extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand
dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he
looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent,
enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and
the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that
momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the
Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming
through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of
sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion,
amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a
bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much
stupider!
Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his
full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He
was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the
English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even
love. Yet women sometimes fell for him...Englishwomen too.
He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which
would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead,
perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before
lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis,
restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine
November...day fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God!
What a place!
He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady
Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he
care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the
central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of
course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own
parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed things, or
had contact with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round
at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cиzanne.
`It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to the top.'
`Yes, I think so,' she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in
Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen
it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She
asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers...other people
were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened
she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about
himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in
his success.
`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a
lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few
moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'
`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.
`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are,
aren't you?'
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.
`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is
hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her
power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was
crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.
`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.
`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to
utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked
suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out
an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled
beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his
face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and dazed,
looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck,
feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could
not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the
defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.
Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing
eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the
answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman,
trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of
every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at
length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then,
with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her
breast.
When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their
suхde slippers, and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he
stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he
turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.
`And now, I suppose you'll hate me!' he said in a quiet, inevitable
way. She looked up at him quickly.
`Why should I?' she asked.
`They mostly do,' he said; then he caught himself up. `I mean...a woman
is supposed to.'
`This is the last moment when I ought to hate you,' she said
resentfully.
`I know! I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...' he
cried miserably.
She wondered why he should be miserable. `Won't you sit down again?'
she said. He glanced at the door.
`Sir Clifford!' he said, `won't he...won't he be...?' She paused a
moment to consider. `Perhaps!' she said. And she looked up at him. `I don't
want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I
don't think it's wrong, do you?'
`Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too infinitely good to me...I can
hardly bear it.'
He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be
sobbing.
`But we needn't let Clifford know, need we?' she pleaded. `It would
hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.'
`Me!' he said, almost fiercely; `he'll know nothing from me! You see if
he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!' he laughed hollowly, cynically, at
such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: `May I kiss your
hand arid go? I'll run into Sheffield I think, and lunch there, if I may,
and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don't hate
me?---and that you won't?'---he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.
`No, I don't hate you,' she said. `I think you're nice.'
`Ah!' he said to her fiercely, `I'd rather you said that to me than
said you love me! It means such a lot more...Till afternoon then. I've
plenty to think about till then.' He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.
`I don't think I can stand that young man,' said Clifford at lunch.
`Why?' asked Connie.
`He's such a bounder underneath his veneer...just waiting to bounce
us.'
`I think people have been so unkind to him,' said Connie.
`Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours doing
deeds of kindness?'
`I think he has a certain sort of generosity.'
`Towards whom?'
`I don't quite know.'
`Naturally you don't. I'm afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for
generosity.'
Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness
of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where
Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the
world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those
of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor
outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back
doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence?
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping, dogs with
lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if
you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.
The queer thing was, he didn't. He came back towards tea-time with a
large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog expression.
Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to disarm opposition,
because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?
His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though
through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel it,
perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and
their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery
in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very
presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an
assumed good manner.
Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery
and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was
perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive, aloof young fellow of the
previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically
playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them
for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not
forgotten. But he knew where he was...in the same old place outside, where
the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-making altogether
personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom
everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an
outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how
Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him;
just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was
also a necessity.
But occasional love, as a comfort arid soothing, was also a good thing,
and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly, poignantly
grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears.
Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing
with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his
outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.
He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the
candles in the hall:
`May I come?'
`I'll come to you,' she said.
`Oh, good!'
He waited for her a long time...but she came.
He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and
was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about
his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and
cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were in abeyance he
seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and
somehow struggling helplessly.
He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a
wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in
her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her
breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed,
disappointed, lost.
But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when
his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he
stayed firm inside her, giving to her, while she was active...wildly,
passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of
her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity,
he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.
`Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously, and she became quite still,
clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.
He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly
the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down
his external man.
He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever,
sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of
hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness
remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to
be hopeless. He rather hated hope. `Une immense espиrance a traversи la
terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:`---and it's darned-well
drowned everything worth having.'
Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And
all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She
couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't
ever quite love at all.
So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in
London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him
by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to
give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.
And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind
and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own
powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused
cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his
best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really
reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male
passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had,
he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were
gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed
for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might even have wished to get her
and Michaelis together again.
Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She
was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it
to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford
did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But,
as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end. Mick couldn't keep
anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any
connexion, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his
major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the
sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if
you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good
fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to
see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't
mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was
a Brigadier-General. `The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from
having to face the battle of life,' he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as
Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life
of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and
didn't much matter. No one thinks of inquiring of another person at what
hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person
concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have `affairs'. All these
matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy,
have no interest for anyone else.
