every race. And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long
chalk. It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on
motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.'
`But what do they do when they get there?'
`Oh, hang around---and have tea in some fine tea-place like the
Mikado---and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some girl.
The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'
`And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'
`They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But I
don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want is just
money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine clothes: and
they don't care about another thing. They haven't the brains to be
socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take anything really serious,
and they never will have.'
Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair
or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys. The moneyboy
and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd got, and how much
you wanted.
Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in
the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came
into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was really the
pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now shrunk from
with dread.
Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries:
Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous mine,
and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London was never
very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently. But now times were
bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.
`There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and
Whiteover,' said Mrs Bolton. `You've not seen the new works at Stacks Gate,
opened after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one day,
they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head,
doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the
chemical by-products than out of the coal---I forget what it is. And the
grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of course it's brought a lot of
riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall men got on
there, and doin' well, a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall's
done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut
down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no
Tevershall pit working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it
closes for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl
it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he
could on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall. And now the
men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out. Doesn't it
sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never go till they have to.
They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to
work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them,
those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they
say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a
lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth,
it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had to
give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the
more machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you
can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks
Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they say so. But
everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to keep the men
going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to
Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to talk about if
Tevershall Collieries took a new lease of life, after everybody saying
they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like
rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so much, of course there was a
boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the
money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and
the owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you!
Why I always thought the pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have
thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood:
yes, it's fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood
standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the
pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery.
Why, whatever should we do if Tevershall shut down---? It doesn't bear
thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even then
the fan-wheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I'm
sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year to year, you
really don't.'
It was Mrs Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His
income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's trust, even
though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It was the
other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and fame; the
popular world, not the working world.
Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a private
individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace of pleasure.
And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the populace
of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too had to have their
providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of
work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and
`getting on' in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.
He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main
appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and
bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men
who made money in industry.
Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement,
stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage
breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The
well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves
for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent
fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.
But under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.
In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own
states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began
to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.
He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to have
forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the
underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch. And he said
little. But his mind began to work.
He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest things
on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in
German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as
possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of
coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the
chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the
almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the
devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry.
It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional
half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field,
men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to
carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond atty mental age
calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the emotional and
human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen,
feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.
But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional
and `human' mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was
interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.
He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the
engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a new
sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the
hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting
things into his grip.
And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had been
gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and
the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life
rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The very stale air of the
colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power.
He was doing something: and he was going to do something. He was going to
win, to win: not as he had won with his stories, mere publicity, amid a
whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man's victory.
At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal
into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new
locomotive engine with a self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And it
was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a great
heat, under peculiar conditions.
The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at
a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of
external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air supply. He
began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had proved brilliant
in chemistry, to help him.
And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had
fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not
done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.
He was not aware how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did not know
how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he
was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost a
trifle vulgar.
With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and
he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave him
mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of her. The
new Achilles in hint had a heel, and in this heel the woman, the woman like
Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a certain
half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her. But his voice
was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to be silent whenever
she was present.
Only when he was alone with Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and a
master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as
her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body as if he
were a child, really as if he were a child.
Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford
no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer.
He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good
deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even
there in the uneasy Midlands.
And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing
forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank
entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen,
or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.
Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst
something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She fled up
to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror filled her
sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilized
species.
But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of
industrial activity, becoming almost a creature, with a hard, efficient
shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and
lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the
crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of
soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.
She was not even free, for Clifford must have her there. He seemed to
have a nervous terror that she should leave him. The curious pulpy part of
him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with terror,
like a child, almost like an idiot. She must be there, there at Wragby, a
Lady Chatterley, his wife. Otherwise he would be lost like an idiot on a
moor.
This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror. She
heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with young
scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power,
his uncanny material power over what is called practical men. He had become
a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and powerful one, a master.
Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence upon him, just at the crisis
in his life.
But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone
to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife, a higher
being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a
worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the
dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to swear not to leave
him, not to give him away.
`Clifford,' she said to him---but this was after she had the key to the
hut---`Would you really like me to have a child one day?'
He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent
pale eyes.
`I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.
`No difference to what?' she asked.
`To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect
that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my
own!'
She looked at him in amazement.
`I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'
She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.
`So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.
`I tell you,' he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, `I am quite
willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that,
I am dead against it.'
Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was
really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking
about.
`Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,' she said,
with a certain sarcasm.
`There!' he said. `That is the point! In that case I don't mind in the
least. I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about the
house, and feel one was building up a future for it. I should have something
to strive for then, and I should know it was your child, shouldn't I, dear?
And it would seem just the same as my own. Because it is you who count in
these matters. You know that, don't you, dear? I don't enter, I am a cypher.
