considering?'
Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an `it'
to him. It...it...it!
`But what about the other man?' she asked.
`Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very
deeply?...You had that lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing almost. It
seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in
our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they?
Where...Where are the snows of yesteryear?...It's what endures through one's
life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and
development. But what do the occasional connexions matter? And the
occasional sexual connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them
ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What
does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the
living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice.
You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of
each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional
excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing...that's what we live by...not
the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two
people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one
another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the
simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick
to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going
to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'
Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so
she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her
marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through
years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions,
and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come
home again.
`And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.
`Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'
She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the
wrong sort of fellow.
`But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of
fellow,' she said.
`No,' he replied. `You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care
for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'
She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so
absolutely wrong.
`And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him
almost furtively.
`Not at all, I'd better not know...But you do agree with me, don't you,
that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived
together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven to?
After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of
life the slow building up of an integral personality, through the years?
living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack
of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love-affair. If
lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you
possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life,
that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that
together...don't you think?...if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and
at the same time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our
steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'
Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right
theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life with
him she...hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself
into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?
Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with
him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an
adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could
one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes,
gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of
course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and
no's! Like the straying of butterflies.
`I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'
`But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'
`Oh yes! I think I do, really.'
She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and
was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man
with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if
about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning
downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had frightened Connie, he
seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That was how she had seen him,
like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.
He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters...the old style, with
a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly
downhill.
`Mellors!' called Clifford.
The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a
soldier!
`Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it
easier,' said Clifford.
The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with
the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He was
moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie at all,
only at the chair.
`Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?'
`No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.
The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair
hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her feel
shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand
and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He
remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.
`But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.
`Eight months, Madam...your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.
`And do you like it?'
She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony,
perhaps with impudence.
`Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'
He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take
hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy
broad drag of the dialect...perhaps also in mockery, because there had been
no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman. Anyhow, he was a
curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of himself.
Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark hazel
thicket.
`Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.
`No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't
really strong enough for the uphill work.' The man glanced round for his
dog...a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly moved its
tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came into his eyes
for a moment, then faded away, and his face was expressionless. They went
fairly quickly down the slope, the man with his hand on the rail of the
chair, steadying it. He looked like a free soldier rather than a servant.
And something about him reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.
When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward, and
opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men looked
at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a curious, cool
wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked like. And she saw in his
blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain
warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?
Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came
quickly, courteously, to close it.
`Why did you run to open?' asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. `Mellors would have done it.'
`I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie. `And leave you to
run after us?' said Clifford.
`Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'
Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise of the
knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted lips. He was
rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail and
quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.
Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over; the
small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed
in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was going to snow.
All grey, all grey! the world looked worn out.
The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for
Connie.
`Not tired, are you?' he said.
`Oh, no!' she said.
But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But
the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn
out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.
They came to the house, and around to the back, where there were no
steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled
house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms. Then Connie lifted
the burden of his dead legs after him.
The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he saw
Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair,
Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
`Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors,' said Clifford casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
`Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
`Nothing, good morning!'
`Good morning, Sir.'
`Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill...I
hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper
outside the door.
His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.
`Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: `Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'
`Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.
`Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.
`Yes, but where did he come from?'
`Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'
`And was he a collier himself?'
`Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was
keeper here for two years before the war...before he joined up. My father
always had a good Opinion of him, so when he came back, and went to the pit
for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really
very glad to get him...its almost impossible to find a good man round here
for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the people.'
`And isn't he married?'
`He was. But his wife went off with...with various men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'
`So this man is alone?'
`More or less! He has a mother in the village...and a child, I
believe.'
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground,
but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the
body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise,
which Only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
So it was with Clifford. Once he was `well', once he was back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been so deep as to be
numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to assert itself in a
spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still was alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as it were,
command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her having a
child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all the brilliant
words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They were not the leafy
words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a
manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in
abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of
unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep...the
bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living
blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood,
deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life that affected her. Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to
feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a
habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became
utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only
reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His
photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had
become in four or five years one of the best known of the young
`intellectuals'. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see.
Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and
motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like
puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and
playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird
and it was nothing. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the
bottom of Connie's soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of
nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!
Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play;
already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of nothingness.
It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the passion for making a
display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money
that Michaelis was after. Clifford had never been primarily out for money,
though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of
success. And success was what they wanted. They wanted, both of them, to
make a real display...a man's own very display of himself that should
capture for a time the vast populace.
It was strange...the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the
thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the
bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed
again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage. He
invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede
gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a great
success. Even Connie was thrilled...thrilled to what bit of marrow she had
left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill, was really
wonderful...and quite beautiful, in Connie's eyes. She saw in him that
ancient motionlessness of a race that can't be disillusioned any more, an
extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure. On the far side of his supreme
prostitution to the bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory
mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply
carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of
Michaelis' life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even Clifford
was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can put it.
So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited him
in the night...and he had not known where to find her. Coquetry!...at his
moment of triumph.
He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play...did she
think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the last
thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised it
rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew it was
nothing.
`Look here!' he said suddenly at last. `Why don't you and I make a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'
`But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
`Oh that!...he'll divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
`But I am married already,' she said. `I can't leave Clifford, you
know.'
`Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
`Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
`Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But
that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic. `Now I consider,' he added, `I can give a woman the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
`And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
`Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of good
time.'
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even
her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been
thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn't `go off'. She just
sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her
almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her
to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say
Yes!---who can tell?
`I should have to think about it,' she said. `I couldn't say now. It
may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how
disabled he is...'
`Oh damn it all! If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I
might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest
of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing
but disabilities to recommend him...'
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:
`You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'
`All right!' she said.
He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he
had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had
finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically
kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self-offering,
till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost
sneering little voice:
`You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'
This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life.
Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real
mode of intercourse.
`What do you mean?' she said.
`You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own
exertions.'
She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment
when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of
love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished
almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
`But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.
He laughed grimly: `I want it!' he said. `That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'
`But don't you?' she insisted.
He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or else
they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to bring
themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She
was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
`But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
`Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he
started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
`Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
`Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
Connie pondered this.
`Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
`I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this
moment?'
`Yes, talking...'
`And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'
`Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'
`A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time
love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually
exclusive.'
`But they shouldn't be!'
`No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in
wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I
don't love them and desire them. The two things don't happen at the same
time in me.'
`I think they ought to.'
`All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.
Connie considered this. `It isn't true,' she said. `Men can love women
and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them without talking, and
being friendly and intimate. How can they?'
`Well,' he said, `I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking
to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction,
sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you
are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special
case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate
them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.
`But doesn't it make you sad?'
`Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the
men who have affairs...No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman
I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see
one...why, I presume I'm cold, and really like some women very much.'
`Do you like me?'
`Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is
there?'
`None at all!' said Connie. `But oughtn't there to be?'
`Why, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went
and kissed him?'
`But isn't there a difference?'
`Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent
human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in
abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male
at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'
`I should hate it.'
`Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run
across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just like women.
Who's going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up
the sex game?'
`No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'
`You may feel it, I don't.'
`Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'
`Has a man for a woman?'
She pondered the other side of the question.
`Not much,' she said truthfully.
`Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like
proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial
sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'
Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn,
so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the
point, of her or anything?
It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold.
Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no
good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even
Michaelis didn't.
And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex
game, they were worse than ever.
It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true,
men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into
thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was
the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to
it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and
jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it
out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly
thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed
somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no
prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life
one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just
mooning yourself into the grave.
On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood,
ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of
a gun not far off startled and angered her.
Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn't
want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was
a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She
strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She
felt just prepared to make a scene.
Turning the corner, she saw two figures in the drive beyond her: the
keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.
`Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice,
and the child sobbed louder.
Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked
at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.
`What's the matter? Why is she crying?' demanded Constance, peremptory
but a little breathless.
A faint smile like a sneer came on the man's face. `Nay, yo mun ax
'er,' he replied callously, in broad vernacular.
Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour.
Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes
blazing rather vaguely.
`I asked you,' she panted.
He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. `You did, your Ladyship,'
he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: `but I canna tell yer.' And
he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.
Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten.
`What is it, dear? Tell me why you're crying!' she said, with the
conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious.
Still more sweetness on Connie's part.
`There, there, don't you cry! Tell me what they've done to you!'...an
intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of her
knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.
`Don't you cry then!' she said, bending in front of the child. `See
what I've got for you!'
Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd
eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. `There,
tell me what's the matter, tell me!' said Connie, putting the coin into the
child's chubby hand, which closed over it.
`It's the...it's the...pussy!'
Shudders of subsiding sobs.
`What pussy, dear?'
After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the
bramble brake.
`There!'
Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched
out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.
`Oh!' she said in repulsion.
`A poacher, your Ladyship,' said the man satirically.
She glanced at him angrily. `No wonder the child cried,' she said, `if
you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!'
He looked into Connie's eyes, laconic, contemptuous, not hiding his
feelings. And again Connie flushed; she felt she had been making a scene,
the man did not respect her.
`What is your name?' she said playfully to the child. `Won't you tell
me your name?'
Sniffs; then very affectedly in a piping voice: `Connie Mellors!'
`Connie Mellors! Well, that's a nice name! And did you come out with
your Daddy, and he shot a pussy? But it was a bad pussy!'
The child looked at her, with bold, dark eyes of scrutiny, sizing her
up, and her condolence.
`I wanted to stop with my Gran,' said the little girl.
`Did you? But where is your Gran?'
The child lifted an arm, pointing down the drive. `At th' cottidge.'
`At the cottage! And would you like to go back to her?'
Sudden, shuddering quivers of reminiscent sobs. `Yes!'
`Come then, shall I take you? Shall I take you to your Gran? Then your
Daddy can do what he has to do.' She turned to the man. `It is your little
girl, isn't it?'
He saluted, and made a slight movement of the head in affirmation.
`I suppose I can take her to the cottage?' asked Connie.
`If your Ladyship wishes.'
Again he looked into her eyes, with that calm, searching detached
glance. A man very much alone, and on his own.
`Would you like to come with me to the cottage, to your Gran, dear?'
The child peeped up again. `Yes!' she simpered.
Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little female. Nevertheless she
wiped her face and took her hand. The keeper saluted in silence.
`Good morning!' said Connie.
It was nearly a mile to the cottage, and Connie senior was well red by
Connie junior by the time the game-keeper's picturesque little home was in
sight. The child was already as full to the brim with tricks as a little
monkey, and so self-assured.
At the cottage the door stood open, and there was a rattling heard
inside. Connie lingered, the child slipped her hand, and ran indoors.
`Gran! Gran!'
`Why, are yer back a'ready!'
The grandmother had been blackleading the stove, it was Saturday
morning. She came to the door in her sacking apron, a blacklead-brush in her
hand, and a black smudge on her nose. She was a little, rather dry woman.
`Why, whatever?' she said, hastily wiping her arm across her face as
she saw Connie standing outside.
`Good morning!' said Connie. `She was crying, so I just brought her
home.'
The grandmother looked around swiftly at the child:
`Why, wheer was yer Dad?'
The little girl clung to her grandmother's skirts and simpered.
`He was there,' said Connie, `but he'd shot a poaching cat, and the
child was upset.'
`Oh, you'd no right t'ave bothered, Lady Chatterley, I'm sure! I'm sure
it was very good of you, but you shouldn't 'ave bothered. Why, did ever you
see!'---and the old woman turned to the child: `Fancy Lady Chatterley takin'
all that trouble over yer! Why, she shouldn't 'ave bothered!'
`It was no bother, just a walk,' said Connie smiling.
`Why, I'm sure 'twas very kind of you, I must say! So she was crying! I
knew there'd be something afore they got far. She's frightened of 'im,
that's wheer it is. Seems 'e's almost a stranger to 'er, fair a stranger,
and I don't think they're two as'd hit it off very easy. He's got funny
ways.'
Connie didn't know what to say.
`Look, Gran!' simpered the child.
The old woman looked down at the sixpence in the little girl's hand.
`An' sixpence an' all! Oh, your Ladyship, you shouldn't, you shouldn't.
Why, isn't Lady Chatterley good to yer! My word, you're a lucky girl this
morning!'
She pronounced the name, as all the people did: Chat'ley.---Isn't Lady
Chat'ley good to you!'---Connie couldn't help looking at the old woman's
nose, and the latter again vaguely wiped her face with the back of her
wrist, but missed the smudge.
Connie was moving away `Well, thank you ever so much, Lady Chat'ley,
I'm sure. Say thank you to Lady Chat'ley!'---this last to the child.
`Thank you,' piped the child.
`There's a dear!' laughed Connie, and she moved away, saying `Good
morning', heartily relieved to get away from the contact.
Curious, she thought, that that thin, proud man should have that
little, sharp woman for a mother!
And the old woman, as soon as Connie had gone, rushed to the bit of
mirror in the scullery, and looked at her face. Seeing it, she stamped her
foot with impatience. `Of course she had to catch me in my coarse apron, and
a dirty face! Nice idea she'd get of me!'
Connie went slowly home to Wragby. `Home!'...it was a warm word to use
for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day.
It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were
cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father,
husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from
day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool
yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness
was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an
individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with
and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was
just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then
left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you
were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.
All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was
a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase
after phase, иtape after иtape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So
that's that! Always this was the last utterance: home, love, marriage,
Michaelis: So that's that! And when one died, the last words to life would
be: So that's that!
Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always
wanted. Money, Success, the bitch-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in
calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You couldn't
spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's that! No, if you lived even
another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just
to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have
it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's
that!
Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are
alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest
you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's
that!
She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him;
and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which she
helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to
make.---`Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of
writing'; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere.
Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest
all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.
So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make
another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford seemed
to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class literature
or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in it! said her father. Twelve
hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.
If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on,
till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power.
It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out
of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money a word
on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it was triumph. The
bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself, let it be to a
bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while one prostituted
oneself to her, which was good.
Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He
wanted to be thought `really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense.
What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being
really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the `really
good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you
missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of
the failures.
Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.
He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on top
for a bit, and show it.
The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to
fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche coming
out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism of the
consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it
all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?
Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to
herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!
Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That
seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted nothing
more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with what she'd got:
Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business, money and fame,
such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with it all. Love, sex, all that
sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don't hang
on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially...nothing! Make up your
mind to it, and you've solved the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both
lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same
thing.
But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would
venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and
it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose children you wanted.
Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a child to a rabbit! Tommy
Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate him with a baby,
another generation. He ended in himself. And out of all the rest of
Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was not a man who did not rouse
her contempt, when she thought of having a child by him. There were several
who would have been quite possible as lover, even Mick. But to let them
Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an `it'
to him. It...it...it!
`But what about the other man?' she asked.
`Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very
deeply?...You had that lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing almost. It
seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in
our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they?
Where...Where are the snows of yesteryear?...It's what endures through one's
life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and
development. But what do the occasional connexions matter? And the
occasional sexual connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them
ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What
does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the
living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice.
You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of
each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional
excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing...that's what we live by...not
the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two
people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one
another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the
simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick
to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going
to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'
Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so
she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her
marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through
years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions,
and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come
home again.
`And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.
`Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'
She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the
wrong sort of fellow.
`But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of
fellow,' she said.
`No,' he replied. `You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care
for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'
She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so
absolutely wrong.
`And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him
almost furtively.
`Not at all, I'd better not know...But you do agree with me, don't you,
that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived
together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven to?
After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of
life the slow building up of an integral personality, through the years?
living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack
of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love-affair. If
lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you
possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life,
that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that
together...don't you think?...if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and
at the same time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our
steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'
Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right
theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life with
him she...hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself
into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?
Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with
him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an
adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could
one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes,
gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of
course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and
no's! Like the straying of butterflies.
`I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'
`But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'
`Oh yes! I think I do, really.'
She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and
was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man
with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if
about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning
downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had frightened Connie, he
seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That was how she had seen him,
like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.
He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters...the old style, with
a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly
downhill.
`Mellors!' called Clifford.
The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a
soldier!
`Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it
easier,' said Clifford.
The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with
the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He was
moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie at all,
only at the chair.
`Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?'
`No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.
The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair
hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her feel
shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand
and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He
remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.
`But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.
`Eight months, Madam...your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.
`And do you like it?'
She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony,
perhaps with impudence.
`Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'
He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take
hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy
broad drag of the dialect...perhaps also in mockery, because there had been
no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman. Anyhow, he was a
curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of himself.
Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark hazel
thicket.
`Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.
`No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't
really strong enough for the uphill work.' The man glanced round for his
dog...a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly moved its
tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came into his eyes
for a moment, then faded away, and his face was expressionless. They went
fairly quickly down the slope, the man with his hand on the rail of the
chair, steadying it. He looked like a free soldier rather than a servant.
