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Origin: http://www.seductionpalace.com
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new
little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is
now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the
obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had
brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live
and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month
on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be
shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits.
Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was
twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to
grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then
he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower
half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,
Wragby Hall, the family `seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now a
baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start
housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys
on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed.
Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the
war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford
came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he
could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled
chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could
drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of
which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent
left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might
say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue,
challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were
very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from
Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight
vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how
proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much
hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone.
There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown
hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had
big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come
from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once
well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the
cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists
and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might
be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to
Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also
in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist
conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one
was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were
at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of
art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among
the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and
artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better,
since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy
youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and
they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in
the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows,
free to do as they liked, and---above all---to say what they liked. It was
the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love
was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the
time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately
and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of
course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was
so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were
so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of
herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only a
sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in
love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he
had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a
girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement
of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's
life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and subjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of
the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it
were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better,
something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The
beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any
sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind
women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A
woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably
turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion.
But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That
the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into
account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away.
Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather
she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to
hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend
himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the
connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her
tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came,
and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless
he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly
interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the
unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever
young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had
never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men
to talk to!---had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what
a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It
marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer
vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the
last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to
show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda
was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had
had the love experience.
L'amour avait possи par lю, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mot a nervous
invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be
`free', and to `fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a
woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as
a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own mind or
soul that she could not get rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm,
who left his nervously hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost,
while he went his own way.
So the girls were `free', and went back to Dresden, and their music,
and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young men,
and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of mental
attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and
wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's
young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for
their young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.
Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is,
the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more
blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her
expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward,
the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more
hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took the
sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude
to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. And
afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence.
Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is
how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they
hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again,
for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are
discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman
do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after
having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas
of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters wept,
and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot them. They
didn't exist any more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington
housemixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood for
`freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a
well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of
voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly
married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same
Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family
job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with
him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort of
society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or
would be, the real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what
they're talking about, or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything,
so far. Her `friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two,
who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities of
coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had
become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so he could mock at
everything more becomingly in uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was
well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but
still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's
daughter.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more `society',
was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease in the
narrow `great world', that is, landed aristocracy society, but he was shy
and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of
the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he
was just a little bit frightened of middle-and lower-class humanity, and of
foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralysing way, conscious
of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege.
Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid
fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer world
of chaos than he was master of himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or
perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in
the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any
sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one
supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort
especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals
altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous,
though it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous:
certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army
or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as
far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were
ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous,
chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them
into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending
more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley---Emma---came down to London from the Midlands to
do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey
and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir, laughed
outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But
Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite
true. But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At
least people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about
something. They believed in something.
They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children. In all
these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But
Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities were ridiculous
ab ovo, not because of toffee or Tommies.
And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous
fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till things
developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here.
And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant young laughed no more.
In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was
terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey, and child of
Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew
that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was ridiculous. Now
he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also
splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?
Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense,
withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and
his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut off he was,
so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable,
that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for
England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St
George: and he never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled
timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.
And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his
father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any further
ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and
the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For willy-nilly he took
his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and
horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in
the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously
isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the
weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or
because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial
Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their
own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their
father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely
mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that
it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt
his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of
the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon
with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two
people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he
and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which
was beyond sex, and beyond a man's `satisfaction`. Clifford anyhow was not
just keen on his `satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the
intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an
accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes
which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law
Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.
Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss
Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was
living in a little flat in London.
Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle
of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place
without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather line old park
of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of
Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy
distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which
began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a
long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick
houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank
dreariness.
Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex
downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the
utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left
it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather
dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the
pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and
the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank
was burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put
it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often,
the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the
earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of
something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna
from the skies of doom.
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful,
but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the
rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and
quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain.
It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror;
she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the
morning it rained.
Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had
a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else
they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard,
shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was
something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the
thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on
the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious.
There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no
deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car up a
dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the
park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the house spread
its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering,
like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a welcome.
There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,
none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely stared;
the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded
awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of
resentment on either side. At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle
of resentment that came from the village. Then she hardened herself to it,
and it became a sort of tonic, something to live up to. It was not that she
and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species
altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as
is perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent. But in the Midlands and the
industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take
place. You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the
common pulse of humanity.
Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract.
In the flesh it was---You leave me alone!---on either side.
The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and
reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent---You leave me
alone!---of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all Methodists. The
miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore
was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other
man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic preaching and praying
concern.
This stubborn, instinctive---We think ourselves as good as you, if you
are Lady Chatterley!---puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The
curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives met her
overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of---Oh dear me! I am somebody now,
with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not as good as
her for all that!---which she always heard twanging in the women's
half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it. It was
hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.
Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went
by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax
figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and
contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was
altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own
class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. And he was
neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like
the pit-bank and Wragby itself.
But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was
lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For he had
to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just
as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the
careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just
as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern
ladylike young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad
shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same
time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His
manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and
self-effacing, almost tremulous.
Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He
was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and
flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately.
But she could not help feeling how little connexion he really had with
people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects
rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw
phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid
of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And
their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs.
He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope,
or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with
anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of
family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie
felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was
nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.
Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big
and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a
wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in
which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost
thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all.
Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very
personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and
yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary
and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the
whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely
an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to
modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.
Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted
everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in
the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to
Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as if the
whole of his being were in his stories.
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He
talked everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and
she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body
and sex had to rouse up and pass into theme stories of his. This thrilled
her and absorbed her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the
house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, arid the
dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could hardly call her a
parlour-maid, or even a woman...who waited at table, had been in the house
for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was
awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these
endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical
cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook,
an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest
the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty
good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict
honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of
feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused
street.
What could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone. Miss
Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and triumphed,
finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie for ousting her from
her union in consciousness with her brother. It was she, Emma, who should be
bringing forth the stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories,
something new in the world, that they, the Chatterleys, had put there. There
was no other standard. There was no organic connexion with the thought and
expression that had gone before. Only something new in the world: the
Chatterley books, entirely personal.
Connie's father, where he paid a flying visit to Wragby, and in private
to his daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart, but there's nothing
in it. It won't last! Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had
done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, still-wondering blue
eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing in it? If the
critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost famous, and it even
brought in money...what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in
Clifford's writing? What else could there be?
For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the
moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily
belonging to one another.
It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: `I hope,
Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.'
`A demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely. `Why? Why not?'
`Unless you like it, of course!' said her father hastily. To Clifford
he said the same, when the two men were alone: `I'm afraid it doesn't quite
suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.'
`A half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of
it.
He thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry and
offended.
`In what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked stiffly.
`She's getting thin...angular. It's not her style. She's not the
pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.'
`Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.
He wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge
business...the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring
himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate
enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but
bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag
in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that
something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she
were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and
wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know,
doesn't exist.
Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living
their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had
never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and wrestled in the
throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really
happening, really in the void.
And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was
non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants...but spectral, not really
existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined
the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicking the brown leaves
of autumn, and picking the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or
rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her
like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody
had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or
words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact! Only this
life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae
of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and
they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they
last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the
moment is the appearance of reality.
Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he
invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers,
people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being
asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But
why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong
with it?
She was hostess to these people...mostly men. She was hostess also to
Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy,
country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling,
brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was
considered a little old-fashioned and `womanly'. She was not a `little
pilchard sort of fish', like a boy, with a boy's flat breast and little
buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart.
So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her
indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest
sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was
quiet and vague, she had no contact with them and intended to have none.
Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.
His relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the kindliness
indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for you
unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no contact. She
let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel they had no need to
draw their steel in readiness. She had no real connexion with them.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so
beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his
books. She entertained...there were always people in the house. Time went on
as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven.
Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her
disconnexion, a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It
twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them, it jerked her spine
when she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It
thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must
jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made
her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner.
It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, abandon
Clifford, and lie prone in the bracken. To get away from the house...she
must get away from the house and everybody. The work was her one refuge, her
sanctuary.
But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no
connexion with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the
rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself...if it had any
such nonsensical thing.
Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way.
Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the
substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not
exist...which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it
was like beating her head against a stone.
Her father warned her again: `Why don't you get yourself a beau,
Connie? Do you all the good in the world.'
That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who
had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken
up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he
wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had
been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and
revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and
bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made
this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and
his corpse thrown into the refuse can.
Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down
Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best
tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.
Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment
in thyoung man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the
ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he
would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when
the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no
doubt do Clifford `good' over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of
kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way,
especially `over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable
what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most
nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction,
when he found he had been made ridiculous.
Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to
become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did not himself
know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a
first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty,
bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert
themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made,
used by all the other R. A.s who sold their pictures. Whereas Clifford
discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all kinds of people
at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined to build
himself a monument of a reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the
making.
Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a
manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at right of him something in
Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly...in fact,
he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply. To Clifford
this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man; to the amazing
success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed,
snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis'
heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute
himself to the bitch-goddess, Success also, if only she would have him.
Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors,
hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he
obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and
bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance:
that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let
such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been
much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now.
He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the
stage and to the front of it, with his plays. He had caught the public. And
he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren't... They never
would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he
didn't belong...among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the
various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!
Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car,
this Dublin mongrel.
There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn't put on airs
to himself, he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford
sensibly, briefly, practically, about all the things Clifford wanted to
know. He didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to
Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent
business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he
answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
`Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you
play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'
`But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.
`Oh, quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept
outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't
help it.'
`But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.
`Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a
writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no
question of that.'
`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.
`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public,
if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them
popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will
have to be...for the time being.'
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such
fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so
old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him
generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he
was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the
desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said
Clifford contemplatively.
`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
`And are you alone?' asked Connie.
`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek,
so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry.
Oh, yes, I must marry.'
`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'
He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I
find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an
Irishwoman...'
`Try an American,' said Clifford.
`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he
will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of
Origin: http://www.seductionpalace.com
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new
little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is
now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the
obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had
brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live
and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month
on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be
shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits.
Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was
twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to
grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then
he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower
half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,
Wragby Hall, the family `seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now a
baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start
housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys
on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed.
Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the
war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford
came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he
could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled
chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could
drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of
which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent
left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might
say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue,
challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were
very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from
Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight
vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how
proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much
hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone.
There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown
hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had
big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come
from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once
well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the
cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists
and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might
be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to
Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also
in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist
conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one
was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were
at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of
art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among
the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and
artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better,
since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy
youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and
they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in
the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows,
free to do as they liked, and---above all---to say what they liked. It was
the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love
was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the
time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately
and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of
course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was
so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were
so humble and craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of
herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only a
sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in
love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he
had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a
girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement
of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's
life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and subjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of
the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it
were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better,
something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The
beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any
sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind
women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A
woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably
turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion.
But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That
the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into
account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away.
Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather
she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to
hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend
himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the
connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her
tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came,
and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless
he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly
interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the
unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever
young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had
never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men
to talk to!---had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what
a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It
marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer
vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the
last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to
show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda
was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had
had the love experience.
L'amour avait possи par lю, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mot a nervous
invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be
`free', and to `fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a
woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as
a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own mind or
soul that she could not get rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm,
who left his nervously hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost,
while he went his own way.
So the girls were `free', and went back to Dresden, and their music,
and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young men,
and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of mental
attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and
wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's
young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for
their young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.
Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is,
the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more
blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her
expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward,
the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more
hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took the
sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude
to the woman for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. And
afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence.
Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is
how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they
hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again,
for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are
discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman
do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after
having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas
of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters wept,
and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot them. They
didn't exist any more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington
housemixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood for
`freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a
well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of
voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly
married a man ten years older than herself, an elder member of the same
Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family
job in the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with
him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort of
society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or
would be, the real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what
they're talking about, or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything,
so far. Her `friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two,
who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities of
coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now he had
become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so he could mock at
everything more becomingly in uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was
well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but
still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's
daughter.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more `society',
was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease in the
narrow `great world', that is, landed aristocracy society, but he was shy
and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of
the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he
was just a little bit frightened of middle-and lower-class humanity, and of
foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralysing way, conscious
of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege.
Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid
fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer world
of chaos than he was master of himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or
perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in
the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any
sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own obstinate one
supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort
especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals
altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous,
though it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous:
certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army
or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as
far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were
ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous,
chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them
into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending
more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley---Emma---came down to London from the Midlands to
do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey
and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir, laughed
outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But
Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite
true. But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At
least people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about
something. They believed in something.
They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children. In all
these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But
Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities were ridiculous
ab ovo, not because of toffee or Tommies.
And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous
fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till things
developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here.
And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant young laughed no more.
In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was
terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey, and child of
Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew
that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was ridiculous. Now
he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also
splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?
Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense,
withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and
his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut off he was,
so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable,
that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for
England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St
George: and he never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled
timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.
And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his
father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any further
ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and
the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For willy-nilly he took
his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and
horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in
the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously
isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the
weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or
because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial
Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their
own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their
father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely
mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that
it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt
his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of
the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon
with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two
people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he
and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which
was beyond sex, and beyond a man's `satisfaction`. Clifford anyhow was not
just keen on his `satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the
intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an
accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes
which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law
Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.
Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss
Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was
living in a little flat in London.
Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle
of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place
without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather line old park
of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of
Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy
distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which
began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a
long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick
houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank
dreariness.
Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex
downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the
utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left
it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather
dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the
pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and
the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank
was burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put
it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often,
the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the
earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of
something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna
from the skies of doom.
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful,
but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the
rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and
quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain.
It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror;
she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the
morning it rained.
Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had
a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else
they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard,
shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was
something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the
thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on
the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious.
There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no
deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car up a
dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the
park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the house spread
its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering,
like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a welcome.
There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,
none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely stared;
the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance, and nodded
awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of
resentment on either side. At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle
of resentment that came from the village. Then she hardened herself to it,
and it became a sort of tonic, something to live up to. It was not that she
and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to another species
altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as
is perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent. But in the Midlands and the
industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take
place. You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the
common pulse of humanity.
Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract.
In the flesh it was---You leave me alone!---on either side.
The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and
reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent---You leave me
alone!---of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all Methodists. The
miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore
was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other
man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic preaching and praying
concern.
This stubborn, instinctive---We think ourselves as good as you, if you
are Lady Chatterley!---puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The
curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives met her
overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of---Oh dear me! I am somebody now,
with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not as good as
her for all that!---which she always heard twanging in the women's
half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it. It was
hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.
Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went
by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax
figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and
contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was
altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own
class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. And he was
neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like
the pit-bank and Wragby itself.
But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was
lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For he had
to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just
as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the
careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just
as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern
ladylike young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad
shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same
time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His
manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and
self-effacing, almost tremulous.
Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He
was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and
flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately.
But she could not help feeling how little connexion he really had with
people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects
rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw
phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid
of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And
their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs.
He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope,
or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with
anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of
family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie
felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was
nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.
Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big
and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a
wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in
which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost
thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all.
Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very
personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and
yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary
and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the
whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely
an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to
modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.
Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted
everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in
the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to
Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as if the
whole of his being were in his stories.
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He
talked everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and
she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body
and sex had to rouse up and pass into theme stories of his. This thrilled
her and absorbed her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the
house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, arid the
dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could hardly call her a
parlour-maid, or even a woman...who waited at table, had been in the house
for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was
awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these
endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical
cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook,
an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest
the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty
good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict
honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of
feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused
street.
What could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone. Miss
Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and triumphed,
finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie for ousting her from
her union in consciousness with her brother. It was she, Emma, who should be
bringing forth the stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories,
something new in the world, that they, the Chatterleys, had put there. There
was no other standard. There was no organic connexion with the thought and
expression that had gone before. Only something new in the world: the
Chatterley books, entirely personal.
Connie's father, where he paid a flying visit to Wragby, and in private
to his daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart, but there's nothing
in it. It won't last! Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had
done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, still-wondering blue
eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing in it? If the
critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost famous, and it even
brought in money...what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in
Clifford's writing? What else could there be?
For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the
moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily
belonging to one another.
It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: `I hope,
Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.'
`A demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely. `Why? Why not?'
`Unless you like it, of course!' said her father hastily. To Clifford
he said the same, when the two men were alone: `I'm afraid it doesn't quite
suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.'
`A half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of
it.
He thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry and
offended.
`In what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked stiffly.
`She's getting thin...angular. It's not her style. She's not the
pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.'
`Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.
He wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge
business...the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring
himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate
enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but
bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag
in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that
something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she
were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and
wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know,
doesn't exist.
Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living
their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had
never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and wrestled in the
throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really
happening, really in the void.
And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was
non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants...but spectral, not really
existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined
the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicking the brown leaves
of autumn, and picking the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or
rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her
like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody
had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or
words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact! Only this
life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae
of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and
they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they
last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the
moment is the appearance of reality.
Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he
invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers,
people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being
asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But
why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong
with it?
She was hostess to these people...mostly men. She was hostess also to
Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy,
country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling,
brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was
considered a little old-fashioned and `womanly'. She was not a `little
pilchard sort of fish', like a boy, with a boy's flat breast and little
buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart.
So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her
indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest
sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was
quiet and vague, she had no contact with them and intended to have none.
Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.
His relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the kindliness
indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for you
unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no contact. She
let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel they had no need to
draw their steel in readiness. She had no real connexion with them.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so
beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his
books. She entertained...there were always people in the house. Time went on
as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven.
Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her
disconnexion, a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It
twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them, it jerked her spine
when she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It
thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must
jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made
her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner.
It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, abandon
Clifford, and lie prone in the bracken. To get away from the house...she
must get away from the house and everybody. The work was her one refuge, her
sanctuary.
But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no
connexion with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the
rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself...if it had any
such nonsensical thing.
Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way.
Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the
substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not
exist...which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it
was like beating her head against a stone.
Her father warned her again: `Why don't you get yourself a beau,
Connie? Do you all the good in the world.'
That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman who
had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had been taken
up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he
wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had
been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and
revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and
bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made
this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and
his corpse thrown into the refuse can.
Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down
Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best
tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.
Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment
in thyoung man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had the
ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he
would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when
the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he would no
doubt do Clifford `good' over there in America. Kudos! A man gets a lot of
kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in the right way,
especially `over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and it was remarkable
what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end Michaelis did him most
nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till the reaction,
when he found he had been made ridiculous.
Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct to
become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did not himself
know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a
first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old, hearty,
bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves, and exert
themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels ready-made,
used by all the other R. A.s who sold their pictures. Whereas Clifford
discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all kinds of people
at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined to build
himself a monument of a reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the
making.
Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a
manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at right of him something in
Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly...in fact,
he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply. To Clifford
this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man; to the amazing
success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed,
snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis'
heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute
himself to the bitch-goddess, Success also, if only she would have him.
Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors,
hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he
obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and
bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance:
that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let
such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been
much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look even now.
He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the
stage and to the front of it, with his plays. He had caught the public. And
he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren't... They never
would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he
didn't belong...among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the
various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!
Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car,
this Dublin mongrel.
There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn't put on airs
to himself, he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford
sensibly, briefly, practically, about all the things Clifford wanted to
know. He didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to
Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent
business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he
answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
`Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you
play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'
`But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.
`Oh, quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept
outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't
help it.'
`But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.
`Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a
writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no
question of that.'
`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.
`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public,
if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them
popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will
have to be...for the time being.'
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such
fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so
old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him
generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he
was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the
desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said
Clifford contemplatively.
`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
`And are you alone?' asked Connie.
`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek,
so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry.
Oh, yes, I must marry.'
`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'
He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I
find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an
Irishwoman...'
`Try an American,' said Clifford.
`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he
will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of