You are the great I-am! as far as life goes. You know that, don't you? I
mean, as far as I am concerned. I mean, but for you I am absolutely nothing.
I live for your sake and your future. I am nothing to myself'
Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion. It was one of
the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence. What man in his senses
would say such things to a woman! But men aren't in their senses. What man
with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility
upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?
Moreover, in half an hour's time, Connie heard Clifford talking to Mrs
Bolton, in a hot, impulsive voice, revealing himself in a sort of
passionless passion to the woman, as if she were half mistress, half
foster-mother to him. And Mrs Bolton was carefully dressing him in evening
clothes, for there were important business guests in the house.
Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she
was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of
idiocy. Clifford's strange business efficiency in a way over-awed her, and
his declaration of private worship put her into a panic. There was nothing
between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never touched her.
He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and because they were so
utterly out of touch, he tortured her with his declaration of idolatry. It
was the cruelty of utter impotence. And she felt her reason would give way,
or she would die.
She fled as much as possible to the wood. One afternoon, as she sat
brooding, watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well, the keeper had
strode up to her.
`I got you a key made, my Lady!' he said, saluting, and he offered her
the key.
`Thank you so much!' she said, startled.
`The hut's not very tidy, if you don't mind,' he said. `I cleared it
what I could.'
`But I didn't want you to trouble!' she said.
`Oh, it wasn't any trouble. I am setting the hens in about a week. But
they won't be scared of you. I s'll have to see to them morning and night,
but I shan't bother you any more than I can help.'
`But you wouldn't bother me,' she pleaded. `I'd rather not go to the
hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.'
He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but
distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and
ill. A cough troubled him.
`You have a cough,' she said.
`Nothing---a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's
nothing.'
He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer.
She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon,
but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to
keep his own privacy.
He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the
fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools
and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the
clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for
the birds, and under it stood the live coops. And, one day when she came,
she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on
pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the
pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself was
so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.
Then all the live coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a grey
and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the
soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing
out their feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she
crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm,
but chiefly of female anger at being approached.
Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the
hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand
with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to
give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor
drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the
hens drank.
Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the
world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from
head to foot. Mrs Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the
business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with
the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much
longer.
Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the
leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How
terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted,
cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm
with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the
brink of fainting all the time.
Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under
the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to
the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round
in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little
chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little
spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to
watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! pure, sparky, fearless new life! New
life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little,
scrambling into the coop again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in
answer to the mother hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened,
it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head
was poking through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the
Cosmos.
Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so
acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.
She had only one desire now, to go to the clearing in the wood. The
rest was a kind of painful dream. But sometimes she was kept all day at
Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were going
blank, just blank and insane.
One evening, guests or no guests, she escaped after tea. It was late,
and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The sun
was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among the
flowers. The light would last long overhead.
She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was
there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the
little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was pattering
about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to
be called in by the anxious mother.
`I had to come and see the chickens!' she said, panting, glancing shyly
at the keeper, almost unaware of him. `Are there any more?'
`Thurty-six so far!' he said. `Not bad!'
He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.
Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in.
But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow
feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing forth
from the vast mother-body.
`I'd love to touch them,' she said, putting her lingers gingerly
through the bars of the coop. But the mother-hen pecked at her hand
fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.
`How she pecks at me! She hates me!' she said in a wondering voice.
`But I wouldn't hurt them!'
The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees
apart, and put his hand with quiet confidence slowly into the coop. The old
hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with sure gentle
lingers, he felt among the old bird's feathers and drew out a
faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.
`There!' he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab
thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little stalks
of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through its almost weightless
feet into Connie's hands. But it lifted its handsome, clean-shaped little
head boldly, and looked sharply round, and gave a little `peep'. `So
adorable! So cheeky!' she said softly.
The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face
the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw a tear fall on to her
wrist.
And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly
he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins, that he
had hoped was quiescent for ever. He fought against it, turning his back to
her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees.
He turned again to look at her. She was kneeling and holding her two
hands slowly forward, blindly, so that the chicken should run in to the
mother-hen again. And there was something so mute and forlorn in her,
compassion flamed in his bowels for her.
Without knowing, he came quickly towards her and crouched beside her
again, taking the chick from her hands, because she was afraid of the hen,
and putting it back in the coop. At the back of his loins the lire suddenly
darted stronger.
He glanced apprehensively at her. Her face was averted, and she was
crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness. His
heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid
his lingers on her knee.
`You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.
But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart
was broken and nothing mattered any more.
He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to
travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to
the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly, stroked
the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.
She had found her scrap of handkerchief and was blindly trying to dry
her face.
`Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.
And closing his hand softly on her upper arm, he drew her up and led
her slowly to the hut, not letting go of her till she was inside. Then he
cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's blanket from
the tool chest, spreading it slowly. She glanced at his face, as she stood
motionless.
