breed a child on you! Ugh! Humiliation and abomination.
So that was that!
Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait!
She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if she
couldn't find one who would do.---`Go ye into the streets and by ways of
Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man.' It had been impossible to find a
man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands of male
humans. But a man! C'est une autre chose!
She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an
Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.
But wait! wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the
following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France, Italy.
Wait! She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair,
and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious to
the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer, not she!
One might take a lover almost at any moment, but a man who should beget a
child on one...wait! wait! it's a very different matter.---`Go ye into the
streets and byways of Jerusalem...' It was not a question of love; it was a
question of a man. Why, one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if
he was the man, what would one's personal hate matter? This business
concerned another part of oneself.
It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's
chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly in
the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.
This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and
as the boy was laid up with influenza, somebody always seemed to have
influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.
The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey
and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the
pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The
end of all things!
In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell
from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among the
old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia, silence,
nothingness.
Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy,
somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer
world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking
reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a
vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and
giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end;
to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all
things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of
strong trees, meant something else.
As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a
rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked
uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the
chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug
and kept very tidy. The door was shut.
Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious
far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like going
away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again, but still
not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the window, and saw the
dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy, not wanting to be
invaded.
She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the
back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle was
roused, she would not be defeated.
So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the
land rose steeply, so the back yard was sunken, and enclosed by a low stone
wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the little yard two
paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked
to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins.
And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which
he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion,
lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water from his ears,
quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie
backed away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In
spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing
himself, commonplace enough, Heaven knows!
Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her
in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over
the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense
of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white,
solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And
beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty,
not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a
single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!
Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it;
it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A man
washing himself in a back yard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow soap! She
was rather annoyed; why should she be made to stumble on these vulgar
privacies?
So she walked away from herself, but after a while she sat down on a
stump. She was too confused to think. But in the coil of her confusion, she
was determined to deliver her message to the fellow. She would not he
balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not time to go out. He
was probably preparing to go out somewhere.
So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came near, the cottage
looked just the same. A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her heart
beating in spite of herself.
She heard the man coming lightly downstairs. He opened the door
quickly, and startled her. He looked uneasy himself, but instantly a laugh
came on his face.
`Lady Chatterley!' he said. `Will you come in?'
His manner was so perfectly easy and good, she stepped over the
threshold into the rather dreary little room.
`I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft,
rather breathless voice.
The man was looking at her with those blue, all-seeing eyes of his,
which made her turn her face aside a little. He thought her comely, almost
beautiful, in her shyness, and he took command of the situation himself at
once.
`Would you care to sit down?' he asked, presuming she would not. The
door stood open.
`No thanks! Sir Clifford wondered if you would and she delivered her
message, looking unconsciously into his eyes again. And now his eyes looked
warm and kind, particularly to a woman, wonderfully warm, and kind, and at
ease.
`Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'
Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of
hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she looked
round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with something like
dismay.
`Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.
`Quite alone, your Ladyship.'
`But your mother...?'
`She lives in her own cottage in the village.'
`With the child?' asked Connie.
`With the child!'
And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of
derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baking.
`No,' he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, `my mother comes and
cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'
Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little
mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was
in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his
face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked
as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But
a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him.
She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked
up at him again, and remarked:
`I hope I didn't disturb you?'
The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.
`Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on,
but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and the
unexpected sounds ominous.'
He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his
shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was,
thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something young
and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a man about
thirty-seven or eight.
She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he
upset her so much, in spite of herself.
And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: `She's nice, she's real!
She's nicer than she knows.'
She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper, so
unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with the
local people. But also something very uncommon.
`The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to
Clifford; `he might almost be a gentleman.'
`Might he?' said Clifford. `I hadn't noticed.'
`But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.
`I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He
only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India, I
rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was
an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the men were
like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back into their old
places when they get home again.'
Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar
tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really
climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.
`But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.
`Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'
He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt
he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the real
truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human
being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her
generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!
When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a
long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge
mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very definitely,
yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.
And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily
hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little
unfinished, incomplete!
She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out
of fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She was
not very tall, a bit Scottish and short; but she had a certain fluent,
down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was faintly tawny,
her limbs had a certain stillness, her body should have had a full,
down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.
Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was
flattening and going a little harsh. It was as if it had not had enough sun
and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.
Disappointed of its real womanhood, it had not succeeded in becoming
boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.
Her breasts were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were
unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had
lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of
her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and
expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little
flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look
so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going
flat, slack, meaningless.
Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much
insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless.
What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and
sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes, denial.
Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, by
external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not
even as bright as that. The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a
rushing fury, the swindle!
She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her
loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple
of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and
it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her
buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German
boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very nearly. How time went by!
Ten years dead, and she was only twenty-seven. The healthy boy with his
fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had then been so scornful of! Where would
she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic,
two-seconds spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that
warms the blood and freshens the whole being.
Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping
fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous, round
stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand, the Arabs say, soft and
downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping.
But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent.
But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning
to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before
it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might somehow bear.
Was she fit, anyhow?
She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed
bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against Clifford,
and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded
a woman even of her own body.
Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very
soul.
But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going
downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things, for
he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who
had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie
did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her,
but she had wanted to do what she could.
So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day
or two; when Mrs Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as was
inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted. It was
natural he should.
And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded,
had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous
feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one
in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the
greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.
And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of
the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He was
never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a
well-bred, cold sort of way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a woman,
as even Connie's father could be warm to her, with the warmth of a man who
did himself well, and intended to, but who still could comfort it woman with
a bit of his masculine glow.
But Clifford was not like that. His whole race was not like that. They
were all inwardly hard and separate, and warmth to them was just bad taste.
You had to get on without it, and hold your own; which was all very well if
you were of the same class and race. Then you could keep yourself cold and
be very estimable, and hold your own, and enjoy the satisfaction of holding
it. But if you were of another class and another race it wouldn't do; there
was no fun merely holding your own, and feeling you belonged to the ruling
class. What was the point, when even the smartest aristocrats had really
nothing positive of their own to hold, and their rule was really a farce,
not rule at all? What was the point? It was all cold nonsense.
