matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so
many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any
case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with
anybody else.
However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common
decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists,
and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would
think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an
immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a
shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a
touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a
murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if
one is to believe all accounts.
The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined
herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the
top of her voice, that her husband has been `keeping' women down at the
cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has
brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone
quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the
woman.
I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was
impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual,
with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody care
for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin can
tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can
isn't there. But I heard that in the village the women call away their
children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade in person. He
goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied
to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish
ballad: `Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!'
I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the
wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a
nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that he had no
power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course.
`Ay,' he said. `folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want
to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.'
He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ
of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate nor
respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle again.
`It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin'
a cod atween my legs.'
These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not
help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think it
would be as well if the man left the place.
I asked him fit was true that he entertained ladies down at the
cottage, and all he said was: `Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?' I
told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he
replied: `Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women.'---When I pressed
him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: `Surely you might ma'e
a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.' As a
matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be hard to beat.
I asked him fit would be easy for him to find another job. He said: `If
you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd be easy as
wink.' So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of next week,
and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as
many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I would give him a
month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd rather I kept my money, as
I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him what he meant, and he
said: `You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing
extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me.'
Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone
away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows her
face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol, because she
merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will
soon become normal again.
Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in
Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were
out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away by the
end of the month.
So you see, we arc deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on
mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.
The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of
Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better
when she received the following from Mellors:
The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have
heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her
abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in
the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at
least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She
noticed the glass and the back-board in the square bedroom. Unfortunately,
on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials,
several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded no clue until she
broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an autobiography of the
actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page.
After this, for some days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was
no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the
rector, Mr Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal
steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had
a mortal fear of the police.
Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things
and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's
name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was
surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course it
was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the
scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem. But he
didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a disreputable
character also walked about with my breeches' buttons undone, and I as good
as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I
leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.
I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square,
will either give me a room or will find one for me.
Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and
her name's Bertha---
There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He
might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew
he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She
resented that too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had
said to Clifford: `Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of
it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.
So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that
would soon die down.
She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her
inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did
nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with
Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been
rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her
again. But she said to him: `I only want one thing of men, and that is, that
they should leave me alone.'
So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the
same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He
wanted to be with her.
`Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, `how very little
people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a
son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he
has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'
`Ask him,' said Connie.
Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both
male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.
`Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that
look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. `The others have a
certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' `And,' she
thought to herself, `like you, Duncan.'
She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the
Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would bring her
to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to
him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland's
hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.
Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her
responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda,
offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch
woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy
into which Hilda always entered ponderously.
Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on
with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the
Orient Express, in spite of Connie's dislike of trains de luxe, the
atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it
would make the journey to Paris shorter.
Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit
carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for the
grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat
in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.
`A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,' said her father,
noticing her glumness.
`I'm not sure I shall go back to Wragby,' she said, with startling
abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue eyes
took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is not quite
clear.
`You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'
`No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'
He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was
getting none of hers to shoulder.
`How's that, all at once?' he asked.
`I'm going to have a child.'
It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and
it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.
`How do you know?' said her father.
She smiled.
`How should I know?'
`But not Clifford's child, of course?'
`No! Another man's.'
She rather enjoyed tormenting him.
`Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.
`No! You've never seen him.'
There was a long pause.
`And what are your plans?'
`I don't know. That's the point.'
`No patching it up with Clifford?'
`I suppose Clifford would take it,' said Connie. `He told me, after
last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long as I
went about it discreetly.'
`Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I
suppose it'll be all right.'
`In what way?' said Connie, looking into her father's eyes. They were
big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in them, a
look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen
selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.
`You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put
another baronet in Wragby.'
Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.
`But I don't think I want to,' she said.
`Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the
truth from me, my child, it's this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and
will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and,
externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private
opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this
year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as
Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you'll get very little out
of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent
income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won't get much out
of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's an amusing thing to do.'
And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.
`I hope you had a real man at last,' he said to her after a while,
sensually alert.
`I did. That's the trouble. There aren't many of them about,' she said.
`No, by God!' he mused. `There aren't! Well, my dear, to look at you,
he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn't make trouble for you?'
`Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.'
`Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.'
Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had
always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in
Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very
tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.
He drove with her to Hartland's hotel, and saw her installed: then went
round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.
She found a letter from Mellors.
I won't come round to your hotel, but I'll wait for you outside the
Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.
There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of
thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the
cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go
anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the
cut-to-pattern class thing.
`Ah, there you are! How well you look!'
`Yes! But not you.'
She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones
showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it
was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her.
Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease
and happy, at home. With a woman's now alert instinct for happiness, she
registered it at once. `I'm happy when he's there!' Not all the sunshine of
Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.
`Was it horrid for you?' she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He
was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious
loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and
kiss it. But she did not quite dare.
`People are always horrid,' he said.
