And she skilfully behaved so that Sir Alexander should think that he was
lord and monarch of the whole caboosh, with his stout, would-be-genial
paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.
Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian
lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the
morning he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his `site'. A little later,
Lady Cooper would he rowed off into the heart of the city, with
sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate watercolour painter, and
the house was full of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges,
medieval facades, and so on. A little later the Guthries, the prince, the
countess, Sir Alexander, and sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would go off
to the Lido, where they would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half
past one.
The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this did
not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father took them
to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He took them to all
the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with them on warm evenings
in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he took them to the theatre,
to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fйtes, there were dances.
This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of
sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of
seals come up for mating. Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and
trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches,
too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too
many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too
much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too
many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls:
too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment!
Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens
of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up like a
bad penny. `Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream or
something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis almost
sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of the mass of
human flesh.
It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all
the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in
hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm
nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what
they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a
drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment!
Enjoyment!
Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women,
speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the women.
How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she getting out of
it?---The men were like great dogs in white flannel trousers, waiting to be
patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster some woman's stomach against
their own, in jazz.
Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the
stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from the
visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could break
loose and ignore `the creature'. He had been merely made use of. Poor Connie
was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she simply couldn't plaster
her stomach against some `creature's' stomach. She hated the conglomerate
mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there was hardly enough water to wet
them all. She disliked Sir Alexander and Lady Cooper. She did not want
Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.
The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across
the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could bathe
quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.
Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long
way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice:
affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians are
not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often
affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted
to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute
himself to them, if they wanted hint: he secretly hoped they would want him.
They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very handy, as
he was just going to be married. He told them about his marriage, and they
were suitably interested.
He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably
meant business: business being l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help him,
for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two ladies, two
mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was justly proud of
them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and gave him orders, he
rather hoped it would be the young milady who would select hint for l'amore.
She would give more money too.
The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier,
so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola man,
a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from the
islands.
Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of
little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a little
like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive, loquacious,
and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with a strength and
ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were ladies, remote from
him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.
He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and
rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a man as
Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the
easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those sweet
Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like in
the back of that labyrinth of a town.
Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes
man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog,
wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!
Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water.
Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness!
Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.
Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He did
not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He was a
little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather doggy
Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus refused
the devil's money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker, master of the
whole situation.
Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind
of stupor, to lind letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He wrote
very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for this
reason Connie found them not very interesting.
She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping
saltiness of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but
health, health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she was
lulled away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was pregnant. She
knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and sea-bathing and
lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away, away in a gondola,
was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another fullness of health,
satisfying and stupefying.
She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten
days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and the
fullness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was in a sort
of stupor of well-being.
From which a letter of Clifford roused her.
We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife
of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself
unwelcome. He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it, however,
that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer fair lady firmly
established in his bed, in puris naturalibus; or one should say, in impuris
naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable to evict
the somewhat man-handled Venus from his couch, he beat a retreat and
retired, it is said, to his mother's house in Tevershall. Meanwhile the
Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims is her
home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.
I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I
had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our ibis,
our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have repeated it had
she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the wood if that woman's
going to be about!
I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white
hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains. But
I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality. However, it suits
his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows
older. Only youth has a taste of immortality---
This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied ell being with
vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she ad got to be bothered by that
beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter from
Mellors. They had agreed not to write at all, but now she wanted to hear
from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child that was
coming. Let him write!
But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low
people were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence,
compared to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a clear
sky was almost the most important thing in life.
She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote
to Mrs Bolton for exact information.
Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa
Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola, and
he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet, almost
taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.
She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:
You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford.
He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful. Of
course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is a dull
house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence among us once
more.
About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems
his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her sitting
on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was come back to
him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his legal wife, and he
wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have anything to do with her,
and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not go in himself; he went back
into the wood without ever opening the door.
But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he
went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without a rag
on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he must take
her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His mother told me
about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd die rather than ever
live with her again, so he took his things and went straight to his mother's
on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night and went to the wood next day
through the park, never going near the cottage. It seems he never saw his
wife that day. But the day after she was at her brother Pan's at Beggarlee,
swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd beers
having women at the cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his
drawer, and gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know
what all. Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking
in Mr Mellors' bedroom early one morning, and a motor-car had been in the
lane.
Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through the
park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was no end of
talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and fetched
away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the handle of the
pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back to Stacks Gate she
went and lodged with that Mrs Swain at Beggarlee, because her brother Dan's
wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going to old Mrs Mellors' house, to
catch him, and she began swearing he'd got in bed with her in the cottage
and she went to a lawyer to make him pay her an allowance. She's grown
heavy, and more common than ever, and as strong as a bull. And she goes
about saying the most awful things about him, how he has women at the
cottage, and how he behaved to her when they were married, the low, beastly
things he did to her, and I don't know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the
mischief a woman can do, once she starts talking. And no matter how low she
may be, there'll be some as will believe her, and some of the dirt will
stick. I'm sure the way she makes out that Mr Mellors was one of those low,
beastly men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to
believe things against anybody, especially things like that. She declared
she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if he was
so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But of course
she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older than he is. And
these common, violent women always go partly insane whets the change of life
comes upon them---
This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming in
for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for not
having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married her.
Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the last
night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all that
sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting. It
would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps
really common, really low.
She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the
Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she now
dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the keeper.
How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt a craving for
utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening respectability of
the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair, how unspeakably
humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and its unclean bite. She
almost wished she could get rid of the child again, and be quite clear. In
short, she fell into a state of funk.
As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able
to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the
drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty's
Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted him to
remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they were Hilda's.
She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say
she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and told
Forbes the history of the man.
`Oh,' said Forbes, `you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled
the man down and done him its. If he has refused to creep up into the middle
classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up for his own
sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't let you be,
straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you like. In fact the
more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But if you believe in your
own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one
insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and
they'll kill you before they'll let you have it. You'll see, they'll hound
that man down. And what's he done, after all? If he's made love to his wife
all ends on, hasn't he a right to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see,
even a low bitch like that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the
mob against sex, to pull him down. You have a snivel and feel sinful or
awful about your sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound
the poor devil down.'
Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done,
after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite
pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural
sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
No no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with
tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it
were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his
voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his
hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places,
like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little
flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh, no! I mustn't go back on
it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him,
through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it me. And I
won't go back on it.
She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note
to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to him:
I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is
making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will
all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and I
do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is
only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days'
time, and I do hope everything will be all right.
A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.
I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the
sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby
misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of
sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So
please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing
you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.
I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer
specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures human
beings are. Some of them might Just as well have a hundred legs, like a
centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has
been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent. One
doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is oneself.
The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball.
Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb,
seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives.
All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as
if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.
She is preoccupied with tie Mellors scandal, and if I will let her
begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which even
then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is against the
wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts. I have been to
the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this world, and when,
released from the current of gossip, I slowly rise to the surface again, I
look at the daylight its wonder that it ever should be.
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the
surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees
are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding
ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping
through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of
the ether, where there is true air. I am convinced that the air we normally
breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the
light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It is our
mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life of our
fellow-men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal destiny is
to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again into the bright
ether, bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into real light. Then one
realizes one's eternal nature.
When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to the
depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal appetite
makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of the dense into
the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can tell the whole
process. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward plunge, down,
horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.
I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the
truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and greater
dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously enough,
the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers' wives behind her,
gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.
I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house,
having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own
daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but
the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly,
and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her
reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed
grandmother.
The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has
aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually
buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married
couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a
weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter
being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always
had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use
his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, `in the Italian way', well that is a