`The whole point about the sexual problem,' said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, `is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why
should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein liehe
problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd
be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of
misplaced curiosity.'
`Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point.'...Julia
was Hammond's wife.
`Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'
`You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?'
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
`Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'
`As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: `As a matter
of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to
self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army
definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how
inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It
is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of
course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing.
That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you...a vital little
dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be
unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful.
Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers'
trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs Arnold B. Hammond---just like a trunk on the
railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B. Hammond,
c/o Mrs Arnold B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The
life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite
right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for
success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.'
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of
his mind, and of his not being a time-server. None the less, he did want
success.
`It's quite true, you can't live without cash,' said May. `You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be
free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops
you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to
talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who
inclines us that way?'
`There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.
`Lascivious! well, why not---? I can't see I do a woman any more harm
by sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her about
the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why
not?'
`Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.
`Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?'
`But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.
`Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death.
Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me
disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?'
`I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.
`Not it! I don't over-eat myself and I don't over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'
`Not at all! You can marry.'
`How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental processes. I'm not properly
pivoted that way...and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot
and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women
sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody's moral
condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around
with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe
trunk.'
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
`It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes, `that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's
quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with
women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of
normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a
woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with any
interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in
common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...'
`If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you
ought to sleep with her,' said May. `It's the only decent thing, to go to
bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the Only
decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put your tongue
between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the
other way.'
`No,' said Hammond. `It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do, with
a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'
`Maybe it does...and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy,
married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's
going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what
I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
`Go it, you two minds!' he said. `Look at me...I don't do any high and
pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry
nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after
the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him
from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the
straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an
English Man of Letters before he's done. A.B.C. from top to toe. Then
there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you
think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?'
Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
`Well!' he said, `being myself hors de combat, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter.'
`Not at all,' said Dukes; `the top of you's by no means hors de combat.
You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your
ideas.'
`Well,' stammered Clifford, `even then I don't suppose I have much
idea...I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand for
what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for one
another, it is a great thing.'
`What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.
`Oh...it perfects the intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.
`Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's natural for
me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season. Unfortunately no
woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself; and am
none the worse for it...I hope so, anyway, for how should I know? Anyhow
I've no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works to
write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in the army...'
Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be
quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations
of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn't get
on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much
more hedgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence,
and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired
by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a
mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a
little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.
How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get
anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say,
especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and
touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was
great fun! But what cold minds!
And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for
Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a
little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel
and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk
round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind.
Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of
it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there,
amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies, as she
called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused, and proud too,
that even their talking they could not do, without her silent presence. She
had an immense respect for thought...and these men, at least, tried to think
honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike
talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't
say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either.
But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across him.
He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies had
against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more
or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least.
There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation
drifted again to love.
`Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in kindred something-or-other'---
said Tommy Dukes. `I'd like to know what the tie is...The tie that
binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that,
there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things
about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world.
Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust
apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by
saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to
flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has
been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer
spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to
bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other
little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer
Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples
little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No,
there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in
spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'
`I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.
`My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the
spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they are poison; when I
begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then poor Clifford
is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me,
then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done.'
`Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.
`I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about
one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'
`And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he
did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had
such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so ex
cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.
Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
`That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,'
said Hammond.
`They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
`I wasn't talking about knowledge...I was talking about the mental
life,' laughed Dukes. `Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the
consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain
and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the
reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and
make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the
world needs criticizing today...criticizing to death. Therefore let's live
the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But,
mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an
Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck
the apple. You've severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the
organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental
life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree.
And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural
necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.'
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
`Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.
`So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.
`But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
`Bravo!' roared Charlie. `What do you think of Bolshevism?'
`Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.
`I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.
`Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, `is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.
`Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he
must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the
Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be
mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many
different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a
machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate...hate of the
bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'
`Absolutely!' said Tommy. `But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-owner's
ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was
hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these
Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up...but it's all part of the life of
the mind, it's a logical development.'
`I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses,' said Hammond.
`My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure
mind...exclusively.'
`At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.
`Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment.
`But this thing can't go on...this hate business. There must be a
reaction...' said Hammond.
`Well, we've been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate's a growing
thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to
life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force
according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula, like a
machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the roost turns
into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians
are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'
`But there are many other ways,' said Hammond, `than the Soviet way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'
`Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if
you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted;
but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted. So I even
consider our far-famed mental life half-witted. We're all as cold as
cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're all of us Bolshevists,
only we give it another name. We think we're gods...men like gods! It's just
the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if
one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the
same thing: they're both too good to be true.'
Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
`You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'
`You lovely lad!' said Tommy. `No, my cherub, nine times out of ten,
no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with
swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two
collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property,
make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I
don't believe in it at all!'
`But you do believe in something?'
`Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say "shit!" in front of a
lady.'
`Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.
Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. `You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never
lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front
of my mother or my aunt...they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really
intelligent, I'm only a "mental-lifer". It would be wonderful to be
intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and
unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do?---to any
really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his
penis...he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God!
when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started
it.'
`There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up
and speaking at last.
The men resented it...she should have pretended to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.
`My God! "If they be not nice to me What care I how nice they be?"
`No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not
going to start forcing myself to it...My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and
lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be quite
happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure!
What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'
`It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.
`Yes, life is all too simple!'
On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie
went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in
his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.
The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round
the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the
top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure,
always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.
The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay
bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the
wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with
sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld
had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured
on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour,
with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot
of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.
Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel
thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge
rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went
trailing off over the little sky.
Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into
the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets
of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood
hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country.
But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road
from Mansfield swerved round to the north.
In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground
keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little
birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed
off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now
Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place
inviolate, shut off from the world.
The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was
nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here
and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots,
lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the
brushwood and rubbish.
This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where
the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over
the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie
had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It
let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.
This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till
he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir
Geoffrey.
Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very
jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding
downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the
bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of
knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
`I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
`Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.
`I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'
`Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to
notice.
`I want this wood perfect...untouched. I want nobody to trespass in
it,' said Clifford.
There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a
blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs
against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown
bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been
deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered,
still remembered.
Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
`I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.
`But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.
`Quite!' said Clifford. `But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!'
`Must one?' said Connie. `If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'
`If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. `And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling
for it, must preserve it.'
There was a sad pause. `Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.
`For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One
may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was
a pause.
`What tradition?' asked Connie.
`The tradition of England! of this!'
`Yes,' she said slowly.
`That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he
said.
Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
`I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.
He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
`It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he
said. `If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the
place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to
rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth
dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he
looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent,
enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and
the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that
momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the
Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming
through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of
sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion,
amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a
bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much
stupider!
Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his
full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He
was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the
English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even
love. Yet women sometimes fell for him...Englishwomen too.
He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which
would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead,
perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before
lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis,
restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine
November...day fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God!
What a place!
He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady
Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he
care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the
central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of
course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own
parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed things, or
had contact with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round
at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cиzanne.
`It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to the top.'
`Yes, I think so,' she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in
Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen
it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She
asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers...other people
were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened
she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about
himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in
his success.
`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a
lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few
moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'
`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.
`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are,
aren't you?'
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.
`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is
hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her
power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was
crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.
`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.
`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to
utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked
suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out
an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled
beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried his
face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and dazed,
looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck,
feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could
not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion, on the
defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.
Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing
eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the
answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman,
trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of
every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at
length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then,
with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that lay on her
breast.
When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their
suхde slippers, and in silence went away to the end of the room, where he
stood with his back to her. There was silence for some minutes. Then he
turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.
`And now, I suppose you'll hate me!' he said in a quiet, inevitable
way. She looked up at him quickly.
`Why should I?' she asked.
`They mostly do,' he said; then he caught himself up. `I mean...a woman
is supposed to.'
`This is the last moment when I ought to hate you,' she said
resentfully.
`I know! I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...' he
cried miserably.
She wondered why he should be miserable. `Won't you sit down again?'
she said. He glanced at the door.
`Sir Clifford!' he said, `won't he...won't he be...?' She paused a
moment to consider. `Perhaps!' she said. And she looked up at him. `I don't
want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It would hurt him so much. But I
don't think it's wrong, do you?'
`Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too infinitely good to me...I can
hardly bear it.'
He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be
sobbing.
`But we needn't let Clifford know, need we?' she pleaded. `It would
hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.'
`Me!' he said, almost fiercely; `he'll know nothing from me! You see if
he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!' he laughed hollowly, cynically, at
such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to her: `May I kiss your
hand arid go? I'll run into Sheffield I think, and lunch there, if I may,
and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you don't hate
me?---and that you won't?'---he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.
`No, I don't hate you,' she said. `I think you're nice.'
`Ah!' he said to her fiercely, `I'd rather you said that to me than
said you love me! It means such a lot more...Till afternoon then. I've
plenty to think about till then.' He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.
`I don't think I can stand that young man,' said Clifford at lunch.
`Why?' asked Connie.
`He's such a bounder underneath his veneer...just waiting to bounce
us.'
`I think people have been so unkind to him,' said Connie.
`Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours doing
deeds of kindness?'
`I think he has a certain sort of generosity.'