His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting
to fate.
`You lie there,' he said softly, and he shut the door, so that it was
dark, quite dark.
With a queer obedience, she lay down on the blanket. Then she felt the
soft, groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her body, feeling for her
face. The hand stroked her face softly, softly, with infinite soothing and
assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss on her cheek.
She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she
quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted
clumsiness, among her `clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her
where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath, slowly, carefully, right
down and over her feet. Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched
the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had
to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft,
quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the
body of the woman.
She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The
activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.
Even the tightness of his arms round her, even the intense movement of his
body, and the springing of his seed in her, was a kind of sleep, from which
she did not begin to rouse till he had finished and lay softly panting
against her breast.
Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary?
Why had it lifted a great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it real?
Was it real?
Her tormented modern-woman's brain still had no rest. Was it real? And
she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept
herself for herself it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she
felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to
be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.
The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he
thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not know
him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his mysterious
stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on hers, his wet
body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet not unpeaceful.
His very stillness was peaceful.
She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was
like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her knees
and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing. Then he
quietly opened the door and went out.
She saw a very brilliant little moon shining above the afterglow over
the oaks. Quickly she got up and arranged herself she was tidy. Then she
went to the door of the hut.
All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead
was crystal. But it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower shadow
towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch.
`Shall we go then?' he said.
`Where?'
`I'll go with you to the gate.'
He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of the hut and came
after her.
`You aren't sorry, are you?' he asked, as he went at her side.
`No! No! Are you?' she said.
`For that! No!' he said. Then after a while he added: `But there's the
rest of things.'
`What rest of things?' she said.
`Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications.'
`Why complications?' she said, disappointed.
`It's always so. For you as well as for me. There's always
complications.' He walked on steadily in the dark.
`And are you sorry?' she said.
`In a way!' he replied, looking up at the sky. `I thought I'd done with
it all. Now I've begun again.'
`Begun what?'
`Life.'
`Life!' she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.
`It's life,' he said. `There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep
clear you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again,
I have.'
She did not quite see it that way, but still `It's just love,' she said
cheerfully.
`Whatever that may be,' he replied.
They went on through the darkening wood in silence, till they were
almost at the gate.
`But you don't hate me, do you?' she said wistfully.
`Nay, nay,' he replied. And suddenly he held her fast against his
breast again, with the old connecting passion. `Nay, for me it was good, it
was good. Was it for you?'
`Yes, for me too,' she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not
been conscious of much.
He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.
`If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said
lugubriously.
She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened it for her.
`I won't come any further,' he said.
`No!' And she held out her hand, as if to shake hands. But he took it
in both his.
`Shall I come again?' she asked wistfully.
`Yes! Yes!'
She left him and went across the park.
He stood back and watched her going into the dark, against the pallor
of the horizon. Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected
him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter
privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.
He turned into the dark of the wood. All was still, the moon had set.
But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks Gate, the
traffic on the main road. Slowly he climbed the denuded knoll. And from the
top he could see the country, bright rows of lights at Stacks Gate, smaller
lights at Tevershall pit, the yellow lights of Tevershall and lights
everywhere, here and there, on the dark country, with the distant blush of
furnaces, faint and rosy, since the night was clear, the rosiness of the
outpouring of white-hot metal. Sharp, wicked electric lights at Stacks Gate!
An undefinable quick of evil in them! And all the unease, the ever-shifting
dread of the industrial night in the Midlands. He could hear the
winding-engines at Stacks Gate turning down the seven-o'clock miners. The
pit worked three shifts.
He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he
knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises
broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could
no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits. And now he
had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.
For he knew by experience what it meant.
It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical
rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy
mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal
and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy
whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells
would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling
and running of iron.
He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing,
she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she
was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of
the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the
modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her
in, as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was
tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that
has gone out of the celluloid women of today. But he would protect her with
his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron
world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as
him.
He went home with his gun and his dog, to the dark cottage, lit the
lamp, started the fire, and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions
and beer. He was alone, in a silence he loved. His room was clean and tidy,
but rather stark. Yet the fire was bright, the hearth white, the petroleum
lamp hung bright over the table, with its white oil-cloth. He tried to read
a book about India, but tonight he could not read. He sat by the fire in his
shirt-sleeves, not smoking, but with a mug of beer in reach. And he thought
about Connie.
To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for
her sake. He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was
troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was
chiefly tear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself.
But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to
be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.
The woman! If she could be there with him, arid there were nobody else
in the world! The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live
bird. At the same time an oppression, a dread of exposing himself and her to
that outside Thing that sparkled viciously in the electric lights, weighed
down his shoulders. She, poor young thing, was just a young female creature
to him; but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he
desired again.
Stretching with the curious yawn of desire, for he had been alone and
apart from man or woman for four years, he rose and took his coat again, and
his gun, lowered the lamp and went out into the starry night, with the dog.
Driven by desire and by dread of the malevolent Thing outside, he made his
round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved the darkness arid folded himself
into it. It fitted the turgidity of his desire which, in spite of all, was
like a riches; the stirring restlessness of his penis, the stirring fire in
his loins! Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that
sparkling electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life,
the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there
were men to fight side by side with! But the men were all outside there,
glorying in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of
mechanized greed or of greedy mechanism.
Constance, for her part, had hurried across the park, home, almost
without thinking. As yet she had no afterthought. She would be in time for
dinner.
She was annoyed to find the doors fastened, however, so that she had to
ring. Mrs Bolton opened.
`Why there you are, your Ladyship! I was beginning to wonder if you'd
gone lost!' she said a little roguishly. `Sir Clifford hasn't asked for you,
though; he's got Mr Linley in with him, talking over something. It looks as
if he'd stay to dinner, doesn't it, my Lady?'
`It does rather,' said Connie.
`Shall I put dinner back a quarter of an hour? That would give you time
to dress in comfort.'
`Perhaps you'd better.'
Mr Linley was the general manager of the collieries, an elderly man
from the north, with not quite enough punch to suit Clifford; not up to
post-war conditions, nor post-war colliers either, with their `ca' canny'
creed. But Connie liked Mr Linley, though she was glad to be spared the
toadying of his wife.
Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much,
so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with big, wide blue eyes arid a soft
repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie had played
this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but still, decidedly
second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared from her consciousness
while she played it.
She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own
thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She
didn't know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really
like her? Not much, she felt. Yet he was kind. There was something, a sort
of warm naive kindness, curious and sudden, that almost opened her womb to
him. But she felt he might be kind like that to any woman. Though even so,
it was curiously soothing, comforting. And he was a passionate man,
wholesome and passionate. But perhaps he wasn't quite individual enough; he
might be the same with any woman as he had been with her. It really wasn't
personal. She was only really a female to him.
But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female
in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she
was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her
altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley;
but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no notice of Constance or
of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.
She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the
dark-green dogs-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees
making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in
her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up,
up to the bud-a, there to push into little flamey oak-leaves, bronze as
blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.
She came to the clearing, but he was not there. She had only half
expected him. The pheasant chicks were running lightly abroad, light as
insects, from the coops where the fellow hens clucked anxiously. Connie sat
and watched them, and waited. She only waited. Even the chicks she hardly
saw. She waited.
The time passed with dream-like slowness, and he did not come. She had
only half expected him. He never came in the afternoon. She must go home to
tea. But she had to force herself to leave.
As she went home, a fine drizzle of rain fell.
`Is it raining again?' said Clifford, seeing her shake her hat.
`Just drizzle.'
She poured tea in silence, absorbed in a sort of obstinacy. She did
want to see the keeper today, to see if it were really real. If it were
really real.
`Shall I read a little to you afterwards?' said Clifford.
She looked at him. Had he sensed something?
`The spring makes me feel queer---I thought I might rest a little,' she
said.
`Just as you like. Not feeling really unwell, are you?'
`No! Only rather tired---with the spring. Will you have Mrs Bolton to
play something with you?'
`No! I think I'll listen in.'
She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to
her bedroom. There she heard the loudspeaker begin to bellow, in an
idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series of
street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old criers.
She pulled on her old violet coloured mackintosh, and slipped out of the
house at the side door.
The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed,
not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open
her light waterproof.
The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain,
full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In
the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had
unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with
greenness.
There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone
under the mother-hens, only one or two last adventurous ones still dibbed
about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were doubtful of
themselves.
So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps
something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.
But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all
tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the straw
neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail.
The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.
She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The
fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing
made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim, twilit, silent
and alive. How alive everything was!
Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding
her.
But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin
jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the hut,
half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched
in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully shutting the
hens and chicks up safe against the night.
At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He
stood before her under the porch.
`You come then,' he said, using the intonation of the dialect.
`Yes,' she said, looking up at him. `You're late!'
`Ay!' he replied, looking away into the wood.
She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.
`Did you want to come in?' she asked.
He looked down at her shrewdly.
`Won't folks be thinkin' somethink, you comin' here every night?' he
said.
`Why?' She looked up at him, at a loss. `I said I'd come. Nobody
knows.'
`They soon will, though,' he replied. `An' what then?'
She was at a loss for an answer.
`Why should they know?' she said.
`Folks always does,' he said fatally.
Her lip quivered a little.
`Well I can't help it,' she faltered.
`Nay,' he said. `You can help it by not comin'---if yer want to,' he
added, in a lower tone.
chalk. It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on
motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.'
`But what do they do when they get there?'
`Oh, hang around---and have tea in some fine tea-place like the
Mikado---and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some girl.
The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'
`And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'
`They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But I
don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want is just
money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine clothes: and
they don't care about another thing. They haven't the brains to be
socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take anything really serious,
and they never will have.'
Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair
or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys. The moneyboy
and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd got, and how much
you wanted.
Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in
the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came
into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was really the
pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now shrunk from
with dread.
Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries:
Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous mine,
and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London was never
very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently. But now times were
bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.
`There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and
Whiteover,' said Mrs Bolton. `You've not seen the new works at Stacks Gate,
opened after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one day,
they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head,
doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the
chemical by-products than out of the coal---I forget what it is. And the
grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of course it's brought a lot of
riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall men got on
there, and doin' well, a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall's
done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut
down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no
Tevershall pit working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it
closes for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl
it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he
could on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall. And now the
men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out. Doesn't it
sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never go till they have to.
They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to
work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them,
those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they
say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a
lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth,
it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had to
give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the
more machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you
can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks
Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they say so. But
everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to keep the men
going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to
Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to talk about if
Tevershall Collieries took a new lease of life, after everybody saying
they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like
rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so much, of course there was a
boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the
money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and
the owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you!
Why I always thought the pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have
thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood:
yes, it's fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood
standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the
pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery.
Why, whatever should we do if Tevershall shut down---? It doesn't bear
thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even then
the fan-wheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I'm
sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year to year, you
really don't.'
It was Mrs Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His
income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's trust, even
though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It was the
other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and fame; the
popular world, not the working world.
Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a private
individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace of pleasure.
And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the populace
of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too had to have their
providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of
work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and
`getting on' in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.
He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main
appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and
bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men
who made money in industry.
Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement,
stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage
breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The
well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves
for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent
fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.
But under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.
In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own
states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began
to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.
He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to have
forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the
underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch. And he said
little. But his mind began to work.
He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest things
on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in
German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as
possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of
coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the
chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the
almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the
devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry.
It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional
half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field,
men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to
carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond atty mental age
calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the emotional and
human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen,
feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.
But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional
and `human' mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was
interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.
He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the
engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a new
sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the
hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting
things into his grip.
And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had been
gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and
the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life
rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The very stale air of the
colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power.
He was doing something: and he was going to do something. He was going to
win, to win: not as he had won with his stories, mere publicity, amid a
whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man's victory.
At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal
into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new
locomotive engine with a self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And it
was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a great
heat, under peculiar conditions.
The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at
a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of
external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air supply. He
began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had proved brilliant
in chemistry, to help him.
And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had
fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not
done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.
He was not aware how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did not know
how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he
was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost a
trifle vulgar.
With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and
he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave him
mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of her. The
new Achilles in hint had a heel, and in this heel the woman, the woman like
Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a certain
half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her. But his voice
was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to be silent whenever
she was present.
Only when he was alone with Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and a
master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as
her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body as if he
were a child, really as if he were a child.
Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford
no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer.
He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good
deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even
there in the uneasy Midlands.
And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing
forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank
entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen,
or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.
Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst
something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She fled up
to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror filled her
sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilized
species.
But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of
industrial activity, becoming almost a creature, with a hard, efficient
shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and
lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the
crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of
soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.
She was not even free, for Clifford must have her there. He seemed to
have a nervous terror that she should leave him. The curious pulpy part of
him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with terror,
like a child, almost like an idiot. She must be there, there at Wragby, a
Lady Chatterley, his wife. Otherwise he would be lost like an idiot on a
moor.
This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror. She
heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with young
scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power,
his uncanny material power over what is called practical men. He had become
a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and powerful one, a master.
Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence upon him, just at the crisis
in his life.
But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone
to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife, a higher
being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a
worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the
dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to swear not to leave
him, not to give him away.
`Clifford,' she said to him---but this was after she had the key to the
hut---`Would you really like me to have a child one day?'
He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent
pale eyes.
`I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.
`No difference to what?' she asked.
`To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect
that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my
own!'
She looked at him in amazement.
`I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'
She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.
`So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.
`I tell you,' he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, `I am quite
willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that,
I am dead against it.'
Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was
really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking
about.
`Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,' she said,
with a certain sarcasm.
`There!' he said. `That is the point! In that case I don't mind in the
least. I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about the
house, and feel one was building up a future for it. I should have something
to strive for then, and I should know it was your child, shouldn't I, dear?
And it would seem just the same as my own. Because it is you who count in
these matters. You know that, don't you, dear? I don't enter, I am a cypher.
You are the great I-am! as far as life goes. You know that, don't you? I
mean, as far as I am concerned. I mean, but for you I am absolutely nothing.
I live for your sake and your future. I am nothing to myself'
Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion. It was one of
the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence. What man in his senses
would say such things to a woman! But men aren't in their senses. What man
with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility
upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?
Moreover, in half an hour's time, Connie heard Clifford talking to Mrs
Bolton, in a hot, impulsive voice, revealing himself in a sort of
passionless passion to the woman, as if she were half mistress, half
foster-mother to him. And Mrs Bolton was carefully dressing him in evening
clothes, for there were important business guests in the house.
Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she
was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of
idiocy. Clifford's strange business efficiency in a way over-awed her, and
his declaration of private worship put her into a panic. There was nothing
between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never touched her.
He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and because they were so
utterly out of touch, he tortured her with his declaration of idolatry. It
was the cruelty of utter impotence. And she felt her reason would give way,
or she would die.
She fled as much as possible to the wood. One afternoon, as she sat
brooding, watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well, the keeper had
strode up to her.
`I got you a key made, my Lady!' he said, saluting, and he offered her
the key.
`Thank you so much!' she said, startled.
`The hut's not very tidy, if you don't mind,' he said. `I cleared it
what I could.'
`But I didn't want you to trouble!' she said.
`Oh, it wasn't any trouble. I am setting the hens in about a week. But
they won't be scared of you. I s'll have to see to them morning and night,
but I shan't bother you any more than I can help.'
`But you wouldn't bother me,' she pleaded. `I'd rather not go to the
hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.'
He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but
distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and
ill. A cough troubled him.
`You have a cough,' she said.
`Nothing---a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's
nothing.'
He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer.
She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon,
but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to
keep his own privacy.
He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the
fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools
and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the
clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for
the birds, and under it stood the live coops. And, one day when she came,
she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on
pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the
pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself was
so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.
Then all the live coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a grey
and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the
soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing
out their feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she
crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm,
but chiefly of female anger at being approached.
Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the
hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand
with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to
give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor
drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the
hens drank.
Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the
world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from
head to foot. Mrs Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the
business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with
the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much
longer.
Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the
leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How
terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted,
cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm
with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the
brink of fainting all the time.
Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under
the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to
the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round
in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little
chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little
spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to
watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! pure, sparky, fearless new life! New
life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little,
scrambling into the coop again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in
answer to the mother hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened,
it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head
was poking through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the
Cosmos.
Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so
acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.
She had only one desire now, to go to the clearing in the wood. The
rest was a kind of painful dream. But sometimes she was kept all day at
Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were going
blank, just blank and insane.
One evening, guests or no guests, she escaped after tea. It was late,
and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The sun
was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among the
flowers. The light would last long overhead.
She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was
there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the
little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was pattering
about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to
be called in by the anxious mother.
`I had to come and see the chickens!' she said, panting, glancing shyly
at the keeper, almost unaware of him. `Are there any more?'
`Thurty-six so far!' he said. `Not bad!'
He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.
Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in.
But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow
feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing forth
from the vast mother-body.
`I'd love to touch them,' she said, putting her lingers gingerly
through the bars of the coop. But the mother-hen pecked at her hand
fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.
`How she pecks at me! She hates me!' she said in a wondering voice.
`But I wouldn't hurt them!'
The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees
apart, and put his hand with quiet confidence slowly into the coop. The old
hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with sure gentle
lingers, he felt among the old bird's feathers and drew out a
faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.
`There!' he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab
thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little stalks
of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through its almost weightless
feet into Connie's hands. But it lifted its handsome, clean-shaped little
head boldly, and looked sharply round, and gave a little `peep'. `So
adorable! So cheeky!' she said softly.
The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face
the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw a tear fall on to her
wrist.
And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly
he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins, that he
had hoped was quiescent for ever. He fought against it, turning his back to
her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees.
He turned again to look at her. She was kneeling and holding her two
hands slowly forward, blindly, so that the chicken should run in to the
mother-hen again. And there was something so mute and forlorn in her,
compassion flamed in his bowels for her.
Without knowing, he came quickly towards her and crouched beside her
again, taking the chick from her hands, because she was afraid of the hen,
and putting it back in the coop. At the back of his loins the lire suddenly
darted stronger.
He glanced apprehensively at her. Her face was averted, and she was
crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness. His
heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid
his lingers on her knee.
`You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.
But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart
was broken and nothing mattered any more.
He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to
travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to
the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly, stroked
the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.
She had found her scrap of handkerchief and was blindly trying to dry
her face.
`Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.
And closing his hand softly on her upper arm, he drew her up and led
her slowly to the hut, not letting go of her till she was inside. Then he
cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's blanket from
the tool chest, spreading it slowly. She glanced at his face, as she stood
motionless.
His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting
to fate.
`You lie there,' he said softly, and he shut the door, so that it was
dark, quite dark.
With a queer obedience, she lay down on the blanket. Then she felt the
soft, groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her body, feeling for her
face. The hand stroked her face softly, softly, with infinite soothing and
assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss on her cheek.
She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she
quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted
clumsiness, among her `clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her
where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath, slowly, carefully, right
down and over her feet. Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched
the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had
to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft,
quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the
body of the woman.
She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The
activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.
Even the tightness of his arms round her, even the intense movement of his
body, and the springing of his seed in her, was a kind of sleep, from which
she did not begin to rouse till he had finished and lay softly panting
against her breast.
Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary?
Why had it lifted a great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it real?
Was it real?
Her tormented modern-woman's brain still had no rest. Was it real? And
she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept
herself for herself it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she
felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to
be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.
The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he
thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not know
him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his mysterious
stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on hers, his wet
body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet not unpeaceful.
His very stillness was peaceful.
She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was
like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her knees
and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing. Then he
quietly opened the door and went out.
She saw a very brilliant little moon shining above the afterglow over
the oaks. Quickly she got up and arranged herself she was tidy. Then she
went to the door of the hut.
All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead
was crystal. But it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower shadow
towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch.
`Shall we go then?' he said.
`Where?'
`I'll go with you to the gate.'
He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of the hut and came
after her.
`You aren't sorry, are you?' he asked, as he went at her side.
`No! No! Are you?' she said.
`For that! No!' he said. Then after a while he added: `But there's the
rest of things.'
`What rest of things?' she said.
`Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications.'
`Why complications?' she said, disappointed.
`It's always so. For you as well as for me. There's always
complications.' He walked on steadily in the dark.
`And are you sorry?' she said.
`In a way!' he replied, looking up at the sky. `I thought I'd done with
it all. Now I've begun again.'
`Begun what?'
`Life.'
`Life!' she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.
`It's life,' he said. `There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep
clear you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again,
I have.'
She did not quite see it that way, but still `It's just love,' she said
cheerfully.
`Whatever that may be,' he replied.
They went on through the darkening wood in silence, till they were
almost at the gate.
`But you don't hate me, do you?' she said wistfully.
`Nay, nay,' he replied. And suddenly he held her fast against his
breast again, with the old connecting passion. `Nay, for me it was good, it
was good. Was it for you?'
`Yes, for me too,' she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not
been conscious of much.
He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.
`If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said
lugubriously.
She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened it for her.
`I won't come any further,' he said.
`No!' And she held out her hand, as if to shake hands. But he took it
in both his.
`Shall I come again?' she asked wistfully.
`Yes! Yes!'
She left him and went across the park.
He stood back and watched her going into the dark, against the pallor
of the horizon. Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected
him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter
privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.
He turned into the dark of the wood. All was still, the moon had set.
But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks Gate, the
traffic on the main road. Slowly he climbed the denuded knoll. And from the
top he could see the country, bright rows of lights at Stacks Gate, smaller
lights at Tevershall pit, the yellow lights of Tevershall and lights
everywhere, here and there, on the dark country, with the distant blush of
furnaces, faint and rosy, since the night was clear, the rosiness of the
outpouring of white-hot metal. Sharp, wicked electric lights at Stacks Gate!
An undefinable quick of evil in them! And all the unease, the ever-shifting
dread of the industrial night in the Midlands. He could hear the
winding-engines at Stacks Gate turning down the seven-o'clock miners. The
pit worked three shifts.
He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he
knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises
broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could
no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits. And now he
had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.
For he knew by experience what it meant.
It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical
rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy
mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal
and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy
whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells
would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling
and running of iron.
He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing,
she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she
was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of
the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the
modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her
in, as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was
tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that
has gone out of the celluloid women of today. But he would protect her with
his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron
world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as
him.
He went home with his gun and his dog, to the dark cottage, lit the
lamp, started the fire, and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions
and beer. He was alone, in a silence he loved. His room was clean and tidy,
but rather stark. Yet the fire was bright, the hearth white, the petroleum
lamp hung bright over the table, with its white oil-cloth. He tried to read
a book about India, but tonight he could not read. He sat by the fire in his
shirt-sleeves, not smoking, but with a mug of beer in reach. And he thought
about Connie.
To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for
her sake. He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was
troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was
chiefly tear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself.
But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to
be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.
The woman! If she could be there with him, arid there were nobody else
in the world! The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a live
bird. At the same time an oppression, a dread of exposing himself and her to
that outside Thing that sparkled viciously in the electric lights, weighed
down his shoulders. She, poor young thing, was just a young female creature
to him; but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he
desired again.
Stretching with the curious yawn of desire, for he had been alone and
apart from man or woman for four years, he rose and took his coat again, and
his gun, lowered the lamp and went out into the starry night, with the dog.
Driven by desire and by dread of the malevolent Thing outside, he made his
round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved the darkness arid folded himself
into it. It fitted the turgidity of his desire which, in spite of all, was
like a riches; the stirring restlessness of his penis, the stirring fire in
his loins! Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that
sparkling electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life,
the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there
were men to fight side by side with! But the men were all outside there,
glorying in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of
mechanized greed or of greedy mechanism.
Constance, for her part, had hurried across the park, home, almost
without thinking. As yet she had no afterthought. She would be in time for
dinner.
She was annoyed to find the doors fastened, however, so that she had to
ring. Mrs Bolton opened.
`Why there you are, your Ladyship! I was beginning to wonder if you'd
gone lost!' she said a little roguishly. `Sir Clifford hasn't asked for you,
though; he's got Mr Linley in with him, talking over something. It looks as
if he'd stay to dinner, doesn't it, my Lady?'
`It does rather,' said Connie.
`Shall I put dinner back a quarter of an hour? That would give you time
to dress in comfort.'
`Perhaps you'd better.'
Mr Linley was the general manager of the collieries, an elderly man
from the north, with not quite enough punch to suit Clifford; not up to
post-war conditions, nor post-war colliers either, with their `ca' canny'
creed. But Connie liked Mr Linley, though she was glad to be spared the
toadying of his wife.
Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much,
so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with big, wide blue eyes arid a soft
repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie had played
this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but still, decidedly
second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared from her consciousness
while she played it.
She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own
thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She
didn't know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really
like her? Not much, she felt. Yet he was kind. There was something, a sort
of warm naive kindness, curious and sudden, that almost opened her womb to
him. But she felt he might be kind like that to any woman. Though even so,
it was curiously soothing, comforting. And he was a passionate man,
wholesome and passionate. But perhaps he wasn't quite individual enough; he
might be the same with any woman as he had been with her. It really wasn't
personal. She was only really a female to him.
But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female
in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she
was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her
altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley;
but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no notice of Constance or
of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.
She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the
dark-green dogs-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees
making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in
her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up,
up to the bud-a, there to push into little flamey oak-leaves, bronze as
blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.
She came to the clearing, but he was not there. She had only half
expected him. The pheasant chicks were running lightly abroad, light as
insects, from the coops where the fellow hens clucked anxiously. Connie sat
and watched them, and waited. She only waited. Even the chicks she hardly
saw. She waited.
The time passed with dream-like slowness, and he did not come. She had
only half expected him. He never came in the afternoon. She must go home to
tea. But she had to force herself to leave.
As she went home, a fine drizzle of rain fell.
`Is it raining again?' said Clifford, seeing her shake her hat.
`Just drizzle.'
She poured tea in silence, absorbed in a sort of obstinacy. She did
want to see the keeper today, to see if it were really real. If it were
really real.
`Shall I read a little to you afterwards?' said Clifford.
She looked at him. Had he sensed something?
`The spring makes me feel queer---I thought I might rest a little,' she
said.
`Just as you like. Not feeling really unwell, are you?'
`No! Only rather tired---with the spring. Will you have Mrs Bolton to
play something with you?'
`No! I think I'll listen in.'
She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to
her bedroom. There she heard the loudspeaker begin to bellow, in an
idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series of
street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old criers.
She pulled on her old violet coloured mackintosh, and slipped out of the
house at the side door.
The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed,
not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open
her light waterproof.
The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain,
full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In
the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had
unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with
greenness.
There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone
under the mother-hens, only one or two last adventurous ones still dibbed
about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were doubtful of
themselves.
So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps
something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.
But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all
tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the straw
neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail.
The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.
She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The
fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing
made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim, twilit, silent
and alive. How alive everything was!
Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding
her.
But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin
jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the hut,
half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched
in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully shutting the
hens and chicks up safe against the night.
At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He
stood before her under the porch.
`You come then,' he said, using the intonation of the dialect.
`Yes,' she said, looking up at him. `You're late!'
`Ay!' he replied, looking away into the wood.
She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.
`Did you want to come in?' she asked.
He looked down at her shrewdly.
`Won't folks be thinkin' somethink, you comin' here every night?' he
said.
`Why?' She looked up at him, at a loss. `I said I'd come. Nobody
knows.'
`They soon will, though,' he replied. `An' what then?'
She was at a loss for an answer.
`Why should they know?' she said.
`Folks always does,' he said fatally.
Her lip quivered a little.
`Well I can't help it,' she faltered.
`Nay,' he said. `You can help it by not comin'---if yer want to,' he
added, in a lower tone.