And something about him reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.
When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward, and
opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men looked
at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a curious, cool
wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked like. And she saw in his
blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and detachment, yet a certain
warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?
Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came
quickly, courteously, to close it.
`Why did you run to open?' asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. `Mellors would have done it.'
`I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie. `And leave you to
run after us?' said Clifford.
`Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'
Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise of the
knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted lips. He was
rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail and
quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.
Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over; the
small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed
in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was going to snow.
All grey, all grey! the world looked worn out.
The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for
Connie.
`Not tired, are you?' he said.
`Oh, no!' she said.
But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But
the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and life seemed worn
out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.
They came to the house, and around to the back, where there were no
steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled
house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms. Then Connie lifted
the burden of his dead legs after him.
The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he saw
Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair,
Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
`Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors,' said Clifford casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
`Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
`Nothing, good morning!'
`Good morning, Sir.'
`Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill...I
hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper
outside the door.
His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.
`Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: `Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'
`Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.
`Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.
`Yes, but where did he come from?'
`Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'
`And was he a collier himself?'
`Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was
keeper here for two years before the war...before he joined up. My father
always had a good Opinion of him, so when he came back, and went to the pit
for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really
very glad to get him...its almost impossible to find a good man round here
for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the people.'
`And isn't he married?'
`He was. But his wife went off with...with various men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'
`So this man is alone?'
`More or less! He has a mother in the village...and a child, I
believe.'
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground,
but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the
body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise,
which Only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
So it was with Clifford. Once he was `well', once he was back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been so deep as to be
numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to assert itself in a
spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still was alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as it were,
command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her having a
child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all the brilliant
words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They were not the leafy
words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a
manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in
abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of
unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep...the
bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living
blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood,
deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life that affected her. Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to
feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a
habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became
utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only
reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His
photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had
become in four or five years one of the best known of the young
`intellectuals'. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see.
Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and
motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like
puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and
playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird
and it was nothing. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the
bottom of Connie's soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of
nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!
Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play;
already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of nothingness.
It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the passion for making a
display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money
that Michaelis was after. Clifford had never been primarily out for money,
though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of
success. And success was what they wanted. They wanted, both of them, to
make a real display...a man's own very display of himself that should
capture for a time the vast populace.
It was strange...the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the
thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the
bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed
again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage. He
invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede
gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a great
success. Even Connie was thrilled...thrilled to what bit of marrow she had
left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill, was really
wonderful...and quite beautiful, in Connie's eyes. She saw in him that
ancient motionlessness of a race that can't be disillusioned any more, an
extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure. On the far side of his supreme
prostitution to the bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory
mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply
carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of
Michaelis' life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even Clifford
was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can put it.
So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited him
in the night...and he had not known where to find her. Coquetry!...at his
moment of triumph.
He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play...did she
think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the last
thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised it
rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew it was
nothing.
`Look here!' he said suddenly at last. `Why don't you and I make a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'
`But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
`Oh that!...he'll divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
`But I am married already,' she said. `I can't leave Clifford, you
know.'
`Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
`Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
`Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But
that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic. `Now I consider,' he added, `I can give a woman the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
`And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
`Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of good
time.'
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even
her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been
thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn't `go off'. She just
sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her
almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her
to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say
Yes!---who can tell?
`I should have to think about it,' she said. `I couldn't say now. It
may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how
disabled he is...'
`Oh damn it all! If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I
might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest
of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing
but disabilities to recommend him...'
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:
`You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'
`All right!' she said.
He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he
had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving passion in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he had
finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her loins, while he heroically
kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will and self-offering,
till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost
sneering little voice:
`You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'
This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life.
Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only real
mode of intercourse.
`What do you mean?' she said.
`You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own
exertions.'
She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment
when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort of
love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was finished
almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
`But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.
He laughed grimly: `I want it!' he said. `That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'
`But don't you?' she insisted.
He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or else
they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to bring
themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman yet who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She
was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
`But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
`Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he
started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
`Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
`Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
Connie pondered this.
`Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
`I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this
moment?'
`Yes, talking...'
`And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'
`Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'
`A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time
love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually
exclusive.'
`But they shouldn't be!'
`No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in
wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore I
don't love them and desire them. The two things don't happen at the same
time in me.'
`I think they ought to.'
`All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.
Connie considered this. `It isn't true,' she said. `Men can love women
and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them without talking, and
being friendly and intimate. How can they?'
`Well,' he said, `I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking
to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction,
sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you
are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special
case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate
them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.
`But doesn't it make you sad?'
`Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the
men who have affairs...No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman
I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see
one...why, I presume I'm cold, and really like some women very much.'
`Do you like me?'
`Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is
there?'
`None at all!' said Connie. `But oughtn't there to be?'
`Why, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went
and kissed him?'
`But isn't there a difference?'
`Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent
human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in
abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male
at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'
`I should hate it.'
`Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run
across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just like women.
Who's going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working up
the sex game?'
`No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'
`You may feel it, I don't.'
`Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'
`Has a man for a woman?'
She pondered the other side of the question.
`Not much,' she said truthfully.
`Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like
proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial
sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'
Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn,
so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the
point, of her or anything?
It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold.
Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no
good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even
Michaelis didn't.
And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex
game, they were worse than ever.
It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true,
men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into
thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was
the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to
it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and
jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it
out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly
thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed
somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no
prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life
one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just
mooning yourself into the grave.
On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood,
ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of
a gun not far off startled and angered her.
Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn't
want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was
a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She
strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She
felt just prepared to make a scene.
Turning the corner, she saw two figures in the drive beyond her: the
keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.
`Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice,
and the child sobbed louder.
Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked
at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.
`What's the matter? Why is she crying?' demanded Constance, peremptory
but a little breathless.
A faint smile like a sneer came on the man's face. `Nay, yo mun ax
'er,' he replied callously, in broad vernacular.
Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour.
Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes
blazing rather vaguely.
`I asked you,' she panted.
He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. `You did, your Ladyship,'
he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: `but I canna tell yer.' And
he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.
Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten.
`What is it, dear? Tell me why you're crying!' she said, with the
conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious.
Still more sweetness on Connie's part.
`There, there, don't you cry! Tell me what they've done to you!'...an
intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of her
knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.
`Don't you cry then!' she said, bending in front of the child. `See
what I've got for you!'
Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd
eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. `There,
tell me what's the matter, tell me!' said Connie, putting the coin into the
child's chubby hand, which closed over it.
`It's the...it's the...pussy!'
Shudders of subsiding sobs.
`What pussy, dear?'
After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the
bramble brake.
`There!'
Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched
out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.
`Oh!' she said in repulsion.
`A poacher, your Ladyship,' said the man satirically.
She glanced at him angrily. `No wonder the child cried,' she said, `if
you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!'
He looked into Connie's eyes, laconic, contemptuous, not hiding his
feelings. And again Connie flushed; she felt she had been making a scene,
the man did not respect her.
`What is your name?' she said playfully to the child. `Won't you tell
me your name?'
Sniffs; then very affectedly in a piping voice: `Connie Mellors!'
`Connie Mellors! Well, that's a nice name! And did you come out with
your Daddy, and he shot a pussy? But it was a bad pussy!'
The child looked at her, with bold, dark eyes of scrutiny, sizing her
up, and her condolence.
`I wanted to stop with my Gran,' said the little girl.
`Did you? But where is your Gran?'
The child lifted an arm, pointing down the drive. `At th' cottidge.'
`At the cottage! And would you like to go back to her?'
Sudden, shuddering quivers of reminiscent sobs. `Yes!'
`Come then, shall I take you? Shall I take you to your Gran? Then your
Daddy can do what he has to do.' She turned to the man. `It is your little
girl, isn't it?'
He saluted, and made a slight movement of the head in affirmation.
`I suppose I can take her to the cottage?' asked Connie.
`If your Ladyship wishes.'
Again he looked into her eyes, with that calm, searching detached
glance. A man very much alone, and on his own.
`Would you like to come with me to the cottage, to your Gran, dear?'
The child peeped up again. `Yes!' she simpered.
Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little female. Nevertheless she
wiped her face and took her hand. The keeper saluted in silence.
`Good morning!' said Connie.
It was nearly a mile to the cottage, and Connie senior was well red by
Connie junior by the time the game-keeper's picturesque little home was in
sight. The child was already as full to the brim with tricks as a little
monkey, and so self-assured.
At the cottage the door stood open, and there was a rattling heard
inside. Connie lingered, the child slipped her hand, and ran indoors.
`Gran! Gran!'
`Why, are yer back a'ready!'
The grandmother had been blackleading the stove, it was Saturday
morning. She came to the door in her sacking apron, a blacklead-brush in her
hand, and a black smudge on her nose. She was a little, rather dry woman.
`Why, whatever?' she said, hastily wiping her arm across her face as
she saw Connie standing outside.
`Good morning!' said Connie. `She was crying, so I just brought her
home.'
The grandmother looked around swiftly at the child:
`Why, wheer was yer Dad?'
The little girl clung to her grandmother's skirts and simpered.
`He was there,' said Connie, `but he'd shot a poaching cat, and the
child was upset.'
`Oh, you'd no right t'ave bothered, Lady Chatterley, I'm sure! I'm sure
it was very good of you, but you shouldn't 'ave bothered. Why, did ever you
see!'---and the old woman turned to the child: `Fancy Lady Chatterley takin'
all that trouble over yer! Why, she shouldn't 'ave bothered!'
`It was no bother, just a walk,' said Connie smiling.
`Why, I'm sure 'twas very kind of you, I must say! So she was crying! I
knew there'd be something afore they got far. She's frightened of 'im,
that's wheer it is. Seems 'e's almost a stranger to 'er, fair a stranger,
and I don't think they're two as'd hit it off very easy. He's got funny
ways.'
Connie didn't know what to say.
`Look, Gran!' simpered the child.
The old woman looked down at the sixpence in the little girl's hand.
`An' sixpence an' all! Oh, your Ladyship, you shouldn't, you shouldn't.
Why, isn't Lady Chatterley good to yer! My word, you're a lucky girl this
morning!'
She pronounced the name, as all the people did: Chat'ley.---Isn't Lady
Chat'ley good to you!'---Connie couldn't help looking at the old woman's
nose, and the latter again vaguely wiped her face with the back of her
wrist, but missed the smudge.
Connie was moving away `Well, thank you ever so much, Lady Chat'ley,
I'm sure. Say thank you to Lady Chat'ley!'---this last to the child.
`Thank you,' piped the child.
`There's a dear!' laughed Connie, and she moved away, saying `Good
morning', heartily relieved to get away from the contact.
Curious, she thought, that that thin, proud man should have that
little, sharp woman for a mother!
And the old woman, as soon as Connie had gone, rushed to the bit of
mirror in the scullery, and looked at her face. Seeing it, she stamped her
foot with impatience. `Of course she had to catch me in my coarse apron, and
a dirty face! Nice idea she'd get of me!'
Connie went slowly home to Wragby. `Home!'...it was a warm word to use
for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day.
It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were
cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father,
husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from
day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool
yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness
was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an
individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with
and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was
just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then
left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you
were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.
All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was
a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase
after phase, иtape after иtape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So
that's that! Always this was the last utterance: home, love, marriage,
Michaelis: So that's that! And when one died, the last words to life would
be: So that's that!
Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always
wanted. Money, Success, the bitch-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in
calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You couldn't
spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's that! No, if you lived even
another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just
to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have
it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's
that!
Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are
alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest
you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's
that!
She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him;
and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which she
helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to
make.---`Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of
writing'; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere.
Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest
all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.
So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make
another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford seemed
to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class literature
or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in it! said her father. Twelve
hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.
If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on,
till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power.
It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation of will out
of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money a word
on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it was triumph. The
bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself, let it be to a
bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while one prostituted
oneself to her, which was good.
Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He
wanted to be thought `really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense.
What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being
really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the `really
good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you
missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of
the failures.
Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.
He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on top
for a bit, and show it.
The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to
fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche coming
out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism of the
consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it
all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?
Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to
herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!
Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That
seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted nothing
more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with what she'd got:
Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business, money and fame,
such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with it all. Love, sex, all that
sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don't hang
on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially...nothing! Make up your
mind to it, and you've solved the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both
lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same
thing.
But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would
venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and
it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose children you wanted.
Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a child to a rabbit! Tommy
Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate him with a baby,
another generation. He ended in himself. And out of all the rest of
Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was not a man who did not rouse
her contempt, when she thought of having a child by him. There were several
who would have been quite possible as lover, even Mick. But to let them