`Towards whom?'
`I don't quite know.'
`Naturally you don't. I'm afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for
generosity.'
Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness
of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where
Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In his way he had conquered the
world, which was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those
of Michaelis more despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor
outsider had shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back
doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence?
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping, dogs with
lolling tongues. The one that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if
you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.
The queer thing was, he didn't. He came back towards tea-time with a
large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog expression.
Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to disarm opposition,
because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?
His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though
through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel it,
perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against men, and
their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible, inward effrontery
in the meagre fellow was what made men so down on Michaelis. His very
presence was an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he might in an
assumed good manner.
Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery
and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for Michaelis, he was
perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive, aloof young fellow of the
previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically
playing up to them to the required amount, and never coming forth to them
for a moment. Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not
forgotten. But he knew where he was...in the same old place outside, where
the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-making altogether
personally. He knew it would not change him from an ownerless dog, whom
everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an
outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how
Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him;
just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was
also a necessity.
But occasional love, as a comfort arid soothing, was also a good thing,
and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly, poignantly
grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness: almost to tears.
Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing
with gratitude to the woman, and burning to come to her again; just as his
outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.
He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the
candles in the hall:
`May I come?'
`I'll come to you,' she said.
`Oh, good!'
He waited for her a long time...but she came.
He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and
was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about
his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and
cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were in abeyance he
seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and
somehow struggling helplessly.
He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning, and a
wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not satisfy in
her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her
breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed,
disappointed, lost.
But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when
his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he
stayed firm inside her, giving to her, while she was active...wildly,
passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of
her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity,
he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.
`Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously, and she became quite still,
clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.
He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly
the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down
his external man.
He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever,
sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind of
hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential remoteness
remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to
be hopeless. He rather hated hope. `Une immense espиrance a traversи la
terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:`---and it's darned-well
drowned everything worth having.'
Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And
all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She
couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't
ever quite love at all.
So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally in
London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him
by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to
give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.
And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind
and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in her own
powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused
cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote his
best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way. He really
reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male
passivity erect inside her. But of course he never knew it, and if he had,
he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus were
gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how Clifford longed
for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might even have wished to get her
and Michaelis together again.
Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She
was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it
to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford
did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But,
as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end. Mick couldn't keep
anything up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any
connexion, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his
major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the
sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if
you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good
fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to
see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they weren't
mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and was
a Brigadier-General. `The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from
having to face the battle of life,' he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age as
Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life
of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private affair, and
didn't much matter. No one thinks of inquiring of another person at what
hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person
concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have `affairs'. All these
matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the privy,
have no interest for anyone else.
`The whole point about the sexual problem,' said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, `is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why
should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein liehe
problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the other, there'd
be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless; a matter of
misplaced curiosity.'
`Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point.'...Julia
was Hammond's wife.
`Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'
`You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?'
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
`Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'
`As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: `As a matter
of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to
self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army
definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how
inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It
is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of
course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing.
That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you...a vital little
dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be
unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful.
Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers'
trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs Arnold B. Hammond---just like a trunk on the
railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B. Hammond,
c/o Mrs Arnold B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The
life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite
right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for
success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.'
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of
his mind, and of his not being a time-server. None the less, he did want
success.
`It's quite true, you can't live without cash,' said May. `You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be
free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops
you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to
talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who
inclines us that way?'
`There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.
`Lascivious! well, why not---? I can't see I do a woman any more harm
by sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her about
the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why
not?'
`Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.
`Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?'
`But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.
`Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death.
Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere with me
disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?'
`I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.
`Not it! I don't over-eat myself and I don't over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'
`Not at all! You can marry.'
`How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental processes. I'm not properly
pivoted that way...and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot
and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I need women
sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse anybody's moral
condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around
with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe
trunk.'
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
`It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes, `that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's
quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with
women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of
normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a
woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with any
interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in
common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...'
`If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you
ought to sleep with her,' said May. `It's the only decent thing, to go to
bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone, the Only
decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put your tongue
between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say. And the same the
other way.'
`No,' said Hammond. `It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do, with
a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'
`Maybe it does...and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy,
married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's
going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what
I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
`Go it, you two minds!' he said. `Look at me...I don't do any high and
pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry
nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after
the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him
from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the
straight road and the narrow gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an
English Man of Letters before he's done. A.B.C. from top to toe. Then
there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you
think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?'
Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
`Well!' he said, `being myself hors de combat, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter.'
`Not at all,' said Dukes; `the top of you's by no means hors de combat.
You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your
ideas.'
`Well,' stammered Clifford, `even then I don't suppose I have much
idea...I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand for
what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for one
another, it is a great thing.'