`And did you mind very much?'
`I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.'
`Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said
you felt like that.'
He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had
suffered bitterly.
`I suppose I did,' he said.
She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.
There was a long pause.
`And did you miss me?' she asked.
`I was glad you were out of it.'
Again there was a pause.
`But did people believe about you and me?' she asked.
`No! I don't think so for a moment.'
`Did Clifford?'
`I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But
naturally it made him want to see the last of me.'
`I'm going to have a child.'
The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He
looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at
all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.
`Say you're glad!' she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a
certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she
could not understand.
`It's the future,' he said.
`But aren't you glad?' she persisted.
`I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.'
`But you needn't be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have
it as his own, he'd be glad.'
She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.
`Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?' she
asked.
He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered
on his face.
`You wouldn't have to tell him who the father was?'
`Oh!' she said; `he'd take it even then, if I wanted him to.'
He thought for a time.
`Ay!' he said at last, to himself. `I suppose he would.'
There was silence. A big gulf was between them.
`But you don't want me to go back to Clifford, do you?' she asked him.
`What do you want yourself?' he replied.
`I want to live with you,' she said simply.
In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her
say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with those
haunted eyes.
`If it's worth it to you,' he said. `I've got nothing.'
`You've got more than most men. Come, you know it,' she said.
`In one way, I know it.' He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he
resumed: `They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it's not
that. I'm not a woman not because I don't want to shoot birds, neither
because I don't want to make money, or get on. I could have got on in the
army, easily, but I didn't like the army. Though I could manage the men all
right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy fear of me when I got mad.
No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead:
absolutely fool-dead. I like men, and men like me. But I can't stand the
twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That's why I
can't get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of
class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?'
`But why offer anything? It's not a bargain. It's just that we love one
another,' she said.
`Nay, nay! It's more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life
won't go down the proper gutters, it just won't. So I'm a bit of a waste
ticket by myself. And I've no business to take a woman into my life, unless
my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us
both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it's going
to be an isolated life, and if she's a genuine woman. I can't be just your
male concubine.'
`Why not?' she said.
`Why, because I can't. And you would soon hate it.'
`As if you couldn't trust me,' she said.
The grin flickered on his face.
`The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with
you. I'm not just my Lady's fucker, after all.'
`What else are you?'
`You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I'm something to
myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite
understand nobody else's seeing it.'
`And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?'
He paused a long time before replying:
`It might.'
She too stayed to think about it.
`And what is the point of your existence?'
`I tell you, it's invisible. I don't believe in the world, not in
money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there's
got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big change from
what now is.'
`And what will the real future have to be like?'
`God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of
rage. But what it really amounts to, I don't know.'
`Shall I tell you?' she said, looking into his face. `Shall I tell you
what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future?
Shall I tell you?'
`Tell me then,' he replied.
`It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when
you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.'
The grin came flickering on his face.
`That!' he said.
Then he sat thinking.
`Ay!' he said. `You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way
through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically,
and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to
them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha
said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural
physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly
way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really;
it's cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And
it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've
got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into
touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying
need.'
She looked at him.
`Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.
He looked at her a long time before he answered.
`It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'
`But isn't there tenderness in me?' she said wistfully.
He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.
`Ay! It comes an' goes, like in me.'
`But can't you trust it between you and me?' she asked, gazing
anxiously at him.
She saw his face all softening down, losing its armour. `Maybe!' he
said. They were both silent.
`I want you to hold me in your arms,' she said. `I want you to tell me
you are glad we are having a child.'
She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards
her.
`I suppose we can go to my room,' he said. `Though it's scandalous
again.'
But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his
face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.
They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a
room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself on a
gas ring. It was small, but decent and tidy.
She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in
the soft first flush of her pregnancy.
`I ought to leave you alone,' he said.
`No!' she said. `Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll
keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.'
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked
body, the only home she had ever known.
`Then I'll keep thee,' he said. `If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee.'
He held her round and fast.
`And say you're glad about the child,' she repeated.
`Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there.'
But that was more difficult for him.
`I've a dread of puttin' children i' th' world,' he said. `I've such a
dread o' th' future for 'em.'
`But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its
future already. Kiss it!'
He quivered, because it was true. `Be tender to it, and that will be
its future.'---At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed
her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus
within the womb.
`Oh, you love me! You love me!' she said, in a little cry like one of
her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling
the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the
bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to
do, to e into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his
integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none,
he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his tenderness from her
on that account. `I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human
beings,' he said to himself, `and the touch of tenderness. And she is my
mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the
insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me
there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with
me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool.
Thank God she's a tender, aware woman.' And as his seed sprang in her, his
soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than
procreative.
She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between
him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.
`Did you hate Bertha Coutts?' she asked him.
`Don't talk to me about her.'
`Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as
intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn't it
rather terrible, when you've been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is
it?'
`I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always,
always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom that
ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against
me, like vitriol in my face.'
`But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?'
`No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage,
she must try to bully me.'
`But she must have loved you.'
`No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even
that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and
started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no
altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.'
`But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to
make you.'
`My God, it was bloody making.'
`But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.'
`How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always
ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she
was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot a stoat,
if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If
only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be
allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own
will set against everything, then it's fearful, and she should be shot at
last.'
`And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own
will?'
`Ay!---the same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again.
I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be
careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never, never could
stand it if she came down on me and you.'
Connie pondered this.
`Then we can't be together?' she said.
`Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in
September; then till March.'
`But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,' she said.
He was silent.
`I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,' he said.
`It's not being very tender to them,' she said.
`Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for
them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only
frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet
to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'
`But you wouldn't do it,' she said.
`I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow
has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot them.'
`Then perhaps it is just as well you daren't.'
`Well.'
Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely
to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack had
been too grim.---This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could
get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then there was
an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn't one go right away, to the far
ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from
Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends
of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and
New York.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of
mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Connie confided in her father.
`You see, Father, he was Clifford's game-keeper: but he was an officer
in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred
to become a private soldier again.'
Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism
of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the
humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed,
the conceit of self-abasement.
`Where did your game-keeper spring from?' asked Sir Malcolm irritably.
`He was a collier's son in Tevershall. But he's absolutely
presentable.'
The knighted artist became more angry.
`Looks to me like a gold-digger,' he said. `And you're a pretty easy
gold-mine, apparently.'
`No, Father, it's not like that. You'd know if you saw him. He's a man.
Clifford always detested him for not being humble.'
`Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.'
What Sir Malcolm could not bear was the scandal of his daughter's
having an intrigue with a game-keeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he
minded the scandal.
`I care nothing about the fellow. He's evidently been able to get round
you all right. But, by God, think of all the talk. Think of your step-mother
how she'll take it!'
`I know,' said Connie. `Talk is beastly: especially if you live in
society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we might
perhaps say it was another man's child, and not mention Mellors' name at
all.'
`Another man's! What other man's?'
`Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life.'
`And he's a fairly well-known artist. And he's fond of me.'
`Well I'm damned! Poor Duncan! And what's he going to get out of it?'
`I don't know. But he might rather like it, even.'
`He might, might he? Well, he's a funny man if he does. Why, you've
never even had an affair with him, have you?'
`No! But he doesn't really want it. He only loves me to be near him,
but not to touch him.'
`My God, what a generation!'
`He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only
I never wanted to.'
`God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.'
`Still, you wouldn't mind so much the talk about him?'
`My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!'
`I know! It's sickening! But what can I do?'
`Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he's
lived too long.'
`Come, Father, if you haven't done a good deal of contriving and
conniving in your time, you may talk.'
`But it was different, I assure you.'
`It's always different.'
Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And
she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about her
sister and a game-keeper. Too, too humiliating!
`Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and
have no scandal?' said Connie.
But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if
Connie was going with the man, she'd better be able to marry him. This was
Hilda's opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn't sure. The affair might still blow over.
`But will you see him, Father?'
Poor Sir Malcolm! he was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he
was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: a lunch in a private room
at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.
Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whisky, Mellors also drank. And they
talked all the while about India, on which the young man was well informed.
This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the
waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:
`Well, young man, and what about my daughter?'
The grin flickered on Mellors' face.
`Well, Sir, and what about her?'
`You've got a baby in her all right.'
`I have that honour!' grinned Mellors.
`Honour, by God!' Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became
Scotch and lewd. `Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?'
`Good!'
`I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I
never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh,
holy saints!' He rolled his eyes to heaven. `But you warmed her up, oh, you
warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her
haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She
needed it. Oh, she's a nice girl, she's a nice girl, and I knew she'd be
good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A
game-keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now,
look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking
seriously, you know!'
Speaking seriously, they didn't get very far. Mellors, though a little
tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as
intelligent as possible: which isn't saying much.
`So you're a game-keeper! Oh, you're quite right! That sort of game is
worth a man's while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her
bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she's going to come
up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?'
`Thirty-nine.'
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
`As much as that! Well, you've another good twenty years, by the look
of you. Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with one
eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a
fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a good cod on
you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter. Game-keeper!
Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you! But look here, seriously,
what are we going to do about it? The world's full of blasted old women.'
Seriously, they didn't do anything about it, except establish the old
free-masonry of male sensuality between them.
`And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely
on me. Game-keeper! Christ, but it's rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows
the girl's got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income,
moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I'll leave her what I've got.
By God, I will. She deserves it for showing spunk, in a world of old women.
I've been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for
seventy years, and haven't managed it yet. But you're the man, I can see
that.'
`I'm glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion,
that I'm the monkey.'
`Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all
the old women?'
They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time
for the rest of the day.
The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet
place.
`It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round,' said
Hilda.
`I had a lot o' fun out of it,' said he.
`I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until
you were both free to marry and have children.'
`The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,' said he.
`I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has
enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.'
`But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do
you?' said he.
`If you'd been in her own class.'
`Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo.'
There was silence.
`I think,' said Hilda, `it will be best if she names quite another man
as co-respondent and you stay out of it altogether.'
`But I thought I'd put my foot right in.'
`I mean in the divorce proceedings.'
He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan
scheme to him.
`I don't follow,' he said.
`We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as
co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,' said Hilda.
`You mean a man?'
`Of course!'
`But she's got no other?'
He looked in wonder at Connie.
`No, no!' she said hastily. `Only that old friendship, quite simple, no
love.'
`Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of
you?'
`Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a
woman,' said Hilda.
`One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?'
`A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an
artist.'
`Duncan Forbes!' he said at once, for Connie had talked to him. `And
how would you shift the blame on to him?'
`They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his
apartment.'
`Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,' he said.
`What else do you suggest?' said Hilda. `If your name appears, you will
get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person
to be mixed up with.'
`All that!' he said grimly.
There was a long silence.
`We could go right away,' he said.
`There is no right away for Connie,' said Hilda. `Clifford is too well
known.'
Again the silence of pure frustration.
`The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being
persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced.
So how are you both going about it?'
He was silent for a long time.
`How are you going about it for us?' he said.
`We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co-respondent: then we
must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce,
and you must both keep apart till you are free.'
`Sounds like a lunatic asylum.'
`Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.;
`What is worse?'
`Criminals, I suppose.'
`Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,' he said,
grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.
`Well!' he said at last. `I agree to anything. The world is a raving
idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you re right. We
must rescue ourselves as best we can.'
He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.
`Ma lass!' he said. `The world's goin' to put salt on thy tail.'
`Not if we don't let it,' she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent
game-keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them.
Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow
with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was
all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra-modern, yet with
a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors
thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was
almost insane on the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal
religion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his
smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the game-keeper
would say. He knew already Connie's and Hilda's opinions.
`It is like a pure bit of murder,' said Mellors at last; a speech
Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.
`And who is murdered?' asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.
`Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.'
A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of
dislike in the other man's voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself
loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!
Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with
flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the
wing, at the pictures.
`Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,' sneered the
artist.
`Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are
stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of
self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.'
In another wave of hate the artist's face looked yellow. But with a
sort of silent hauteur he turned the pictures to the wall.
`I think we may go to the dining-room,' he said. And they trailed off,
dismally.
After coffee, Duncan said:
`I don't at all mind posing as the father of Connie's child. But only
on the condition that she'll come and pose as a model for me. I've wanted
her for years, and she's always refused.' He uttered it with the dark
finality of an inquisitor announcing an auto da fe.
`Ah!' said Mellors. `You only do it on condition, then?'
`Quite! I only do it on that condition.' The artist tried to put the
utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too
much.
`Better have me as a model at the same time,' said Mellors. `Better do
us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a
blacksmith, before I was a game-keeper.'
`Thank you,' said the artist. `I don't think Vulcan has a figure that
interests me.'
`Not even if it was tubified and titivated up?'
There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.
It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored
the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words were
wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the women.
`You didn't like him, but he's better than that, really. He's really
kind,' Connie explained as they left.
`He's a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,' said Mellors.
`No, he wasn't nice today.'
`And will you go and be a model to him?'
`Oh, I don't really mind any more. He won't touch me. And I don't mind
anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.'
`But he'll only shit on you on canvas.'
`I don't care. He'll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I
don't mind if he does that. I wouldn't have him touch me, not for anything.
But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty staring, let him
stare. He can make as many empty tubes and corrugations out of me as he
likes. It's his funeral. He hated you for what you said: that his tubified
art is sentimental and self-important. But of course it's true.'
Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really
in love with another man, and do hope you will divorce me. I am staying at
present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with us. I'm
awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly. You don't
really need me any more, and I can't bear to come back to Wragby. I'm
awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and find someone
better. I'm not really the right person for you, I am too impatient and
selfish, I suppose. But I can't ever come back to live with you again. And I
feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your sake. But if you don't let
yourself get worked up, you'll see you won't mind so frightfully. You didn't
really care about me personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.
Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he
had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused
any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most
terrible blow and shock to him, He had kept the surface of his confidence in
her quite serene.
And that is how we are, By strength of will we cut of four inner
intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of
dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does
fall.
Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs Bolton a terrible
shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.
`Why, Sir Clifford, whatever's the matter?'
No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and
felt his face, took his pulse.
`Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!'
No answer!
`Oh dear, oh dear! Then I'll telephone to Sheffield for Dr Carrington,
many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any
case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with
anybody else.
However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common
decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists,
and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would
think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an
immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a
shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a
touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a
murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if
one is to believe all accounts.
The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined
herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the
top of her voice, that her husband has been `keeping' women down at the
cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has
brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone
quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the
woman.
I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was
impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual,
with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody care
for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin can
tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can
isn't there. But I heard that in the village the women call away their
children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade in person. He
goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied
to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish
ballad: `Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!'
I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the
wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a
nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that he had no
power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course.
`Ay,' he said. `folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want
to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.'
He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ
of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate nor
respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle again.
`It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin'
a cod atween my legs.'
These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not
help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think it
would be as well if the man left the place.
I asked him fit was true that he entertained ladies down at the
cottage, and all he said was: `Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?' I
told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he
replied: `Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women.'---When I pressed
him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: `Surely you might ma'e
a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.' As a
matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be hard to beat.
I asked him fit would be easy for him to find another job. He said: `If
you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd be easy as
wink.' So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of next week,
and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as
many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I would give him a
month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd rather I kept my money, as
I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him what he meant, and he
said: `You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing
extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me.'
Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone
away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows her
face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol, because she
merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will
soon become normal again.
Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in
Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were
out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away by the
end of the month.
So you see, we arc deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on
mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.
The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of
Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better
when she received the following from Mellors:
The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have
heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her
abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in
the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at
least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She
noticed the glass and the back-board in the square bedroom. Unfortunately,
on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials,
several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded no clue until she
broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an autobiography of the
actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page.
After this, for some days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was
no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the
rector, Mr Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal
steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had
a mortal fear of the police.
Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things
and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's
name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was
surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course it
was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the
scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem. But he
didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a disreputable
character also walked about with my breeches' buttons undone, and I as good
as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I
leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.
I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square,
will either give me a room or will find one for me.
Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and
her name's Bertha---
There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He
might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew
he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She
resented that too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had
said to Clifford: `Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of
it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.
So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that
would soon die down.
She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her
inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did
nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with
Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been
rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her
again. But she said to him: `I only want one thing of men, and that is, that
they should leave me alone.'
So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the
same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He
wanted to be with her.
`Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, `how very little
people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a
son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he
has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'
`Ask him,' said Connie.
Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both
male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.
`Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that
look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. `The others have a
certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' `And,' she
thought to herself, `like you, Duncan.'
She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the
Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would bring her
to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to
him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland's
hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.
Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her
responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda,
offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch
woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy
into which Hilda always entered ponderously.
Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on
with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the
Orient Express, in spite of Connie's dislike of trains de luxe, the
atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it
would make the journey to Paris shorter.
Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit
carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for the
grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat
in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.
`A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,' said her father,
noticing her glumness.
`I'm not sure I shall go back to Wragby,' she said, with startling
abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue eyes
took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is not quite
clear.
`You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'
`No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'
He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was
getting none of hers to shoulder.
`How's that, all at once?' he asked.
`I'm going to have a child.'
It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and
it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.
`How do you know?' said her father.
She smiled.
`How should I know?'
`But not Clifford's child, of course?'
`No! Another man's.'
She rather enjoyed tormenting him.
`Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.
`No! You've never seen him.'
There was a long pause.
`And what are your plans?'
`I don't know. That's the point.'
`No patching it up with Clifford?'
`I suppose Clifford would take it,' said Connie. `He told me, after
last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long as I
went about it discreetly.'
`Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I
suppose it'll be all right.'
`In what way?' said Connie, looking into her father's eyes. They were
big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in them, a
look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen
selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.
`You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put
another baronet in Wragby.'
Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.
`But I don't think I want to,' she said.
`Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the
truth from me, my child, it's this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and
will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and,
externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private
opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this
year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as
Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you'll get very little out
of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent
income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won't get much out
of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's an amusing thing to do.'
And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.
`I hope you had a real man at last,' he said to her after a while,
sensually alert.
`I did. That's the trouble. There aren't many of them about,' she said.
`No, by God!' he mused. `There aren't! Well, my dear, to look at you,
he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn't make trouble for you?'
`Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.'
`Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.'
Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had
always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in
Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very
tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.
He drove with her to Hartland's hotel, and saw her installed: then went
round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.
She found a letter from Mellors.
I won't come round to your hotel, but I'll wait for you outside the
Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.
There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of
thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the
cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go
anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the
cut-to-pattern class thing.
`Ah, there you are! How well you look!'
`Yes! But not you.'
She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones
showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it
was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her.
Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease
and happy, at home. With a woman's now alert instinct for happiness, she
registered it at once. `I'm happy when he's there!' Not all the sunshine of
Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.
`Was it horrid for you?' she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He
was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious
loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and
kiss it. But she did not quite dare.
`People are always horrid,' he said.
`And did you mind very much?'
`I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.'
`Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said
you felt like that.'
He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had
suffered bitterly.
`I suppose I did,' he said.
She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.
There was a long pause.
`And did you miss me?' she asked.
`I was glad you were out of it.'
Again there was a pause.
`But did people believe about you and me?' she asked.
`No! I don't think so for a moment.'
`Did Clifford?'
`I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But
naturally it made him want to see the last of me.'
`I'm going to have a child.'
The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He
looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at
all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.
`Say you're glad!' she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a
certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she
could not understand.
`It's the future,' he said.
`But aren't you glad?' she persisted.
`I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.'
`But you needn't be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have
it as his own, he'd be glad.'
She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.
`Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?' she
asked.
He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered
on his face.
`You wouldn't have to tell him who the father was?'
`Oh!' she said; `he'd take it even then, if I wanted him to.'
He thought for a time.
`Ay!' he said at last, to himself. `I suppose he would.'
There was silence. A big gulf was between them.
`But you don't want me to go back to Clifford, do you?' she asked him.
`What do you want yourself?' he replied.
`I want to live with you,' she said simply.
In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her
say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with those
haunted eyes.
`If it's worth it to you,' he said. `I've got nothing.'
`You've got more than most men. Come, you know it,' she said.
`In one way, I know it.' He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he
resumed: `They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it's not
that. I'm not a woman not because I don't want to shoot birds, neither
because I don't want to make money, or get on. I could have got on in the
army, easily, but I didn't like the army. Though I could manage the men all
right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy fear of me when I got mad.
No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead:
absolutely fool-dead. I like men, and men like me. But I can't stand the
twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That's why I
can't get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of
class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?'
`But why offer anything? It's not a bargain. It's just that we love one
another,' she said.
`Nay, nay! It's more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life
won't go down the proper gutters, it just won't. So I'm a bit of a waste
ticket by myself. And I've no business to take a woman into my life, unless
my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us
both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it's going
to be an isolated life, and if she's a genuine woman. I can't be just your
male concubine.'
`Why not?' she said.
`Why, because I can't. And you would soon hate it.'
`As if you couldn't trust me,' she said.
The grin flickered on his face.
`The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with
you. I'm not just my Lady's fucker, after all.'
`What else are you?'
`You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I'm something to
myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite
understand nobody else's seeing it.'
`And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?'
He paused a long time before replying:
`It might.'
She too stayed to think about it.
`And what is the point of your existence?'
`I tell you, it's invisible. I don't believe in the world, not in
money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there's
got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big change from
what now is.'
`And what will the real future have to be like?'
`God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of
rage. But what it really amounts to, I don't know.'
`Shall I tell you?' she said, looking into his face. `Shall I tell you
what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future?
Shall I tell you?'
`Tell me then,' he replied.
`It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when
you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.'
The grin came flickering on his face.
`That!' he said.
Then he sat thinking.
`Ay!' he said. `You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way
through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically,
and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to
them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha
said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural
physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly
way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really;
it's cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And
it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've
got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into
touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying
need.'
She looked at him.
`Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.
He looked at her a long time before he answered.
`It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'
`But isn't there tenderness in me?' she said wistfully.
He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.
`Ay! It comes an' goes, like in me.'
`But can't you trust it between you and me?' she asked, gazing
anxiously at him.
She saw his face all softening down, losing its armour. `Maybe!' he
said. They were both silent.
`I want you to hold me in your arms,' she said. `I want you to tell me
you are glad we are having a child.'
She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards
her.
`I suppose we can go to my room,' he said. `Though it's scandalous
again.'
But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his
face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.
They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a
room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself on a
gas ring. It was small, but decent and tidy.
She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in
the soft first flush of her pregnancy.
`I ought to leave you alone,' he said.
`No!' she said. `Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll
keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.'
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked
body, the only home she had ever known.
`Then I'll keep thee,' he said. `If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee.'
He held her round and fast.
`And say you're glad about the child,' she repeated.
`Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there.'
But that was more difficult for him.
`I've a dread of puttin' children i' th' world,' he said. `I've such a
dread o' th' future for 'em.'
`But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its
future already. Kiss it!'
He quivered, because it was true. `Be tender to it, and that will be
its future.'---At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed
her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus
within the womb.
`Oh, you love me! You love me!' she said, in a little cry like one of
her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling
the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the
bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to
do, to e into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his
integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none,
he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his tenderness from her
on that account. `I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human
beings,' he said to himself, `and the touch of tenderness. And she is my
mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the
insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me
there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with
me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool.
Thank God she's a tender, aware woman.' And as his seed sprang in her, his
soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than
procreative.
She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between
him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.
`Did you hate Bertha Coutts?' she asked him.
`Don't talk to me about her.'
`Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as
intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn't it
rather terrible, when you've been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is
it?'
`I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always,
always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom that
ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against
me, like vitriol in my face.'
`But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?'
`No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage,
she must try to bully me.'
`But she must have loved you.'
`No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even
that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and
started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no
altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.'
`But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to
make you.'
`My God, it was bloody making.'
`But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.'
`How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always
ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she
was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot a stoat,
if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If
only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be
allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own
will set against everything, then it's fearful, and she should be shot at
last.'
`And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own
will?'
`Ay!---the same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again.
I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be
careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never, never could
stand it if she came down on me and you.'
Connie pondered this.
`Then we can't be together?' she said.
`Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in
September; then till March.'
`But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,' she said.
He was silent.
`I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,' he said.
`It's not being very tender to them,' she said.
`Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for
them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only
frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet
to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'
`But you wouldn't do it,' she said.
`I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow
has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot them.'
`Then perhaps it is just as well you daren't.'
`Well.'
Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely
to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack had
been too grim.---This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could
get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then there was
an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn't one go right away, to the far
ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from
Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends
of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and
New York.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of
mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Connie confided in her father.
`You see, Father, he was Clifford's game-keeper: but he was an officer
in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred
to become a private soldier again.'
Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism
of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the
humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed,
the conceit of self-abasement.
`Where did your game-keeper spring from?' asked Sir Malcolm irritably.
`He was a collier's son in Tevershall. But he's absolutely
presentable.'
The knighted artist became more angry.
`Looks to me like a gold-digger,' he said. `And you're a pretty easy
gold-mine, apparently.'
`No, Father, it's not like that. You'd know if you saw him. He's a man.
Clifford always detested him for not being humble.'
`Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.'
What Sir Malcolm could not bear was the scandal of his daughter's
having an intrigue with a game-keeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he
minded the scandal.
`I care nothing about the fellow. He's evidently been able to get round
you all right. But, by God, think of all the talk. Think of your step-mother
how she'll take it!'
`I know,' said Connie. `Talk is beastly: especially if you live in
society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we might
perhaps say it was another man's child, and not mention Mellors' name at
all.'
`Another man's! What other man's?'
`Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life.'
`And he's a fairly well-known artist. And he's fond of me.'
`Well I'm damned! Poor Duncan! And what's he going to get out of it?'
`I don't know. But he might rather like it, even.'
`He might, might he? Well, he's a funny man if he does. Why, you've
never even had an affair with him, have you?'
`No! But he doesn't really want it. He only loves me to be near him,
but not to touch him.'
`My God, what a generation!'
`He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only
I never wanted to.'
`God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.'
`Still, you wouldn't mind so much the talk about him?'
`My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!'
`I know! It's sickening! But what can I do?'
`Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he's
lived too long.'
`Come, Father, if you haven't done a good deal of contriving and
conniving in your time, you may talk.'
`But it was different, I assure you.'
`It's always different.'
Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And
she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about her
sister and a game-keeper. Too, too humiliating!
`Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and
have no scandal?' said Connie.
But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if
Connie was going with the man, she'd better be able to marry him. This was
Hilda's opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn't sure. The affair might still blow over.
`But will you see him, Father?'
Poor Sir Malcolm! he was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he
was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: a lunch in a private room
at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.
Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whisky, Mellors also drank. And they
talked all the while about India, on which the young man was well informed.
This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the
waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:
`Well, young man, and what about my daughter?'
The grin flickered on Mellors' face.
`Well, Sir, and what about her?'
`You've got a baby in her all right.'
`I have that honour!' grinned Mellors.
`Honour, by God!' Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became
Scotch and lewd. `Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?'
`Good!'
`I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I
never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh,
holy saints!' He rolled his eyes to heaven. `But you warmed her up, oh, you
warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her
haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She
needed it. Oh, she's a nice girl, she's a nice girl, and I knew she'd be
good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A
game-keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now,
look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking
seriously, you know!'
Speaking seriously, they didn't get very far. Mellors, though a little
tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as
intelligent as possible: which isn't saying much.
`So you're a game-keeper! Oh, you're quite right! That sort of game is
worth a man's while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her
bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she's going to come
up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?'
`Thirty-nine.'
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
`As much as that! Well, you've another good twenty years, by the look
of you. Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with one
eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a
fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a good cod on
you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter. Game-keeper!
Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you! But look here, seriously,
what are we going to do about it? The world's full of blasted old women.'
Seriously, they didn't do anything about it, except establish the old
free-masonry of male sensuality between them.
`And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely
on me. Game-keeper! Christ, but it's rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows
the girl's got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income,
moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I'll leave her what I've got.
By God, I will. She deserves it for showing spunk, in a world of old women.
I've been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for
seventy years, and haven't managed it yet. But you're the man, I can see
that.'
`I'm glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion,
that I'm the monkey.'
`Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all
the old women?'
They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time
for the rest of the day.
The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet
place.
`It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round,' said
Hilda.
`I had a lot o' fun out of it,' said he.
`I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until
you were both free to marry and have children.'
`The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,' said he.
`I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has
enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.'
`But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do
you?' said he.
`If you'd been in her own class.'
`Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo.'
There was silence.
`I think,' said Hilda, `it will be best if she names quite another man
as co-respondent and you stay out of it altogether.'
`But I thought I'd put my foot right in.'
`I mean in the divorce proceedings.'
He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan
scheme to him.
`I don't follow,' he said.
`We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as
co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,' said Hilda.
`You mean a man?'
`Of course!'
`But she's got no other?'
He looked in wonder at Connie.
`No, no!' she said hastily. `Only that old friendship, quite simple, no
love.'
`Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of
you?'
`Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a
woman,' said Hilda.
`One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?'
`A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an
artist.'
`Duncan Forbes!' he said at once, for Connie had talked to him. `And
how would you shift the blame on to him?'
`They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his
apartment.'
`Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,' he said.
`What else do you suggest?' said Hilda. `If your name appears, you will
get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person
to be mixed up with.'
`All that!' he said grimly.
There was a long silence.
`We could go right away,' he said.
`There is no right away for Connie,' said Hilda. `Clifford is too well
known.'
Again the silence of pure frustration.
`The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being
persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced.
So how are you both going about it?'
He was silent for a long time.
`How are you going about it for us?' he said.
`We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co-respondent: then we
must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce,
and you must both keep apart till you are free.'
`Sounds like a lunatic asylum.'
`Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.;
`What is worse?'
`Criminals, I suppose.'
`Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,' he said,
grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.
`Well!' he said at last. `I agree to anything. The world is a raving
idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you re right. We
must rescue ourselves as best we can.'
He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.
`Ma lass!' he said. `The world's goin' to put salt on thy tail.'
`Not if we don't let it,' she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent
game-keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them.
Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow
with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was
all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra-modern, yet with
a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors
thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was
almost insane on the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal
religion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his
smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the game-keeper
would say. He knew already Connie's and Hilda's opinions.
`It is like a pure bit of murder,' said Mellors at last; a speech
Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.
`And who is murdered?' asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.
`Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.'
A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of
dislike in the other man's voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself
loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!
Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with
flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the
wing, at the pictures.
`Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,' sneered the
artist.
`Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are
stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of
self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.'
In another wave of hate the artist's face looked yellow. But with a
sort of silent hauteur he turned the pictures to the wall.
`I think we may go to the dining-room,' he said. And they trailed off,
dismally.
After coffee, Duncan said:
`I don't at all mind posing as the father of Connie's child. But only
on the condition that she'll come and pose as a model for me. I've wanted
her for years, and she's always refused.' He uttered it with the dark
finality of an inquisitor announcing an auto da fe.
`Ah!' said Mellors. `You only do it on condition, then?'
`Quite! I only do it on that condition.' The artist tried to put the
utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too
much.
`Better have me as a model at the same time,' said Mellors. `Better do
us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a
blacksmith, before I was a game-keeper.'
`Thank you,' said the artist. `I don't think Vulcan has a figure that
interests me.'
`Not even if it was tubified and titivated up?'
There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.
It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored
the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words were
wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the women.
`You didn't like him, but he's better than that, really. He's really
kind,' Connie explained as they left.
`He's a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,' said Mellors.
`No, he wasn't nice today.'
`And will you go and be a model to him?'
`Oh, I don't really mind any more. He won't touch me. And I don't mind
anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.'
`But he'll only shit on you on canvas.'
`I don't care. He'll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I
don't mind if he does that. I wouldn't have him touch me, not for anything.
But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty staring, let him
stare. He can make as many empty tubes and corrugations out of me as he
likes. It's his funeral. He hated you for what you said: that his tubified
art is sentimental and self-important. But of course it's true.'
Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really
in love with another man, and do hope you will divorce me. I am staying at
present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with us. I'm
awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly. You don't
really need me any more, and I can't bear to come back to Wragby. I'm
awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and find someone
better. I'm not really the right person for you, I am too impatient and
selfish, I suppose. But I can't ever come back to live with you again. And I
feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your sake. But if you don't let
yourself get worked up, you'll see you won't mind so frightfully. You didn't
really care about me personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.
Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he
had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused
any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most
terrible blow and shock to him, He had kept the surface of his confidence in
her quite serene.
And that is how we are, By strength of will we cut of four inner
intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of
dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does
fall.
Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs Bolton a terrible
shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.
`Why, Sir Clifford, whatever's the matter?'
No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and
felt his face, took his pulse.
`Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!'
No answer!
`Oh dear, oh dear! Then I'll telephone to Sheffield for Dr Carrington,