A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie. What was the good of it all?
What was the good of her sacrifice, her devoting her life to Clifford? What
was she serving, after all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no warm human
contacts, and that was as corrupt as any low-born Jew, in craving for
prostitution to the bitch-goddess, Success. Even Clifford's cool and
contactless assurance that he belonged to the ruling class didn't prevent
his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as he panted after the bitch-goddess.
After all, Michaelis was really more dignified in the matter, and far, far
more successful. Really, if you looked closely at Clifford, he was a
buffoon, and a buffoon is more humiliating than a bounder.
As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more use for her than
Clifford had. He had even more need of her. Any good nurse can attend to
crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort, Michaelis was a heroic rat, and
Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.
There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford's Aunt Eva,
Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a widow, and
still something of a grande dame. She belonged to one of the best families,
and had the character to carry it off. Connie liked her, she was so
perfectly simple and [rank, as far as she intended to be frank, and
superficially kind. Inside herself she was a past-mistress in holding her
own, and holding other people a little lower. She was not at all a snob: far
too sure of herself. She was perfect at the social sport of coolly holding
her own, and making other people defer to her.
She was kind to Connie, and tried to worm into her woman's soul with
the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.
`You're quite wonderful, in my opinion,' she said to Connie. `You've
done wonders for Clifford. I never saw any budding genius myself, and there
he is, all the rage.' Aunt Eva was quite complacently proud of Clifford's
success. Another feather in the family cap! She didn't care a straw about
his books, but why should she?
`Oh, I don't think it's my doing,' said Connie.
`It must be! Can't be anybody else's. And it seems to me you don't get
enough out of it.'
`How?'
`Look at the way you are shut up here. I said to Clifford: If that
child rebels one day you'll have yourself to thank!'
`But Clifford never denies me anything,' said Connie.
`Look here, my dear child'---and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on
Connie's arm. `A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having
lived it. Believe me!' And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was
her form of repentance.
`But I do live my life, don't I?'
`Not in my idea! Clifford should bring you to London, and let you go
about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for you?
If I were you I should think it wasn't good enough. You'll let your youth
slip by, and you'll spend your old age, and your middle age too, repenting
it.'
Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.
But Connie was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the
smart world by Lady Bennerley. She didn't feel really smart, it wasn't
interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it all;
like the soil of Labrador, which his gay little flowers on its surface, and
a foot down is frozen.
Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack
Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory than when
only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for the weather
was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to dance to.
Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in
bottles, and women would be `immunized'.
`Jolly good thing too!' she said. `Then a woman can live her own life.'
Strangeways wanted children, and she didn't.
`How'd you like to be immunized?' Winterslow asked her, with an ugly
smile.
`I hope I am; naturally,' she said. `Anyhow the future's going to have
more sense, and a woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.'
`Perhaps she'll float off into space altogether,' said Dukes.
`I do think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot of the
physical disabilities,' said Clifford. `All the love-business for example,
it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in
bottles.'
`No!' cried Olive. `That might leave all the more room for fun.'
`I suppose,' said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, `if the
love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A
little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for
everybody.'
`The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a
cheerful weekend!' said Jack. `Sounds all right, but where should we be by
Wednesday?'
`So long as you can forget your body you are happy,' said Lady
Bennerley. `And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are
wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our
bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.'
`Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,' said Winterslow. `It's
quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical
side of it.'
`Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,' said Connie.
`It won't happen,' said Dukes. `Our old show will come flop; our
civilization is going to fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down the
chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the
phallus!'
`Oh do! do be impossible, General!' cried Olive.
`I believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva.
`And what will come after it?' asked Clifford.
`I haven't the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,' said the
elderly lady.
`Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunized
women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge to
what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?' said Clifford.
`Oh, don't bother! let's get on with today,' said Olive. `Only hurry up
with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.'
`There might even be real men, in the next phase,' said Tommy. `Real,
intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be a
change, an enormous change from us? We're not men, and the women aren't
women. We're only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and intellectual
experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine men and women,
instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age of
seven. It would be even more amazing than men of smoke or babies in
bottles.'
`Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,' said
Olive.
`Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,' said
Winterslow.
`Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.
`Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.
`But it'll come, in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a
bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of
a democracy of pocket.'
Something echoed inside Connie: `Give me the democracy of touch, the
resurrection of the body!' She didn't at all know what it meant, but it
comforted her, as meaningless things may do.
Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored
by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and
even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of
it!
Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued
plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body,
she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness,
yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the housekeeper
noticed it, and asked her about herself Even Tommy Dukes insisted she was
not well, though she said she was all right. Only she began to be afraid of
the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara
marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under
Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the
park. The bristling of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill
affected her with a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off
when she would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the
tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri du coeur to
her sister, Hilda. `I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the matter
with me.'
Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She
came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the drive
she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass,
where the two great wild beech-trees stood, on the flat in front of the
house.
Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda pulled up her car, got out, and
kissed her sister.
`But Connie!' she cried. `Whatever is the matter?'
`Nothing!' said Connie, rather shamefacedly; but she knew how she had
suffered in contrast to Hilda. Both sisters had the same rather golden,
glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally strong, warm physique. But
now Connie was thin and earthy-looking, with a scraggy, yellowish neck, that
stuck out of her jumper.
`But you're ill, child!' said Hilda, in the soft, rather breathless
voice that both sisters had alike. Hilda was nearly, but not quite, two
years older than Connie.
`No, not ill. Perhaps I'm bored,' said Connie a little pathetically.
The light of battle glowed in Hilda's face; she was a woman, soft and
still as she seemed, of the old amazon sort, not made to fit with men.
`This wretched place!' she said softly, looking at poor, old, lumbering
Wragby with real hate. She looked soft and warm herself, as a ripe pear, and
she was an amazon of the real old breed.
She went quietly in to Clifford. He thought how handsome she looked,
but also he shrank from her. His wife's family did not have his sort of
manners, or his sort of etiquette. He considered them rather outsiders, but
once they got inside they made him jump through the hoop.
He sat square and well-groomed in his chair, his hair sleek and blond,
and his face fresh, his blue eyes pale, and a little prominent, his
expression inscrutable, but well-bred. Hilda thought it sulky and stupid,
and he waited. He had an air of aplomb, but Hilda didn't care what he had an
air of; she was up in arms, and if he'd been Pope or Emperor it would have
been just the same.
`Connie's looking awfully unwell,' she said in her soft voice, fixing
him with her beautiful, glowering grey eyes. She looked so maidenly, so did
Connie; but he well knew the tone of Scottish obstinacy underneath.
`She's a little thinner,' he said.
`Haven't you done anything about it?'
`Do you think it necessary?' he asked, with his suavest English
stiffness, for the two things often go together.
Hilda only glowered at him without replying; repartee was not her
forte, nor Connie's; so she glowered, and he was much more uncomfortable
than if she had said things.
`I'll take her to a doctor,' said Hilda at length. `Can you suggest a
good one round here?'
`I'm afraid I can't.'
`Then I'll take her to London, where we have a doctor we trust.'
Though boiling with rage, Clifford said nothing.
`I suppose I may as well stay the night,' said Hilda, pulling off her
gloves, `and I'll drive her to town tomorrow.'
Clifford was yellow at the gills with anger, and at evening the whites
of his eyes were a little yellow too. He ran to liver. But Hilda was
consistently modest and maidenly.
`You must have a nurse or somebody, to look after you personally. You
should really have a manservant,' said Hilda as they sat, with apparent
calmness, at coffee after dinner. She spoke in her soft, seemingly gentle
way, but Clifford felt she was hitting him on the head with a bludgeon.
`You think so?' he said coldly.
`I'm sure! It's necessary. Either that, or Father and I must take
Connie away for some months. This can't go on.'
`What can't go on?'
`Haven't you looked at the child!' asked Hilda, gazing at him full
stare. He looked rather like a huge, boiled crayfish at the moment; or so
she thought.
`Connie and I will discuss it,' he said.
`I've already discussed it with her,' said Hilda.
Clifford had been long enough in the hands of nurses; he hated them,
because they left him no real privacy. And a manservant!...he couldn't stand
a man hanging round him. Almost better any woman. But why not Connie?
The two sisters drove off in the morning, Connie looking rather like an
Easter lamb, rather small beside Hilda, who held the wheel. Sir Malcolm was
away, but the Kensington house was open.
The doctor examined Connie carefully, and asked her all about her life.
`I see your photograph, and Sir Clifford's, in the illustrated papers
sometimes. Almost notorieties, aren't you? That's how the quiet little girls
grow up, though you're only a quiet little girl even now, in spite of the
illustrated papers. No, no! There's nothing organically wrong, but it won't
do! It won't do! Tell Sir Clifford he's got to bring you to town, or take
you abroad, and amuse you. You've got to be amused, got to! Your vitality is
much too low; no reserves, no reserves. The nerves of the heart a bit queer
already: oh, yes! Nothing but nerves; I'd put you right in a month at Cannes
or Biarritz. But it mustn't go on, mustn't, I tell you, or I won't be
answerable for consequences. You're spending your life without renewing it.
You've got to be amused, properly, healthily amused. You're spending your
vitality without making any. Can't go on, you know. Depression! Avoid
depression!'
Hilda set her jaw, and that meant something.
Michaelis heard they were in town, and came running with roses. `Why,
whatever's wrong?' he cried. `You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never saw
such a change! Why ever didn't you let me know? Come to Nice with me! Come
down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me. It's lovely there just now.
You want sun! You want life! Why, you're wasting away! Come away with me!
Come to Africa! Oh, hang Sir Clifford! Chuck him, and come along with me.
I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come along and try a life! God's
love! That place Wragby would kill anybody. Beastly place! Foul place! Kill
anybody! Come away with me into the sun! It's the sun you want, of course,
and a bit of normal life.'
But Connie's heart simply stood still at the thought of abandoning
Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No...no! She just couldn't. She
had to go back to Wragby.
Michaelis was disgusted. Hilda didn't like Michaelis, but she almost
preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands.
Hilda talked to Clifford, who still had yellow eyeballs when they got
back. He, too, in his way, was overwrought; but he had to listen to all
Hilda said, to all the doctor had said, not what Michaelis had said, of
course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum.
`Here is the address of a good manservant, who was with an invalid
patient of the doctor's till he died last month. He is really a good man,
and fairly sure to come.'
`But I'm not an invalid, and I will not have a manservant,' said
Clifford, poor devil.
`And here are the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would
do very well; a woman of about fifty, quiet, strong, kind, and in her way
cultured...'
Clifford only sulked, and would not answer.
`Very well, Clifford. If we don't settle something by to-morrow, I
shall telegraph to Father, and we shall take Connie away.'
`Will Connie go?' asked Clifford.
`She doesn't want to, but she knows she must. Mother died of cancer,
brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks.'
So next day Clifford suggested Mrs Bolton, Tevershall parish nurse.
Apparently Mrs Betts had thought of her. Mrs Bolton was just retiring from
her parish duties to take up private nursing jobs. Clifford had a queer
dread of delivering himself into the hands of a stranger, but this Mrs
Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew her.
The two sisters at once called on Mrs Bolton, in a newish house in a
row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking woman of
forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar and apron, just making
herself tea in a small crowded sitting-room.
Mrs Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with
a bit of a broad slur, but in heavily correct English, and from having
bossed the sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion of
herself, and a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way, one of
the governing class in the village, very much respected.
`Yes, Lady Chatterley's not looking at all well! Why, she used to be
that bonny, didn't she now? But she's been failing all winter! Oh, it's
hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer for.'
And Mrs Bolton would come to Wragby at once, if Dr Shardlow would let
her off. She had another fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights, but
they might get a substitute, you know.
Hilda posted off to Dr Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs Bolton
drove up in Leiver's cab to Wragby with two trunks. Hilda had talks with
her; Mrs Bolton was ready at any moment to talk. And she seemed so young!
The way the passion would flush in her rather pale cheek. She was
forty-seven.
Her husband, Ted Bolton, had been killed in the pit, twenty-two years
ago, twenty-two years last Christmas, just at Christmas time, leaving her
with two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married now, Edith,
to a young man in Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The other one was a
schoolteacher in Chesterfield; she came home weekends, when she wasn't asked
out somewhere. Young folks enjoyed themselves nowadays, not like when she,
Ivy Bolton, was young.
Ted Bolton was twenty-eight when lie was killed in an explosion down
th' pit. The butty in front shouted to them all to lie down quick, there
were four of them. And they all lay down in time, only Ted, and it killed
him. Then at the inquiry, on the masters' side they said Ted had been
frightened, and trying to run away, and not obeying orders, so it was like
his fault really. So the compensation was only three hundred pounds, and
they made out as if it was more of a gift than legal compensation, because
it was really the man's own fault. And they wouldn't let her have the money
down; she wanted to have a little shop. But they said she'd no doubt
squander it, perhaps in drink! So she had to draw it thirty shillings a
week. Yes, she had to go every Monday morning down to the offices, and stand
there a couple of hours waiting her turn; yes, for almost four years she
went every Monday. And what could she do with two little children on her
hands? But Ted's mother was very good to her. When the baby could toddle
she'd keep both the children for the day, while she, Ivy Bolton, went to
Sheffield, and attended classes in ambulance, and then the fourth year she
even took a nursing course and got qualified. She was determined to be
independent and keep her children. So she was assistant at Uthwaite
hospital, just a little place, for a while. But when the Company, the
Tevershall Colliery Company, really Sir Geoffrey, saw that she could get on
by herself, they were very good to her, gave her the parish nursing, and
stood by her, she would say that for them. And she'd done it ever since,
till now it was getting a bit much for her; she needed something a bit
lighter, there was such a lot of traipsing around if you were a district
nurse.
`Yes, the Company's been very good to me, I always say it. But I should
never forget what they said about Ted, for he was as steady and fearless a
chap as ever set foot on the cage, and it was as good as branding him a
coward. But there, he was dead, and could say nothing to none of 'em.'
It was a queer mixture of feelings the woman showed as she talked. She
liked the colliers, whom she had nursed for so long; but she felt very
superior to them. She felt almost upper class; and at the same time a
resentment against the ruling class smouldered in her. The masters! In a
dispute between masters and men, she was always for the men. But when there
was no question of contest, she was pining to be superior, to be one of the
upper class. The upper classes fascinated her, appealing to her peculiar
English passion for superiority. She was thrilled to come to Wragby;
thrilled to talk to Lady Chatterley, my word, different from the common
colliers' wives! She said so in so many words. Yet one could see a grudge
against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge against the masters.
`Why, yes, of course, it would wear Lady Chatterley out! It's a mercy
she had a sister to come and help her. Men don't think, high and low-alike,
they take what a woman does for them for granted. Oh, I've told the colliers
off about it many a time. But it's very hard for Sir Clifford, you know,
crippled like that. They were always a haughty family, standoffish in a way,
as they've a right to be. But then to be brought down like that! And it's
very hard on Lady Chatterley, perhaps harder on her. What she misses! I only
had Ted three years, but my word, while I had him I had a husband I could
never forget. He was one in a thousand, and jolly as the day. Who'd ever
have thought he'd get killed? I don't believe it to this day somehow, I've
never believed it, though I washed him with my own hands. But he was never
dead for me, he never was. I never took it in.'
This was a new voice in Wragby, very new for Connie to hear; it roused
a new ear in her.
For the first week or so, Mrs Bolton, however, was very quiet at
Wragby, her assured, bossy manner left her, and she was nervous. With
Clifford she was shy, almost frightened, and silent. He liked that, and soon
recovered his self-possession, letting her do things for him without even
noticing her.
`She's a useful nonentity!' he said. Connie opened her eyes in wonder,
but she did not contradict him. So different are impressions on two
different people!
And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She
had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing. So susceptible we
are to what is expected of us! The colliers had been so like children,
talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while she bandaged them, or
nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost super-human in
her administrations. Now Clifford made her feel small, and like a servant,
and she accepted it without a word, adjusting herself to the upper classes.
She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to
administer to him. And she said very humbly: `Shall I do this now, Sir
Clifford? Shall I do that?'
`No, leave it for a time. I'll have it done later.'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
`Come in again in half an hour.'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
`And just take those old papers out, will you?'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
She went softly, and in half an hour she came softly again. She was
bullied, but she didn't mind. She was experiencing the upper classes. She
neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a phenomenon,
the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be
known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley, and after all it's the
mistress of the house matters most.
Mrs Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the
passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She also
helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even shaving
him, in her soft, tentative woman's way. She was very good and competent,
and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn't so very different
from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin, and softly rubbed
the bristles. The stand-offishness and the lack of frankness didn't bother
her; she was having a new experience.
Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for
giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he
said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and her. But
Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather
like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing,
to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.
Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in
her room, and sing: `Touch not the nettle, for the bonds of love are ill to
loose.' She had not realized till lately how ill to loose they were, these
bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She was so glad to be
alone, not always to have to talk to him. When he was alone he
tapped-tapped-tapped on a typewriter, to infinity. But when he was not
`working', and she was there, he talked, always talked; infinite small
analysis of people and motives, and results, characters and personalities,
till now she had had enough. For years she had loved it, until she had
enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.
It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of
consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till
they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she
was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the
threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear. But
the bonds of such love are more ill to loose even than most bonds; though
Mrs Bolton's coming had been a great help.
But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk
or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that Mrs Bolton should come at
ten to disturb them. At ten o'clock Connie could go upstairs and be alone.
Clifford was in good hands with Mrs Bolton.
Mrs Bolton ate with Mrs Betts in the housekeeper's room, since they
were all agreeable. And it was curious how much closer the servants'
quarters seemed to have come; right up to the doors of Clifford's study,
when before they were so remote. For Mrs Betts would sometimes sit in Mrs
Bolton's room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and felt somehow the
strong, other vibration of the working people almost invading the
sitting-room, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed was Wragby merely
by Mrs Bolton's coming.
And Connie felt herself released, in another world, she felt she
breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her roots,
perhaps mortal ones, were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still, she breathed
freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.
Mrs Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling she must
extend to her her female and professional protection. She was always urging
her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie
So that was that!
Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait!
She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if she
couldn't find one who would do.---`Go ye into the streets and by ways of
Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man.' It had been impossible to find a
man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands of male
humans. But a man! C'est une autre chose!
She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an
Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.
But wait! wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the
following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France, Italy.
Wait! She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair,
and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious to
the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer, not she!
One might take a lover almost at any moment, but a man who should beget a
child on one...wait! wait! it's a very different matter.---`Go ye into the
streets and byways of Jerusalem...' It was not a question of love; it was a
question of a man. Why, one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if
he was the man, what would one's personal hate matter? This business
concerned another part of oneself.
It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's
chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly in
the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.
This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and
as the boy was laid up with influenza, somebody always seemed to have
influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.
The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey
and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the
pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The
end of all things!
In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell
from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among the
old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia, silence,
nothingness.
Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy,
somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer
world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking
reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a
vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and
giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end;
to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all
things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of
strong trees, meant something else.
As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a
rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked
uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the
chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug
and kept very tidy. The door was shut.
Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious
far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like going
away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again, but still
not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the window, and saw the
dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy, not wanting to be
invaded.
She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the
back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle was
roused, she would not be defeated.
So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the
land rose steeply, so the back yard was sunken, and enclosed by a low stone
wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the little yard two
paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked
to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins.
And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which
he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion,
lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water from his ears,
quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie
backed away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In
spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing
himself, commonplace enough, Heaven knows!
Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her
in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over
the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense
of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white,
solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And
beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty,
not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a
single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!
Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it;
it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A man
washing himself in a back yard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow soap! She
was rather annoyed; why should she be made to stumble on these vulgar
privacies?
So she walked away from herself, but after a while she sat down on a
stump. She was too confused to think. But in the coil of her confusion, she
was determined to deliver her message to the fellow. She would not he
balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not time to go out. He
was probably preparing to go out somewhere.
So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came near, the cottage
looked just the same. A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her heart
beating in spite of herself.
She heard the man coming lightly downstairs. He opened the door
quickly, and startled her. He looked uneasy himself, but instantly a laugh
came on his face.
`Lady Chatterley!' he said. `Will you come in?'
His manner was so perfectly easy and good, she stepped over the
threshold into the rather dreary little room.
`I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft,
rather breathless voice.
The man was looking at her with those blue, all-seeing eyes of his,
which made her turn her face aside a little. He thought her comely, almost
beautiful, in her shyness, and he took command of the situation himself at
once.
`Would you care to sit down?' he asked, presuming she would not. The
door stood open.
`No thanks! Sir Clifford wondered if you would and she delivered her
message, looking unconsciously into his eyes again. And now his eyes looked
warm and kind, particularly to a woman, wonderfully warm, and kind, and at
ease.
`Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'
Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of
hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she looked
round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with something like
dismay.
`Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.
`Quite alone, your Ladyship.'
`But your mother...?'
`She lives in her own cottage in the village.'
`With the child?' asked Connie.
`With the child!'
And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of
derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baking.
`No,' he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, `my mother comes and
cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'
Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little
mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was
in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his
face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked
as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But
a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him.
She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked
up at him again, and remarked:
`I hope I didn't disturb you?'
The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.
`Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on,
but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and the
unexpected sounds ominous.'
He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his
shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was,
thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something young
and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a man about
thirty-seven or eight.
She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he
upset her so much, in spite of herself.
And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: `She's nice, she's real!
She's nicer than she knows.'
She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper, so
unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with the
local people. But also something very uncommon.
`The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to
Clifford; `he might almost be a gentleman.'
`Might he?' said Clifford. `I hadn't noticed.'
`But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.
`I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He
only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India, I
rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was
an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the men were
like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back into their old
places when they get home again.'
Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar
tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really
climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.
`But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.
`Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'
He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt
he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the real
truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human
being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her
generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!
When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a
long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge
mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very definitely,
yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.
And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily
hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little
unfinished, incomplete!
She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out
of fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She was
not very tall, a bit Scottish and short; but she had a certain fluent,
down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was faintly tawny,
her limbs had a certain stillness, her body should have had a full,
down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.
Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was
flattening and going a little harsh. It was as if it had not had enough sun
and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.
Disappointed of its real womanhood, it had not succeeded in becoming
boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.
Her breasts were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were
unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had
lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of
her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and
expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little
flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look
so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going
flat, slack, meaningless.
Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much
insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless.
What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and
sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes, denial.
Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, by
external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not
even as bright as that. The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a
rushing fury, the swindle!
She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her
loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple
of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and
it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her
buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German
boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very nearly. How time went by!
Ten years dead, and she was only twenty-seven. The healthy boy with his
fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had then been so scornful of! Where would
she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic,
two-seconds spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that
warms the blood and freshens the whole being.
Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping
fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous, round
stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand, the Arabs say, soft and
downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping.
But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent.
But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning
to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before
it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might somehow bear.
Was she fit, anyhow?
She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed
bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against Clifford,
and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded
a woman even of her own body.
Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very
soul.
But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going
downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things, for
he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who
had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie
did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her,
but she had wanted to do what she could.
So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day
or two; when Mrs Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as was
inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted. It was
natural he should.
And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded,
had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous
feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one
in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the
greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.
And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of
the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He was
never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a
well-bred, cold sort of way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a woman,
as even Connie's father could be warm to her, with the warmth of a man who
did himself well, and intended to, but who still could comfort it woman with
a bit of his masculine glow.
But Clifford was not like that. His whole race was not like that. They
were all inwardly hard and separate, and warmth to them was just bad taste.
You had to get on without it, and hold your own; which was all very well if
you were of the same class and race. Then you could keep yourself cold and
be very estimable, and hold your own, and enjoy the satisfaction of holding
it. But if you were of another class and another race it wouldn't do; there
was no fun merely holding your own, and feeling you belonged to the ruling
class. What was the point, when even the smartest aristocrats had really
nothing positive of their own to hold, and their rule was really a farce,
not rule at all? What was the point? It was all cold nonsense.
A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie. What was the good of it all?
What was the good of her sacrifice, her devoting her life to Clifford? What
was she serving, after all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no warm human
contacts, and that was as corrupt as any low-born Jew, in craving for
prostitution to the bitch-goddess, Success. Even Clifford's cool and
contactless assurance that he belonged to the ruling class didn't prevent
his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as he panted after the bitch-goddess.
After all, Michaelis was really more dignified in the matter, and far, far
more successful. Really, if you looked closely at Clifford, he was a
buffoon, and a buffoon is more humiliating than a bounder.
As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more use for her than
Clifford had. He had even more need of her. Any good nurse can attend to
crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort, Michaelis was a heroic rat, and
Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.
There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford's Aunt Eva,
Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a widow, and
still something of a grande dame. She belonged to one of the best families,
and had the character to carry it off. Connie liked her, she was so
perfectly simple and [rank, as far as she intended to be frank, and
superficially kind. Inside herself she was a past-mistress in holding her
own, and holding other people a little lower. She was not at all a snob: far
too sure of herself. She was perfect at the social sport of coolly holding
her own, and making other people defer to her.
She was kind to Connie, and tried to worm into her woman's soul with
the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.
`You're quite wonderful, in my opinion,' she said to Connie. `You've
done wonders for Clifford. I never saw any budding genius myself, and there
he is, all the rage.' Aunt Eva was quite complacently proud of Clifford's
success. Another feather in the family cap! She didn't care a straw about
his books, but why should she?
`Oh, I don't think it's my doing,' said Connie.
`It must be! Can't be anybody else's. And it seems to me you don't get
enough out of it.'
`How?'
`Look at the way you are shut up here. I said to Clifford: If that
child rebels one day you'll have yourself to thank!'
`But Clifford never denies me anything,' said Connie.
`Look here, my dear child'---and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on
Connie's arm. `A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having
lived it. Believe me!' And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was
her form of repentance.
`But I do live my life, don't I?'
`Not in my idea! Clifford should bring you to London, and let you go
about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for you?
If I were you I should think it wasn't good enough. You'll let your youth
slip by, and you'll spend your old age, and your middle age too, repenting
it.'
Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.
But Connie was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the
smart world by Lady Bennerley. She didn't feel really smart, it wasn't
interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it all;
like the soil of Labrador, which his gay little flowers on its surface, and
a foot down is frozen.
Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack
Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory than when
only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for the weather
was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to dance to.
Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in
bottles, and women would be `immunized'.
`Jolly good thing too!' she said. `Then a woman can live her own life.'
Strangeways wanted children, and she didn't.
`How'd you like to be immunized?' Winterslow asked her, with an ugly
smile.
`I hope I am; naturally,' she said. `Anyhow the future's going to have
more sense, and a woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.'
`Perhaps she'll float off into space altogether,' said Dukes.
`I do think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot of the
physical disabilities,' said Clifford. `All the love-business for example,
it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in
bottles.'
`No!' cried Olive. `That might leave all the more room for fun.'
`I suppose,' said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, `if the
love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A
little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for
everybody.'
`The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a
cheerful weekend!' said Jack. `Sounds all right, but where should we be by
Wednesday?'
`So long as you can forget your body you are happy,' said Lady
Bennerley. `And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are
wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our
bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.'
`Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,' said Winterslow. `It's
quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical
side of it.'
`Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,' said Connie.
`It won't happen,' said Dukes. `Our old show will come flop; our
civilization is going to fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down the
chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the
phallus!'
`Oh do! do be impossible, General!' cried Olive.
`I believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva.
`And what will come after it?' asked Clifford.
`I haven't the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,' said the
elderly lady.
`Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunized
women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge to
what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?' said Clifford.
`Oh, don't bother! let's get on with today,' said Olive. `Only hurry up
with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.'
`There might even be real men, in the next phase,' said Tommy. `Real,
intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be a
change, an enormous change from us? We're not men, and the women aren't
women. We're only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and intellectual
experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine men and women,
instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age of
seven. It would be even more amazing than men of smoke or babies in
bottles.'
`Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,' said
Olive.
`Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,' said
Winterslow.
`Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.
`Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.
`But it'll come, in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a
bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of
a democracy of pocket.'
Something echoed inside Connie: `Give me the democracy of touch, the
resurrection of the body!' She didn't at all know what it meant, but it
comforted her, as meaningless things may do.
Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored
by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and
even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of
it!
Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued
plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body,
she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness,
yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the housekeeper
noticed it, and asked her about herself Even Tommy Dukes insisted she was
not well, though she said she was all right. Only she began to be afraid of
the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara
marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under
Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the
park. The bristling of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill
affected her with a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off
when she would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the
tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri du coeur to
her sister, Hilda. `I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the matter
with me.'
Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She
came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the drive
she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass,
where the two great wild beech-trees stood, on the flat in front of the
house.
Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda pulled up her car, got out, and
kissed her sister.
`But Connie!' she cried. `Whatever is the matter?'
`Nothing!' said Connie, rather shamefacedly; but she knew how she had
suffered in contrast to Hilda. Both sisters had the same rather golden,
glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally strong, warm physique. But
now Connie was thin and earthy-looking, with a scraggy, yellowish neck, that
stuck out of her jumper.
`But you're ill, child!' said Hilda, in the soft, rather breathless
voice that both sisters had alike. Hilda was nearly, but not quite, two
years older than Connie.
`No, not ill. Perhaps I'm bored,' said Connie a little pathetically.
The light of battle glowed in Hilda's face; she was a woman, soft and
still as she seemed, of the old amazon sort, not made to fit with men.
`This wretched place!' she said softly, looking at poor, old, lumbering
Wragby with real hate. She looked soft and warm herself, as a ripe pear, and
she was an amazon of the real old breed.
She went quietly in to Clifford. He thought how handsome she looked,
but also he shrank from her. His wife's family did not have his sort of
manners, or his sort of etiquette. He considered them rather outsiders, but
once they got inside they made him jump through the hoop.
He sat square and well-groomed in his chair, his hair sleek and blond,
and his face fresh, his blue eyes pale, and a little prominent, his
expression inscrutable, but well-bred. Hilda thought it sulky and stupid,
and he waited. He had an air of aplomb, but Hilda didn't care what he had an
air of; she was up in arms, and if he'd been Pope or Emperor it would have
been just the same.
`Connie's looking awfully unwell,' she said in her soft voice, fixing
him with her beautiful, glowering grey eyes. She looked so maidenly, so did
Connie; but he well knew the tone of Scottish obstinacy underneath.
`She's a little thinner,' he said.
`Haven't you done anything about it?'
`Do you think it necessary?' he asked, with his suavest English
stiffness, for the two things often go together.
Hilda only glowered at him without replying; repartee was not her
forte, nor Connie's; so she glowered, and he was much more uncomfortable
than if she had said things.
`I'll take her to a doctor,' said Hilda at length. `Can you suggest a
good one round here?'
`I'm afraid I can't.'
`Then I'll take her to London, where we have a doctor we trust.'
Though boiling with rage, Clifford said nothing.
`I suppose I may as well stay the night,' said Hilda, pulling off her
gloves, `and I'll drive her to town tomorrow.'
Clifford was yellow at the gills with anger, and at evening the whites
of his eyes were a little yellow too. He ran to liver. But Hilda was
consistently modest and maidenly.
`You must have a nurse or somebody, to look after you personally. You
should really have a manservant,' said Hilda as they sat, with apparent
calmness, at coffee after dinner. She spoke in her soft, seemingly gentle
way, but Clifford felt she was hitting him on the head with a bludgeon.
`You think so?' he said coldly.
`I'm sure! It's necessary. Either that, or Father and I must take
Connie away for some months. This can't go on.'
`What can't go on?'
`Haven't you looked at the child!' asked Hilda, gazing at him full
stare. He looked rather like a huge, boiled crayfish at the moment; or so
she thought.
`Connie and I will discuss it,' he said.
`I've already discussed it with her,' said Hilda.
Clifford had been long enough in the hands of nurses; he hated them,
because they left him no real privacy. And a manservant!...he couldn't stand
a man hanging round him. Almost better any woman. But why not Connie?
The two sisters drove off in the morning, Connie looking rather like an
Easter lamb, rather small beside Hilda, who held the wheel. Sir Malcolm was
away, but the Kensington house was open.
The doctor examined Connie carefully, and asked her all about her life.
`I see your photograph, and Sir Clifford's, in the illustrated papers
sometimes. Almost notorieties, aren't you? That's how the quiet little girls
grow up, though you're only a quiet little girl even now, in spite of the
illustrated papers. No, no! There's nothing organically wrong, but it won't
do! It won't do! Tell Sir Clifford he's got to bring you to town, or take
you abroad, and amuse you. You've got to be amused, got to! Your vitality is
much too low; no reserves, no reserves. The nerves of the heart a bit queer
already: oh, yes! Nothing but nerves; I'd put you right in a month at Cannes
or Biarritz. But it mustn't go on, mustn't, I tell you, or I won't be
answerable for consequences. You're spending your life without renewing it.
You've got to be amused, properly, healthily amused. You're spending your
vitality without making any. Can't go on, you know. Depression! Avoid
depression!'
Hilda set her jaw, and that meant something.
Michaelis heard they were in town, and came running with roses. `Why,
whatever's wrong?' he cried. `You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never saw
such a change! Why ever didn't you let me know? Come to Nice with me! Come
down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me. It's lovely there just now.
You want sun! You want life! Why, you're wasting away! Come away with me!
Come to Africa! Oh, hang Sir Clifford! Chuck him, and come along with me.
I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come along and try a life! God's
love! That place Wragby would kill anybody. Beastly place! Foul place! Kill
anybody! Come away with me into the sun! It's the sun you want, of course,
and a bit of normal life.'
But Connie's heart simply stood still at the thought of abandoning
Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No...no! She just couldn't. She
had to go back to Wragby.
Michaelis was disgusted. Hilda didn't like Michaelis, but she almost
preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands.
Hilda talked to Clifford, who still had yellow eyeballs when they got
back. He, too, in his way, was overwrought; but he had to listen to all
Hilda said, to all the doctor had said, not what Michaelis had said, of
course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum.
`Here is the address of a good manservant, who was with an invalid
patient of the doctor's till he died last month. He is really a good man,
and fairly sure to come.'
`But I'm not an invalid, and I will not have a manservant,' said
Clifford, poor devil.
`And here are the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would
do very well; a woman of about fifty, quiet, strong, kind, and in her way
cultured...'
Clifford only sulked, and would not answer.
`Very well, Clifford. If we don't settle something by to-morrow, I
shall telegraph to Father, and we shall take Connie away.'
`Will Connie go?' asked Clifford.
`She doesn't want to, but she knows she must. Mother died of cancer,
brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks.'
So next day Clifford suggested Mrs Bolton, Tevershall parish nurse.
Apparently Mrs Betts had thought of her. Mrs Bolton was just retiring from
her parish duties to take up private nursing jobs. Clifford had a queer
dread of delivering himself into the hands of a stranger, but this Mrs
Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew her.
The two sisters at once called on Mrs Bolton, in a newish house in a
row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking woman of
forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar and apron, just making
herself tea in a small crowded sitting-room.
Mrs Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with
a bit of a broad slur, but in heavily correct English, and from having
bossed the sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion of
herself, and a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way, one of
the governing class in the village, very much respected.
`Yes, Lady Chatterley's not looking at all well! Why, she used to be
that bonny, didn't she now? But she's been failing all winter! Oh, it's
hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer for.'
And Mrs Bolton would come to Wragby at once, if Dr Shardlow would let
her off. She had another fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights, but
they might get a substitute, you know.
Hilda posted off to Dr Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs Bolton
drove up in Leiver's cab to Wragby with two trunks. Hilda had talks with
her; Mrs Bolton was ready at any moment to talk. And she seemed so young!
The way the passion would flush in her rather pale cheek. She was
forty-seven.
Her husband, Ted Bolton, had been killed in the pit, twenty-two years
ago, twenty-two years last Christmas, just at Christmas time, leaving her
with two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married now, Edith,
to a young man in Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The other one was a
schoolteacher in Chesterfield; she came home weekends, when she wasn't asked
out somewhere. Young folks enjoyed themselves nowadays, not like when she,
Ivy Bolton, was young.