`What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.
`Oh...it perfects the intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.
`Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's natural for
me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season. Unfortunately no
woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself; and am
none the worse for it...I hope so, anyway, for how should I know? Anyhow
I've no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works to
write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in the army...'
Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be
quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations
of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn't get
on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much
more hedgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence,
and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired
by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a
mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a
little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.
How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get
anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say,
especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and
touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was
great fun! But what cold minds!
And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for
Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a
little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel
and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk
round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind.
Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of
it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there,
amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies, as she
called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused, and proud too,
that even their talking they could not do, without her silent presence. She
had an immense respect for thought...and these men, at least, tried to think
honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike
talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't
say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either.
But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across him.
He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies had
against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more
or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least.
There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation
drifted again to love.
`Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in kindred something-or-other'---
said Tommy Dukes. `I'd like to know what the tie is...The tie that
binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that,
there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things
about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world.
Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust
apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by
saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to
flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has
been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer
spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to
bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other
little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer
Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples
little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No,
there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in
spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'
`I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.
`My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the
spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they are poison; when I
begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then poor Clifford
is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me,
then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done.'
`Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.
`I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about
one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'
`And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he
did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had
such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so ex
cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.
Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
`That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,'
said Hammond.
`They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
`I wasn't talking about knowledge...I was talking about the mental
life,' laughed Dukes. `Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the
consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain
and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the
reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and
make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the
world needs criticizing today...criticizing to death. Therefore let's live
the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But,
mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an
Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck
the apple. You've severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the
organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental
life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree.
And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural
necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.'
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
`Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.
`So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.
`But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
`Bravo!' roared Charlie. `What do you think of Bolshevism?'
`Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.
`I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.
`Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, `is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.
`Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he
must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the
Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be
mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many
different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a
machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate...hate of the
bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'
`Absolutely!' said Tommy. `But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-owner's
ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was
hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these
Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up...but it's all part of the life of
the mind, it's a logical development.'
`I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses,' said Hammond.
`My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure
mind...exclusively.'
`At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.
`Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment.
`But this thing can't go on...this hate business. There must be a
reaction...' said Hammond.
`Well, we've been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate's a growing
thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to
life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force
according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula, like a
machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the roost turns
into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians
are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'
`But there are many other ways,' said Hammond, `than the Soviet way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'
`Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if
you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted;
but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted. So I even
consider our far-famed mental life half-witted. We're all as cold as
cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're all of us Bolshevists,
only we give it another name. We think we're gods...men like gods! It's just
the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if
one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the
same thing: they're both too good to be true.'
Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
`You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'
`You lovely lad!' said Tommy. `No, my cherub, nine times out of ten,
no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with
swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two
collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property,
make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I
don't believe in it at all!'
`But you do believe in something?'
`Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say "shit!" in front of a
lady.'
`Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.
Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. `You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never
lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front
of my mother or my aunt...they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really
intelligent, I'm only a "mental-lifer". It would be wonderful to be
intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and
unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do?---to any
really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his
penis...he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God!
when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started
it.'
`There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up
and speaking at last.
The men resented it...she should have pretended to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.
`My God! "If they be not nice to me What care I how nice they be?"
`No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not
going to start forcing myself to it...My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and
lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be quite
happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure!
What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'
`It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.
`Yes, life is all too simple!'
On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie
went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in
his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.
The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round
the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the
top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure,
always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.
The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay
bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the
wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with
sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld
had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured
on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour,
with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot
of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.
Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel
thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge
rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went
trailing off over the little sky.
Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into
the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets
of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood
hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country.
But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road
from Mansfield swerved round to the north.
In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground
keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little
birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed
off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now
Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place
inviolate, shut off from the world.
The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was
nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here
and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots,
lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the
brushwood and rubbish.
This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where
the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over
the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie
had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It
let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.
This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till
he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir
Geoffrey.
Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very
jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding
downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the
bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of
knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
`I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
`Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.
`I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'
`Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to
notice.
`I want this wood perfect...untouched. I want nobody to trespass in
it,' said Clifford.
There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a
blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs
against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown
bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been
deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered,
still remembered.
Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
`I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.
`But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.
`Quite!' said Clifford. `But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!'
`Must one?' said Connie. `If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'
`If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. `And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling
for it, must preserve it.'
There was a sad pause. `Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.
`For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One
may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was
a pause.
`What tradition?' asked Connie.
`The tradition of England! of this!'
`Yes,' she said slowly.
`That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he
said.
Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
`I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.
He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
`It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he
said. `If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the
place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to
rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth