might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one
blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he
would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one
blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his
arms was the only necessity.
He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the
floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly
his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness
cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one
moment of completeness and sleep.
He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then
slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock, still
clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was used to the dark, he could see
well.
Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be
near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of unfinished
aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms. Perhaps he could
find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to
her. For the need was imperious.
He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round
the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand
sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could already
see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level lozenge in
front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.
There was the house, low and long and obscure, with one light burning
downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the woman who
held the other end of the frail thread which drew him so mercilessly, that
he did not know.
He went a little nearer, gun in hand, and stood motionless on the
drive, watching the house. Perhaps even now he could find her, come at her
in some way. The house was not impregnable: he was as clever as burglars
are. Why not come to her?
He stood motionless, waiting, while the dawn faintly and imperceptibly
paled behind him. He saw the light in the house go out. But he did not see
Mrs Bolton come to the window and draw back the old curtain of dark-blue
silk, and stand herself in the dark room, looking out on the half-dark of
the approaching day, looking for the longed-for dawn, waiting, waiting for
Clifford to be really reassured that it was daybreak. For when he was sure
of daybreak, he would sleep almost at once.
She stood blind with sleep at the window, waiting. And as she stood,
she started, and almost cried out. For there was a man out there on the
drive, a black figure in the twilight. She woke up greyly, and watched, but
without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford.
The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed
to go smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and baggy
jacket---it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. `Yes, for there was the dog
nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him'!
And what did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he
standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick
male dog outside the house where the bitch is?
Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs Bolton like a shot. He was
Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!
To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a tiny bit in love
with him herself. When he was a lad of sixteen and she a woman of
twenty-six. It was when she was studying, and he had helped her a lot with
the anatomy and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever boy, had a
scholarship for Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French and things: and
then after all had become an overhead blacksmith shoeing horses, because he
was fond of horses, he said: but really because he was frightened to go out
and face the world, only he'd never admit it.
But he'd been a nice lad, a nice lad, had helped her a lot, so clever
at making things clear to you. He was quite as clever as Sir Clifford: and
always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.
Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself.
Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed of
something. And no wonder it had been a failure.---For years he was gone, all
the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really
quite the gentleman!---Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a
game-keeper! Really, some people can't take their chances when they've got
them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the worst, when she, Ivy
Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, really.
Well, well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well her ladyship
wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad
born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap
back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys!
But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realized: it's no good! It's
no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it
all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times!
But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to
it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when
they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her
broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming
together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track
her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came.
He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew
it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing after
her. No use!
Mrs Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him.
`Well, well!' she said. `He's the one man I never thought of; and the
one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after
I lost Ted. Well, well! Whatever would he say if he knew!'
And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she
stepped softly from the room.
Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were
several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir
Geoffery's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffery's mother had liked
cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffery himself had liked old carved oak chests,
vestry chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected
very modern pictures, at very moderate prices.
So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic
William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten
the daughter of an R.A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear
it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.
Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the old
family cradle, of rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to look at it. It had a
certain charm: she looked at it a longtime.
`It's thousand pities it won't be called for,' sighed Mrs Bolton, who
was helping. `Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'
`It might be called for. I might have a child,' said Connie casually,
as if saying she might have a new hat.
`You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs Bolton.
`No! I mean as things are. It's only muscular paralysis with Sir
Clifford---it doesn't affect him,' said Connie, lying as naturally as
breathing.
Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had said: `Of course I may
have a child yet. I'm not really mutilated at all. The potency may easily
come back, even if the muscles of the hips and legs are paralysed. And then
the seed may be transferred.'
He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard at
the question of the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning. Connie
had looked at him in terror. But she was quite quick-witted enough to use
his suggestion for her own preservation. For she would have a child if she
could: but not his.
Mrs Bolton was for a moment breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't
believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things nowadays.
They might sort of graft seed.
`Well, my Lady, I only hope and pray you may. It would be lovely for
you: and for everybody. My word, a child in Wragby, what a difference it
would make!'
`Wouldn't it!' said Connie.
And she chose three R. A. pictures of sixty years ago, to send to the
Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was called
`the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to send things for
her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed R. A.s. She might even
call, on the strength of them. How furious Clifford was when she called!
But oh my dear! Mrs Bolton was thinking to herself. Is it Oliver
Mellors' child you're preparing us for? Oh my dear, that would be a
Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it, neither!
Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish
blackjapanned box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or seventy
years ago, and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was a
concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three
beautiful little razors in safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and all. Underneath
came a sort of escritoire outfit: blotters, pens, ink-bottles, paper,
envelopes, memorandum books: and then a perfect sewing-outfit, with three
different sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg,
all of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little
medicine store, with bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess.
Cloves and so on: but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole
thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside,
it fitted together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly have
spilled: there wasn't room.
The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship
of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley must
even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a peculiar
soullessness.
Yet Mrs Bolton was thrilled.
`Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes,
three perfect ones! No! and those scissors! They're the best that money
could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'
`Do you?' said Connie. `Then you have it.'
`Oh no, my Lady!'
`Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it,
I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't deserve
so much. Do have it!'
`Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'
`You needn't try,' laughed Connie.
And Mrs Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her
arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.
Mr Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the
box. And she had to have a few friends in, to show it: the school-mistress,
the chemist's wife, Mrs Weedon the undercashier's wife. They thought it
marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child.
`Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs Weedon.
But Mrs Bolton was convinced, if it did come, it would be Sir
Clifford's child. So there!
Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:
`And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the
hand of God in mercy, indeed!'
`Well! We may hope,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same
time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible it
might even be his child.
Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody
called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman, as
Mrs Bolton said to Mrs Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his
old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out of
date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers.
They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even
the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at
great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly strong
pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly strong, wet wind
the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes, and left a fine
powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.
`But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?'
asked Winter.
`I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell
electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'
`If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid!
If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little out
of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm gone, there
may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men again, and you
won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid idea, and I
hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt they would have
up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the way, dear boy, is there any
foundation to the rumour that we may entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?'
`Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.
`Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me, that's all I
can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world, if
there were no foundation.'
`Well, Sir,' said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes.
`There is a hope. There is a hope.'
Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.
`My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear
that! And to hear you are working in the hopes of a son: and that you may
again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy! to keep up the level of
the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to work!---'
The old man was really moved.
Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.
`Connie,' said Clifford, `did you know there was a rumour that you are
going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'
Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the
flowers.
`No!' she said. `Is it a joke? Or malice?'
He paused before he answered:
`Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'
Connie went on with her flowers.
`I had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. `He wants to know
if I am aware he has accepted Sir Alexander Cooper's Invitation for me for
July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'
`July and August?' said Clifford.
`Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'
`I won't travel abroad,' said Clifford promptly. She took her flowers
to the window.
`Do you mind if I go?' she said. You know it was promised, for this
summer.
`For how long would you go?'
`Perhaps three weeks.'
There was silence for a time.
`Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. `I suppose I could
stand it for three weeks: if I were absolutely sure you'd want to come
back.'
`I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet simplicity, heavy
with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.
Clifford felt her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed
it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.
`In that case,' he said,
`I think it would be all right, don't you?'
`I think so,' she said.
`You'd enjoy the change?' She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.
`I should like to see Venice again,' she said, `and to bathe from one
of the shingle islands across the lagoon. But you know I loathe the Lido!
And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and Lady Cooper. But if
Hilda is there, and we have a gondola of our own: yes, it will be rather
lovely. I do wish you'd come.'
She said it sincerely. She would so love to make him happy, in these
ways.
`Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'
`But why not? I see other men carried in litter-chairs, who have been
wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'
`We should need to take two men.'
`Oh no! We'd manage with Field. There would always be another man
there.'
But Clifford shook his head.
`Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'
She went away gloomily. Next year! What would next year bring? She
herself did not really want to go to Venice: not now, now there was the
other man. But she was going as a sort of discipline: and also because, if
she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.
It was already May, and in June they were supposed to start. Always
these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that worked
one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!
It was May, but cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for corn and
hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie had to go into Uthwaite,
which was their little town, where the Chatterleys were still the
Chatterleys. She went alone, Field driving her.
In spite of May and a new greenness, the country was dismal. It was
rather chilly, and there was smoke on the rain, and a certain sense of
exhaust vapour in the air. One just had to live from one's resistance. No
wonder these people were ugly and tough.
The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of
Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening
their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and
black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything.
The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of
life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird
and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.
The stacks of soap in the grocers' shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the
greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly,
followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture
announcements, `A Woman's Love!', and the new big Primitive chapel,
primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry
glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick
and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational
chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and
had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school
buildings, expensivink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings,
all very imposing, and fixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison.
Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the
la-me-doh-la exercises and beginning a `sweet children's song'. Anything
more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a
strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like
savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean
something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called
singing. Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was
filling petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in
whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer
mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?
A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started
upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops, the
post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where Sam Black
was peering out of the door of the Sun, that called itself an inn, not a
pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was bowing to Lady
Chatterley's car.
The church was away to the left among black trees. The car slid on
downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the
Nelson, the Three Tuns, and the Sun, now it passed the Miners' Arms, then
the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare and so,
past a few new `villas', out into the blackened road between dark hedges and
dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.
Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England!
No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to
live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the
money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side
dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent
consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground
about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we
understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries
full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like
men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah
God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to
their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now
there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.
She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it
all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as
she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a
baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.
Yet Mellors had come out of all this!---Yes, but he was as apart from
it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead.
The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far
as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England:
as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.
The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and
in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away in
long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and
Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.
As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a
height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop Castle,
dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners' dwellings,
newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from the
great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into the pockets
of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old castle was a ruin,
yet it hung its bulk on the low sky-line, over the black plumes and the
white that waved on the damp air below.
A turn, and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate, as
seen from the highroad, was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the
Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in barbarous isolation off
the road. But if you looked, you saw on the left rows of handsome `modern'
dwellings, set down like a game of dominoes, with spaces and gardens, a
queer game of dominoes that some weird `masters' were playing on the
surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings, at the back, rose all
the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern mine,
chemical works and long galleries, enormous, and of shapes not before known
to man. The head-stock and pit-bank of the mine itself were insignificant
among the huge new installations. And in front of this, the game of dominoes
stood forever in a sort of surprise, waiting to be played.
This was Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war. But
as a matter of fact, though even Connie did not know it, downhill half a
mile below the `hotel' was old Stacks Gate, with a little old colliery and
blackish old brick dwellings, and a chapel or two and a shop or two and a
little pub or two.
But that didn't count any more. The vast plumes of smoke and vapour
rose from the new works up above, and this was now Stacks Gate: no chapels,
no pubs, even no shops. Only the great works', which are the modern Olympia
with temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings: then the hotel. The
hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners' pub though it looked
first-classy.
Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on the
face of the earth, and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff
drifting in from anywhere, to poach Clifford's rabbits among other
occupations.
The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread out.
The county! It had once been a proud and lordly county. In front, looming
again and hanging on the brow of the sky-line, was the huge and splendid
bulk of Chadwick Hall, more window than wall, one of the most famous
Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood alone above a great park, but out of
date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a show place. `Look how our
ancestors lorded it!'
That was the past. The present lay below. God alone knows where the
future lies. The car was already turning, between little old blackened
miners' cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day, was
sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam, to whatever gods there
be. Uthwaite down in the valley, with all the steel threads of the railways
to Sheffield drawn through it, and the coal-mines and the steel-works
sending up smoke and glare from long tubes, and the pathetic little
corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble down, still pricking
the fumes, always affected Connie strangely. It was an old market-town,
centre of the dales. One of the chief inns was the Chatterley Arms. There,
in Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby, as if it were a whole place, not
just a house, as it was to outsiders: Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby,
a `seat'.
The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with that
intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years old. They
lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you sank, you forgot
instantly the open, rolling country where the castles and big houses still
dominated, but like ghosts. Now you were just above the tangle of naked
railway-lines, and foundries and other `works' rose about you, so big you
were only aware of walls. And iron clanked with a huge reverberating clank,
and huge lorries shook the earth, and whistles screamed.
Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked
heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two centuries
ago, in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood, and the old
pharmacy, streets which used to lead Out to the wild open world of the
castles and stately couchant houses.
But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded
with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the lorries
were past could he salute her ladyship.
So it was. Upon the old crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish
blackened miners' dwellings crowded, lining the roads out. And immediately
after these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering
the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And beyond that again, in the
wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved against steam, and patch
after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements,
sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the sky-line of
the slopes. And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of the old
coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the
miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when
they were not at work.
England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of
England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion with
the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good
Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco,
that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes,
they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of
England---there they are---great plasterings of brick dwellings on the
hopeless countryside.
`Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are
going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie
passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war
the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too
expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The gentry were
departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend their money without
having to see how it was made.'
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the
halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted
out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.
One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England.
And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.
Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of
the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really
blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the
blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood
was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.
Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back,
opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the Shipley
colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood open, because
through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used. They hung around
the park.
The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their
newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside,
a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century.
It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house,
and the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if
cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.
Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter,
more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy painted
panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in
exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense.
Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of
life.
But Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was
bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his
ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not
made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his
ornamental waters---not in the private part of the park, no, he drew the
line there---he would say: `the miners are perhaps not so ornamental as
deer, but they are far more profitable.'
But that was in the golden---monetarily---latter half of Queen
Victoria's reign. Miners were then `good working men'.
Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then
Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:
`You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would
open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I
am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price. Your men
are good men too, I hear.'
But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of
money, and the blessings of industrialism.
However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now
there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open
soup-kitchens.
And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining
villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the
population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite grand
way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle
pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who
did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry,
had a will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman-owner. All
the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it.
It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.
Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to
walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked,
bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with
Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw
fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood
and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean,
well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage
winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not
at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And, deep down,
there was a profound grudge. They `worked for him'. And in their ugliness,
they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. `Who's he!' It
was the difference they resented.
And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a
soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt
himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless
he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.
Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie's call, suddenly.
And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.
The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It
cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The
avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided
into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of
this still-one-more no-man's-land, new little streets of semi-detacheds were
run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!
Within a year of Connie's last call, it had happened. There stood
Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached `villas' in new
streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there
twelve months before.
But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening, the
sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.
One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and
the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.
What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the
new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the
collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new collier lads
lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly
unconscious of the old England. There was a gap in the continuity of
consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?
Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in
the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living man.
The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people
were so many, and really so terrible. So she bought as she was going home,
and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one
shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy ironshod boots.
Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing from the pit
roof, shoulders Out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in some ways patient and good
men. In other ways, non-existent. Something that men should have was bred
and killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children. One might
bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly.
But they were only half, Only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they
were `good'. But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the
dead in them ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible to think of. Connie
was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her.
A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always `in the pit'.
Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!
Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had
made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal
had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all?
Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the
face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when
the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the
coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the
elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element
of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the
elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the
weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and
blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental
creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the
coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood.
The anima of mineral disintegration!
Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad
even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands
affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
`Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop,' she said.
`Really! Winter would have given you tea.'
`Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley.' Miss Bentley was a
shallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition who
served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.
`Did she ask after me?' said Clifford.
`Of course!---. May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!---I
believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!'
`And I suppose you said I was blooming.'
`Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to
you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.'
`Me! Whatever for! See me!'
`Why yes, Clifford. You can't be so adored without making some slight
return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.'
`And do you think she'll come?'
`Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing!
Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?'
`The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?'
`Oh!' Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, `your Ladyship, if
ever I should dare to presume!'
`Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And
how was her tea?'
`Oh, Lipton's and very strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the
Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?'
`I'm not flattered, even then.'
`They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers,
and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful.'
She went upstairs to change.
That evening he said to her:
`You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?'
She looked at him.
`But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain
that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.'
He looked at her, annoyed.
`What I mean,' he said, `is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in
the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sиrieux, will you?'
`A love affair in Venice au grand sиrieux? No. I assure you! No, I'd
never take a love affair in Venice more than au trхs petit sиrieux.'
She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking
at her.
Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper's dog Flossie
sitting in the corridor outside Clifford's room, and whimpering very
faintly.
`Why, Flossie!' she said softly. `What are you doing here?'
And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed,
with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was standing
at attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of
head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.
`Oh, good morning, Clifford!' Connie said. `I didn't know you were
busy.' Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He
murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely. But she felt a whiff of
passion touch her, from his mere presence.
`Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry.'
`No, it's nothing of any importance.'
She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the
first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his
curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction,
an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A hireling! One of
Clifford's hirelings! `The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in
ourselves, that we are underlings.'
Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?
It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs
Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn together,
in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that exist between
people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in small plants for
the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in
putting the soft roots of young plants into a soft black puddle, and
cradling them down. On this spring morning she felt a quiver in her womb
too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.
`It is many years since you lost your husband?' she said to Mrs Bolton
as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.
`Twenty-three!' said Mrs Bolton, as she carefully separated the young
columbines into single plants. `Twenty-three years since they brought him
home.'
Connie's heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. `Brought
him home!'
`Why did he get killed, do you think?' she asked. `He was happy with
you?'
It was a woman's question to a woman. Mrs Bolton put aside a strand of
hair from her face, with the back of her hand.
`I don't know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn't give in to things: he
wouldn't really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head for
anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed. You see he
didn't really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never to have been
down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you're over
twenty, it's not very easy to come out.'
`Did he say he hated it?'
`Oh no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny
face. He was one of those who wouldn't take care: like some of the first
lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away. He wasn't
really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to him: "You care
for nought nor nobody!" But he did! The way he sat when my first baby was
born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me with, when it
was over! I had a bad time, but I had to comfort him. "It's all right, lad,
it's all right!" I said to him. And he gave me a look, and that funny sort
of smile. He never said anything. But I don't believe he had any right
pleasure with me at nights after; he'd never really let himself go. I used
to say to him: Oh, let thysen go, lad!---I'd talk broad to him sometimes.
And he said nothing. But he wouldn't let himself go, or he couldn't. He
didn't want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for
letting him in th' room. He'd no right t'ave been there. Men makes so much
more of things than they should, once they start brooding.'
`Did he mind so much?' said Connie in wonder.
`Yes, he sort of couldn't take it for natural, all that pain. And it
spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I don't
care, why should you? It's my look-out!---But all he'd ever say was: It's
not right!'
`Perhaps he was too sensitive,' said Connie.
`That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too
blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he
would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one
blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his
arms was the only necessity.
He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the
floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly
his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness
cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one
moment of completeness and sleep.
He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then
slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock, still
clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was used to the dark, he could see
well.
Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be
near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of unfinished
aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms. Perhaps he could
find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to
her. For the need was imperious.
He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round
the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand
sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could already
see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level lozenge in
front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.
There was the house, low and long and obscure, with one light burning
downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the woman who
held the other end of the frail thread which drew him so mercilessly, that
he did not know.
He went a little nearer, gun in hand, and stood motionless on the
drive, watching the house. Perhaps even now he could find her, come at her
in some way. The house was not impregnable: he was as clever as burglars
are. Why not come to her?
He stood motionless, waiting, while the dawn faintly and imperceptibly
paled behind him. He saw the light in the house go out. But he did not see
Mrs Bolton come to the window and draw back the old curtain of dark-blue
silk, and stand herself in the dark room, looking out on the half-dark of
the approaching day, looking for the longed-for dawn, waiting, waiting for
Clifford to be really reassured that it was daybreak. For when he was sure
of daybreak, he would sleep almost at once.
She stood blind with sleep at the window, waiting. And as she stood,
she started, and almost cried out. For there was a man out there on the
drive, a black figure in the twilight. She woke up greyly, and watched, but
without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford.
The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed
to go smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and baggy
jacket---it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. `Yes, for there was the dog
nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him'!
And what did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he
standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick
male dog outside the house where the bitch is?
Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs Bolton like a shot. He was
Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!
To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a tiny bit in love
with him herself. When he was a lad of sixteen and she a woman of
twenty-six. It was when she was studying, and he had helped her a lot with
the anatomy and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever boy, had a
scholarship for Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French and things: and
then after all had become an overhead blacksmith shoeing horses, because he
was fond of horses, he said: but really because he was frightened to go out
and face the world, only he'd never admit it.
But he'd been a nice lad, a nice lad, had helped her a lot, so clever
at making things clear to you. He was quite as clever as Sir Clifford: and
always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.
Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself.
Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed of
something. And no wonder it had been a failure.---For years he was gone, all
the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really
quite the gentleman!---Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a
game-keeper! Really, some people can't take their chances when they've got
them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the worst, when she, Ivy
Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, really.
Well, well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well her ladyship
wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad
born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap
back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys!
But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realized: it's no good! It's
no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it
all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times!
But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to
it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when
they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her
broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming
together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track
her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came.
He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew
it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing after
her. No use!
Mrs Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him.
`Well, well!' she said. `He's the one man I never thought of; and the
one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after
I lost Ted. Well, well! Whatever would he say if he knew!'
And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she
stepped softly from the room.
Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were
several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir
Geoffery's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffery's mother had liked
cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffery himself had liked old carved oak chests,
vestry chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected
very modern pictures, at very moderate prices.
So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic
William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten
the daughter of an R.A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear
it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.
Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the old
family cradle, of rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to look at it. It had a
certain charm: she looked at it a longtime.
`It's thousand pities it won't be called for,' sighed Mrs Bolton, who
was helping. `Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'
`It might be called for. I might have a child,' said Connie casually,
as if saying she might have a new hat.
`You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs Bolton.
`No! I mean as things are. It's only muscular paralysis with Sir
Clifford---it doesn't affect him,' said Connie, lying as naturally as
breathing.
Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had said: `Of course I may
have a child yet. I'm not really mutilated at all. The potency may easily
come back, even if the muscles of the hips and legs are paralysed. And then
the seed may be transferred.'
He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard at
the question of the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning. Connie
had looked at him in terror. But she was quite quick-witted enough to use
his suggestion for her own preservation. For she would have a child if she
could: but not his.
Mrs Bolton was for a moment breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't
believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things nowadays.
They might sort of graft seed.
`Well, my Lady, I only hope and pray you may. It would be lovely for
you: and for everybody. My word, a child in Wragby, what a difference it
would make!'
`Wouldn't it!' said Connie.
And she chose three R. A. pictures of sixty years ago, to send to the
Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was called
`the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to send things for
her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed R. A.s. She might even
call, on the strength of them. How furious Clifford was when she called!
But oh my dear! Mrs Bolton was thinking to herself. Is it Oliver
Mellors' child you're preparing us for? Oh my dear, that would be a
Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it, neither!
Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish
blackjapanned box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or seventy
years ago, and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was a
concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three
beautiful little razors in safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and all. Underneath
came a sort of escritoire outfit: blotters, pens, ink-bottles, paper,
envelopes, memorandum books: and then a perfect sewing-outfit, with three
different sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg,
all of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little
medicine store, with bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess.
Cloves and so on: but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole
thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside,
it fitted together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly have
spilled: there wasn't room.
The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship
of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley must
even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a peculiar
soullessness.
Yet Mrs Bolton was thrilled.
`Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes,
three perfect ones! No! and those scissors! They're the best that money
could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'
`Do you?' said Connie. `Then you have it.'
`Oh no, my Lady!'
`Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it,
I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't deserve
so much. Do have it!'
`Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'
`You needn't try,' laughed Connie.
And Mrs Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her
arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.
Mr Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the
box. And she had to have a few friends in, to show it: the school-mistress,
the chemist's wife, Mrs Weedon the undercashier's wife. They thought it
marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child.
`Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs Weedon.
But Mrs Bolton was convinced, if it did come, it would be Sir
Clifford's child. So there!
Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:
`And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the
hand of God in mercy, indeed!'
`Well! We may hope,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same
time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible it
might even be his child.
Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody
called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman, as
Mrs Bolton said to Mrs Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his
old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out of
date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers.
They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even
the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at
great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly strong
pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly strong, wet wind
the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes, and left a fine
powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.
`But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?'
asked Winter.
`I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell
electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'
`If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid!
If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little out
of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm gone, there
may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men again, and you
won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid idea, and I
hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt they would have
up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the way, dear boy, is there any
foundation to the rumour that we may entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?'
`Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.
`Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me, that's all I
can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world, if
there were no foundation.'
`Well, Sir,' said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes.
`There is a hope. There is a hope.'
Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.
`My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear
that! And to hear you are working in the hopes of a son: and that you may
again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy! to keep up the level of
the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to work!---'
The old man was really moved.
Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.
`Connie,' said Clifford, `did you know there was a rumour that you are
going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'
Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the
flowers.
`No!' she said. `Is it a joke? Or malice?'
He paused before he answered:
`Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'
Connie went on with her flowers.
`I had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. `He wants to know
if I am aware he has accepted Sir Alexander Cooper's Invitation for me for
July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'
`July and August?' said Clifford.
`Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'
`I won't travel abroad,' said Clifford promptly. She took her flowers
to the window.
`Do you mind if I go?' she said. You know it was promised, for this
summer.
`For how long would you go?'
`Perhaps three weeks.'
There was silence for a time.
`Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. `I suppose I could
stand it for three weeks: if I were absolutely sure you'd want to come
back.'
`I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet simplicity, heavy
with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.
Clifford felt her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed
it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.
`In that case,' he said,
`I think it would be all right, don't you?'
`I think so,' she said.
`You'd enjoy the change?' She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.
`I should like to see Venice again,' she said, `and to bathe from one
of the shingle islands across the lagoon. But you know I loathe the Lido!
And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and Lady Cooper. But if
Hilda is there, and we have a gondola of our own: yes, it will be rather
lovely. I do wish you'd come.'
She said it sincerely. She would so love to make him happy, in these
ways.
`Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'
`But why not? I see other men carried in litter-chairs, who have been
wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'
`We should need to take two men.'
`Oh no! We'd manage with Field. There would always be another man
there.'
But Clifford shook his head.
`Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'
She went away gloomily. Next year! What would next year bring? She
herself did not really want to go to Venice: not now, now there was the
other man. But she was going as a sort of discipline: and also because, if
she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.
It was already May, and in June they were supposed to start. Always
these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that worked
one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!
It was May, but cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for corn and
hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie had to go into Uthwaite,
which was their little town, where the Chatterleys were still the
Chatterleys. She went alone, Field driving her.
In spite of May and a new greenness, the country was dismal. It was
rather chilly, and there was smoke on the rain, and a certain sense of
exhaust vapour in the air. One just had to live from one's resistance. No
wonder these people were ugly and tough.
The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of
Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening
their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and
black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything.
The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of
life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird
and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.
The stacks of soap in the grocers' shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the
greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly,
followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture
announcements, `A Woman's Love!', and the new big Primitive chapel,
primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry
glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick
and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational
chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and
had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school
buildings, expensivink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings,
all very imposing, and fixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison.
Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the
la-me-doh-la exercises and beginning a `sweet children's song'. Anything
more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a
strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like
savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean
something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called
singing. Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was
filling petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in
whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer
mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?
A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started
upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops, the
post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where Sam Black
was peering out of the door of the Sun, that called itself an inn, not a
pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was bowing to Lady
Chatterley's car.
The church was away to the left among black trees. The car slid on
downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the
Nelson, the Three Tuns, and the Sun, now it passed the Miners' Arms, then
the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare and so,
past a few new `villas', out into the blackened road between dark hedges and
dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.
Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England!
No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to
live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the
money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side
dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent
consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground
about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we
understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries
full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like
men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah
God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to
their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now
there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.
She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it
all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as
she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a
baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.
Yet Mellors had come out of all this!---Yes, but he was as apart from
it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead.
The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far
as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England:
as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.
The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and
in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away in
long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and
Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.
As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a
height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop Castle,
dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners' dwellings,
newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from the
great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into the pockets
of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old castle was a ruin,
yet it hung its bulk on the low sky-line, over the black plumes and the
white that waved on the damp air below.
A turn, and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate, as
seen from the highroad, was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the
Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in barbarous isolation off
the road. But if you looked, you saw on the left rows of handsome `modern'
dwellings, set down like a game of dominoes, with spaces and gardens, a
queer game of dominoes that some weird `masters' were playing on the
surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings, at the back, rose all
the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern mine,
chemical works and long galleries, enormous, and of shapes not before known
to man. The head-stock and pit-bank of the mine itself were insignificant
among the huge new installations. And in front of this, the game of dominoes
stood forever in a sort of surprise, waiting to be played.
This was Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war. But
as a matter of fact, though even Connie did not know it, downhill half a
mile below the `hotel' was old Stacks Gate, with a little old colliery and
blackish old brick dwellings, and a chapel or two and a shop or two and a
little pub or two.
But that didn't count any more. The vast plumes of smoke and vapour
rose from the new works up above, and this was now Stacks Gate: no chapels,
no pubs, even no shops. Only the great works', which are the modern Olympia
with temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings: then the hotel. The
hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners' pub though it looked
first-classy.
Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on the
face of the earth, and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff
drifting in from anywhere, to poach Clifford's rabbits among other
occupations.
The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread out.
The county! It had once been a proud and lordly county. In front, looming
again and hanging on the brow of the sky-line, was the huge and splendid
bulk of Chadwick Hall, more window than wall, one of the most famous
Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood alone above a great park, but out of
date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a show place. `Look how our
ancestors lorded it!'
That was the past. The present lay below. God alone knows where the
future lies. The car was already turning, between little old blackened
miners' cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day, was
sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam, to whatever gods there
be. Uthwaite down in the valley, with all the steel threads of the railways
to Sheffield drawn through it, and the coal-mines and the steel-works
sending up smoke and glare from long tubes, and the pathetic little
corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble down, still pricking
the fumes, always affected Connie strangely. It was an old market-town,
centre of the dales. One of the chief inns was the Chatterley Arms. There,
in Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby, as if it were a whole place, not
just a house, as it was to outsiders: Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby,
a `seat'.
The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with that
intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years old. They
lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you sank, you forgot
instantly the open, rolling country where the castles and big houses still
dominated, but like ghosts. Now you were just above the tangle of naked
railway-lines, and foundries and other `works' rose about you, so big you
were only aware of walls. And iron clanked with a huge reverberating clank,
and huge lorries shook the earth, and whistles screamed.
Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked
heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two centuries
ago, in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood, and the old
pharmacy, streets which used to lead Out to the wild open world of the
castles and stately couchant houses.
But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded
with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the lorries
were past could he salute her ladyship.
So it was. Upon the old crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish
blackened miners' dwellings crowded, lining the roads out. And immediately
after these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering
the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And beyond that again, in the
wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved against steam, and patch
after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements,
sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the sky-line of
the slopes. And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of the old
coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the
miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when
they were not at work.
England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of
England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion with
the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good
Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco,
that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes,
they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of
England---there they are---great plasterings of brick dwellings on the
hopeless countryside.
`Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are
going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie
passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war
the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too
expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The gentry were
departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend their money without
having to see how it was made.'
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the
halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted
out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.
One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England.
And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.
Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of
the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really
blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the
blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood
was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.
Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back,
opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the Shipley
colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood open, because
through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used. They hung around
the park.
The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their
newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside,
a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century.
It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house,
and the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if
cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.
Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter,
more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy painted
panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in
exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense.
Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of
life.
But Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was
bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his
ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not
made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his
ornamental waters---not in the private part of the park, no, he drew the
line there---he would say: `the miners are perhaps not so ornamental as
deer, but they are far more profitable.'
But that was in the golden---monetarily---latter half of Queen
Victoria's reign. Miners were then `good working men'.
Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then
Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:
`You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would
open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I
am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price. Your men
are good men too, I hear.'
But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of
money, and the blessings of industrialism.
However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now
there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open
soup-kitchens.
And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining
villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the
population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite grand
way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle
pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who
did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry,
had a will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman-owner. All
the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it.
It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.
Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to
walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked,
bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with
Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw
fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood
and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean,
well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage
winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not
at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And, deep down,
there was a profound grudge. They `worked for him'. And in their ugliness,
they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. `Who's he!' It
was the difference they resented.
And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a
soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt
himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless
he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.
Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie's call, suddenly.
And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.
The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It
cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The
avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided
into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of
this still-one-more no-man's-land, new little streets of semi-detacheds were
run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!
Within a year of Connie's last call, it had happened. There stood
Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached `villas' in new
streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there
twelve months before.
But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening, the
sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.
One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and
the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.
What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the
new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the
collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new collier lads
lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly
unconscious of the old England. There was a gap in the continuity of
consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?
Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in
the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living man.
The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people
were so many, and really so terrible. So she bought as she was going home,
and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one
shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy ironshod boots.
Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing from the pit
roof, shoulders Out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in some ways patient and good
men. In other ways, non-existent. Something that men should have was bred
and killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children. One might
bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly.
But they were only half, Only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they
were `good'. But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the
dead in them ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible to think of. Connie
was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her.
A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always `in the pit'.
Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!
Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had
made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal
had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all?
Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the
face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when
the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the
coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the
elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element
of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the
elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the
weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and
blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental
creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the
coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood.
The anima of mineral disintegration!
Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad
even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands
affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
`Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop,' she said.
`Really! Winter would have given you tea.'
`Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley.' Miss Bentley was a
shallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition who
served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.
`Did she ask after me?' said Clifford.
`Of course!---. May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!---I
believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!'
`And I suppose you said I was blooming.'
`Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to
you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.'
`Me! Whatever for! See me!'
`Why yes, Clifford. You can't be so adored without making some slight
return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.'
`And do you think she'll come?'
`Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing!
Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?'
`The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?'
`Oh!' Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, `your Ladyship, if
ever I should dare to presume!'
`Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And
how was her tea?'
`Oh, Lipton's and very strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the
Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?'
`I'm not flattered, even then.'
`They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers,
and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful.'
She went upstairs to change.
That evening he said to her:
`You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?'
She looked at him.
`But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain
that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.'
He looked at her, annoyed.
`What I mean,' he said, `is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in
the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sиrieux, will you?'
`A love affair in Venice au grand sиrieux? No. I assure you! No, I'd
never take a love affair in Venice more than au trхs petit sиrieux.'
She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking
at her.
Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper's dog Flossie
sitting in the corridor outside Clifford's room, and whimpering very
faintly.
`Why, Flossie!' she said softly. `What are you doing here?'
And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed,
with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was standing
at attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of
head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.
`Oh, good morning, Clifford!' Connie said. `I didn't know you were
busy.' Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He
murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely. But she felt a whiff of
passion touch her, from his mere presence.
`Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry.'
`No, it's nothing of any importance.'
She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the
first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his
curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction,
an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A hireling! One of
Clifford's hirelings! `The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in
ourselves, that we are underlings.'
Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?
It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs
Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn together,
in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that exist between
people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in small plants for
the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in
putting the soft roots of young plants into a soft black puddle, and
cradling them down. On this spring morning she felt a quiver in her womb
too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.
`It is many years since you lost your husband?' she said to Mrs Bolton
as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.
`Twenty-three!' said Mrs Bolton, as she carefully separated the young
columbines into single plants. `Twenty-three years since they brought him
home.'
Connie's heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. `Brought
him home!'
`Why did he get killed, do you think?' she asked. `He was happy with
you?'
It was a woman's question to a woman. Mrs Bolton put aside a strand of
hair from her face, with the back of her hand.
`I don't know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn't give in to things: he
wouldn't really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head for
anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed. You see he
didn't really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never to have been
down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you're over
twenty, it's not very easy to come out.'
`Did he say he hated it?'
`Oh no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny
face. He was one of those who wouldn't take care: like some of the first
lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away. He wasn't
really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to him: "You care
for nought nor nobody!" But he did! The way he sat when my first baby was
born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me with, when it
was over! I had a bad time, but I had to comfort him. "It's all right, lad,
it's all right!" I said to him. And he gave me a look, and that funny sort
of smile. He never said anything. But I don't believe he had any right
pleasure with me at nights after; he'd never really let himself go. I used
to say to him: Oh, let thysen go, lad!---I'd talk broad to him sometimes.
And he said nothing. But he wouldn't let himself go, or he couldn't. He
didn't want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for
letting him in th' room. He'd no right t'ave been there. Men makes so much
more of things than they should, once they start brooding.'
`Did he mind so much?' said Connie in wonder.
`Yes, he sort of couldn't take it for natural, all that pain. And it
spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I don't
care, why should you? It's my look-out!---But all he'd ever say was: It's
not right!'
`Perhaps he was too sensitive,' said Connie.
`That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too