Ted Bolton was twenty-eight when lie was killed in an explosion down
th' pit. The butty in front shouted to them all to lie down quick, there
were four of them. And they all lay down in time, only Ted, and it killed
him. Then at the inquiry, on the masters' side they said Ted had been
frightened, and trying to run away, and not obeying orders, so it was like
his fault really. So the compensation was only three hundred pounds, and
they made out as if it was more of a gift than legal compensation, because
it was really the man's own fault. And they wouldn't let her have the money
down; she wanted to have a little shop. But they said she'd no doubt
squander it, perhaps in drink! So she had to draw it thirty shillings a
week. Yes, she had to go every Monday morning down to the offices, and stand
there a couple of hours waiting her turn; yes, for almost four years she
went every Monday. And what could she do with two little children on her
hands? But Ted's mother was very good to her. When the baby could toddle
she'd keep both the children for the day, while she, Ivy Bolton, went to
Sheffield, and attended classes in ambulance, and then the fourth year she
even took a nursing course and got qualified. She was determined to be
independent and keep her children. So she was assistant at Uthwaite
hospital, just a little place, for a while. But when the Company, the
Tevershall Colliery Company, really Sir Geoffrey, saw that she could get on
by herself, they were very good to her, gave her the parish nursing, and
stood by her, she would say that for them. And she'd done it ever since,
till now it was getting a bit much for her; she needed something a bit
lighter, there was such a lot of traipsing around if you were a district
nurse.
`Yes, the Company's been very good to me, I always say it. But I should
never forget what they said about Ted, for he was as steady and fearless a
chap as ever set foot on the cage, and it was as good as branding him a
coward. But there, he was dead, and could say nothing to none of 'em.'
It was a queer mixture of feelings the woman showed as she talked. She
liked the colliers, whom she had nursed for so long; but she felt very
superior to them. She felt almost upper class; and at the same time a
resentment against the ruling class smouldered in her. The masters! In a
dispute between masters and men, she was always for the men. But when there
was no question of contest, she was pining to be superior, to be one of the
upper class. The upper classes fascinated her, appealing to her peculiar
English passion for superiority. She was thrilled to come to Wragby;
thrilled to talk to Lady Chatterley, my word, different from the common
colliers' wives! She said so in so many words. Yet one could see a grudge
against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge against the masters.
`Why, yes, of course, it would wear Lady Chatterley out! It's a mercy
she had a sister to come and help her. Men don't think, high and low-alike,
they take what a woman does for them for granted. Oh, I've told the colliers
off about it many a time. But it's very hard for Sir Clifford, you know,
crippled like that. They were always a haughty family, standoffish in a way,
as they've a right to be. But then to be brought down like that! And it's
very hard on Lady Chatterley, perhaps harder on her. What she misses! I only
had Ted three years, but my word, while I had him I had a husband I could
never forget. He was one in a thousand, and jolly as the day. Who'd ever
have thought he'd get killed? I don't believe it to this day somehow, I've
never believed it, though I washed him with my own hands. But he was never
dead for me, he never was. I never took it in.'
This was a new voice in Wragby, very new for Connie to hear; it roused
a new ear in her.
For the first week or so, Mrs Bolton, however, was very quiet at
Wragby, her assured, bossy manner left her, and she was nervous. With
Clifford she was shy, almost frightened, and silent. He liked that, and soon
recovered his self-possession, letting her do things for him without even
noticing her.
`She's a useful nonentity!' he said. Connie opened her eyes in wonder,
but she did not contradict him. So different are impressions on two
different people!
And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She
had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing. So susceptible we
are to what is expected of us! The colliers had been so like children,
talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while she bandaged them, or
nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost super-human in
her administrations. Now Clifford made her feel small, and like a servant,
and she accepted it without a word, adjusting herself to the upper classes.
She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to
administer to him. And she said very humbly: `Shall I do this now, Sir
Clifford? Shall I do that?'
`No, leave it for a time. I'll have it done later.'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
`Come in again in half an hour.'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
`And just take those old papers out, will you?'
`Very well, Sir Clifford.'
She went softly, and in half an hour she came softly again. She was
bullied, but she didn't mind. She was experiencing the upper classes. She
neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a phenomenon,
the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be
known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley, and after all it's the
mistress of the house matters most.
Mrs Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the
passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She also
helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even shaving
him, in her soft, tentative woman's way. She was very good and competent,
and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn't so very different
from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin, and softly rubbed
the bristles. The stand-offishness and the lack of frankness didn't bother
her; she was having a new experience.
Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for
giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he
said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and her. But
Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather
like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing,
to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.
Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in
her room, and sing: `Touch not the nettle, for the bonds of love are ill to
loose.' She had not realized till lately how ill to loose they were, these
bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She was so glad to be
alone, not always to have to talk to him. When he was alone he
tapped-tapped-tapped on a typewriter, to infinity. But when he was not
`working', and she was there, he talked, always talked; infinite small
analysis of people and motives, and results, characters and personalities,
till now she had had enough. For years she had loved it, until she had
enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.
It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of
consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till
they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she
was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the
threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear. But
the bonds of such love are more ill to loose even than most bonds; though
Mrs Bolton's coming had been a great help.
But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk
or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that Mrs Bolton should come at
ten to disturb them. At ten o'clock Connie could go upstairs and be alone.
Clifford was in good hands with Mrs Bolton.
Mrs Bolton ate with Mrs Betts in the housekeeper's room, since they
were all agreeable. And it was curious how much closer the servants'
quarters seemed to have come; right up to the doors of Clifford's study,
when before they were so remote. For Mrs Betts would sometimes sit in Mrs
Bolton's room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and felt somehow the
strong, other vibration of the working people almost invading the
sitting-room, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed was Wragby merely
by Mrs Bolton's coming.
And Connie felt herself released, in another world, she felt she
breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her roots,
perhaps mortal ones, were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still, she breathed
freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.
Mrs Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling she must
extend to her her female and professional protection. She was always urging
her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie