lad chatterly chap 4-5

Chapter 4



Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to
her. She was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal of her life
and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a
man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not. There were
occasional spasms of Michaelis. But, as she knew by foreboding, that
would come to an end. Mick COULDN'T keep anything up. It was part of
his very being that he must break off any connexion, and be loose,
isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was his major necessity, even
though he always said: She turned me down!

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in
the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring,
and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find
very few good fish in the sea.

Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came to
see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if they
weren't mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or
conger-eel.

There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had remained in the army, and
was a Brigadier-General. 'The army leaves me time to think, and saves
me from having to face the battle of life,' he said.

There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same age
as Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in
the life of the mind. What you did apart from that was your private
affair, and didn't much matter. No one thinks of inquiring of another
person at what hour he retires to the privy. It isn't interesting to
anyone but the person concerned.

And so with most of the matters of ordinary life...how you make your
money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have 'affairs'. All
these matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going to the
privy, have no interest for anyone else.

'The whole point about the sexual problem,' said Hammond, who was a
tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more closely
connected with a typewriter, 'is that there is no point to it. Strictly
there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so
why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman? And therein
lies the problem. If we took no more notice of the one thing than the
other, there'd be no problem. It's all utterly senseless and pointless;
a matter of misplaced curiosity.'

'Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling
point.'...Julia was Hammond's wife.

'Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'

'You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet
alcove?'

Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.

'Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'

'As a matter of fact,' said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: 'As a
matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a
strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in
the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I
see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success
is in men. It is enormously overdeveloped. All our individuality has
run that way. And of course men like you think you'll get through
better with a woman's backing. That's why you're so jealous. That's
what sex is to you...a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to
bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt,
like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people like you and Julia
have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is labelled MRS
ARNOLD B. HAMMOND--just like a trunk on the railway that belongs to
somebody. And you are labelled ARNOLD B. HAMMOND, C/o MRS ARNOLD B.
HAMMOND. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The life of the
mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite right.
It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success.
That is the pivot on which all things turn.'

Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of
his mind, and of his NOT being a time-server. None the less, he did
want success.

'It's quite true, you can't live without cash,' said May. 'You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even
to be free to THINK you must have a certain amount of money, or your
stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off
sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make
love to any woman who inclines us that way?'

'There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.

'Lascivious! well, why not--? I can't see I do a woman any more harm by
sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her
about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of
ideas, so why not?'

'Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.

'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?'

'But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.

'Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or
death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would interfere
with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me.
What then?'

'I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.

'Not it! I don't over-eat myself and I don't over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'

'Not at all! You can marry.'

'How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental processes. I'm not
properly pivoted that way...and so must I be chained in a kennel like a
monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my calculations. I
need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain of it, and I refuse
anybody's moral condemnation or prohibition. I'd be ashamed to see a
woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway
station, like a wardrobe trunk.'

These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.

'It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes, 'that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose
it's quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and
emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex
might be a sort of normal physical conversation between a man and a
woman. You don't talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that
is you don't talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you
had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn't sleep
with her. But if you had...'

'If you HAVE the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman, you
OUGHT to sleep with her,' said May. 'It's the only decent thing, to go
to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to someone,
the only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't prudishly put
your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say.
And the same the other way.'

'No,' said Hammond. 'It's wrong. You, for example, May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do what you should do,
with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'

'Maybe it does...and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my boy,
married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but
it's going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks,
from what I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'

Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.

'Go it, you two minds!' he said. 'Look at me...I don't do any high and
pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither
marry nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants
to run after the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I
wouldn't prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property
instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow gate are right
for him. You'll see he'll be an English Man of Letters before he's
done. A.B.C. from top to toe. Then there's me. I'm nothing. Just a
squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think sex is a dynamo to
help a man on to success in the world?'

Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.

'Well!' he said, 'being myself HORS DE COMBAT, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter.'

'Not at all,' said Dukes; 'the top of you's by no means HORS DE COMBAT.
You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us hear your
ideas.'

'Well,' stammered Clifford, 'even then I don't suppose I have much
idea...I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well stand
for what I think. Though of course between a man and woman who care for
one another, it is a great thing.'

'What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.

'Oh...it perfects the intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.

'Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's
natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season.
Unfortunately no woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to
bed by myself; and am none the worse for it...I hope so, anyway, for
how should I know? Anyhow I've no starry calculations to be interfered
with, and no immortal works to write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in
the army...'

Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had
to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important
speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there.
They didn't get on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so
freely. Clifford was much more hedgy and nervous, he got cold feet much
quicker in Connie's absence, and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came
off best; he was a little inspired by her presence. Hammond she didn't
really like; he seemed so selfish in a mental way. And Charles May,
though she liked something about him, seemed a little distasteful and
messy, in spite of his stars.

How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to
get anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had
to say, especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men
kissing you, and touching you with their bodies, they revealed their
minds to you. It was great fun! But what cold minds!

And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for
Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a
little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort.
Mongrel and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't
merely walk round them with millions of words, in the parade of the
life of the mind.

Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of
it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being
there, amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the
cronies, as she called them privately to herself. She was infinitely
amused, and proud too, that even their talking they could not do,
without her silent presence. She had an immense respect for
thought...and these men, at least, tried to think honestly. But somehow
there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike talked at
something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't say. It
was something that Mick didn't clear, either.

But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across
him. He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies
had against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they
were more or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say
the least.

There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation
drifted again to love.

'Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in kindred something-or-other'--

said Tommy Dukes. 'I'd like to know what the tie is...The tie that
binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from
that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say
spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned
intellectuals in the world. Damned everybodies, as far as that goes,
for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful
things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a
curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in
spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at
Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all,
just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or
whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs
joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly
sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday
stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's
something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite
and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'

'I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.

'My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer
the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they ARE poison;
when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then
poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful
things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say
sugaries, or I'm done.'

'Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.

'I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about
one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'

'And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start,
but he did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The
cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It
was all so EX CATHEDRA, and it all pretended to be so humble.

Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.

'That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,'
said Hammond.

'They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.

They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

'I wasn't talking about knowledge...I was talking about the mental
life,' laughed Dukes. 'Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of
the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of
your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the
mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to
criticize, and make a deadness. I say ALL they can do. It is vastly
important. My God, the world needs criticizing today...criticizing to
death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite,
and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's like this: while you
LIVE your life, you are in some way an Organic whole with all life. But
once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the
connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And
if you've got nothing in your life BUT the mental life, then you
yourself are a plucked apple...you've fallen off the tree. And then it
is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity
for a plucked apple to go bad.'

Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.

'Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and
petulantly.

'So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.

'But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.

'Bravo!' roared Charlie. 'What do you think of Bolshevism?'

'Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.

'I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his
head seriously.

'Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, 'is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is,
isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and
emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man
without them.

'Then the individual, especially the PERSONAL man, is bourgeois: so he
must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing,
the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal
must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic,
composed of many different, yet equally essential parts, is the
machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine,
hate...hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'

'Absolutely!' said Tommy. 'But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the
factory-owner's ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that
the driving power was hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life
itself. Just look at these Midlands, if it isn't plainly written
up...but it's all part of the life of the mind, it's a logical
development.'

'I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses,' said Hammond.

'My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure
mind...exclusively.'

'At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.

'Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have
the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment.

'But this thing can't go on...this hate business. There must be a
reaction...' said Hammond.

'Well, we've been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate's a growing
thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas
on to life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we
force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula,
like a machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the
roost turns into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are
hypocrites. The Russians are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'

'But there are many other ways,' said Hammond, 'than the Soviet way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'

'Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if
you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism
half-witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west
half-witted. So I even consider our far-famed mental life half-witted.
We're all as cold as cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're
all of us Bolshevists, only we give it another name. We think we're
gods...men like gods! It's just the same as Bolshevism. One has to be
human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being
either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the same thing: they're
both too good to be true.'

Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:

'You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'

'You lovely lad!' said Tommy. 'No, my cherub, nine times out of ten,
no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows
with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks,
like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the
joint-property, make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love?
No, my fine fellow, I don't believe in it at all!'

'But you do believe in something?'

'Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say "shit!" in front
of a lady.'

'Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.

Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. 'You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and
never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say
"shit!" in front of my mother or my aunt...they are real ladies, mind
you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a "mental-lifer". It
would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all
the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and
says: How do you do?--to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he
painted his pictures with his penis...he did too, lovely pictures! I
wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another
torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it.'

'There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up
and speaking at last.

The men resented it...she should have pretended to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.

'My God!'

IF THEY BE NOT NICE TO ME
WHAT CARE I HOW NICE THEY BE?

'No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not
going to start forcing myself to it...My God, no! I'll remain as I am,
and lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be
quite happy TALKING to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure.
Hopelessly pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'

'It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.

'Yes, life is all too simple!'




Chapter 5



On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie
went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed
in his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.

The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round
the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on
the top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an
enclosure, always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an
enclosure.

The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay
bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the
wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled
with sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the
underworld had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink,
shrimp-coloured on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was
pale shrimp-colour, with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always
pleased Connie, this underfoot of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind
that brings nobody good.

Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel
thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's
edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train,
and went trailing off over the little sky.

Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into
the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped
thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where
Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming
across country. But now, of course, it was only a riding through the
private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north.

In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground
keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little
birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been
killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till
now Clifford had got his game-keeper again.

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this
place inviolate, shut off from the world.

The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there
was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling
leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their
grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen
had burned the brushwood and rubbish.

This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll
where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could
look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at
Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure
seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell
Clifford.

This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry
till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him
hate Sir Geoffrey.

Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and
very jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the
riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved
at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely
easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

'I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.

'Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.

'I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'

'Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to
notice.

'I want this wood perfect...untouched. I want nobody to trespass in
it,' said Clifford.

There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given
it a blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable
twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the
brown bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there
had been deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place
remembered, still remembered.

Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.

'I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.

'But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.

'Quite!' said Clifford. 'But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!'

'Must one?' said Connie. 'If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'

'If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. 'And we who have this kind of property, and the
feeling for it, must preserve it.'

There was a sad pause. 'Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.

'For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the
place. One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.'
Again there was a pause.

'What tradition?' asked Connie.

'The tradition of England! of this!'

'Yes,' she said slowly.

'That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he
said.

Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.

'I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.

He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.

'It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he
said. 'If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the
place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the
child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you
think it's worth considering?'

Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an 'it'
to him. It...it...it!

'But what about the other man?' she asked.

'Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very
deeply?...You had that lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing
almost. It seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little
connexions we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass
away, and where are they? Where...Where are the snows of
yesteryear?...It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own
life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what
do the occasional connexions matter? And the occasional sexual
connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously,
they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it
matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the living
together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You
and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of
each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any
occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing...that's what we
live by...not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little,
living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so
intricately to one another. That's the real secret of marriage, not
sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven
in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this
sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us
a checkmate physically there.'

Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she
loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an
excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of
intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the
human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point
of an excursion is that you come home again.

'And wouldn't you mind WHAT man's child I had?' she asked.

'Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'

She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the
wrong sort of fellow.

'But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of
fellow,' she said.

'No,' he replied. 'You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care
for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let
you.'

She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so
absolutely wrong.

'And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him
almost furtively.

'Not at all, I'd better not know...But you do agree with me, don't you,
that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived
together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven
to? After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole
problem of life the slow building up of an integral personality,
through the years? living an integrated life? There's no point in a
disintegrated life. If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then
go out and have a love-affair. If lack of a child is going to
disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do
these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long
harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together...don't you
think?...if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and at the same time
weave the adaptation together into a piece with our steadily-lived
life. Don't you agree?'

Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right
theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life
with him she...hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving
herself into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?

Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with
him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of
an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How
could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The
little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that
butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be
followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.

'I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'

'But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'

'Oh yes! I think I do, really.'

She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and
was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark.
A man with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their
way as if about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was
turning downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had
frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That
was how she had seen him, like the sudden rush of a threat out of
nowhere.

He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters...the old style, with
a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly
downhill.

'Mellors!' called Clifford.

The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a
soldier!

'Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it
easier,' said Clifford.

The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with
the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He
was moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie
at all, only at the chair.

'Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?'

'No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.

The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair
hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her
feel shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his
left hand and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said
nothing at all. He remained for a moment still, with his hat in his
hand.

'But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.

'Eight months, Madam...your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.

'And do you like it?'

She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony,
perhaps with impudence.

'Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'

He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take
hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the
heavy broad drag of the dialect...perhaps also in mockery, because
there had been no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a
gentleman. Anyhow, he was a curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but
sure of himself.

Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark
hazel thicket.

'Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.

'No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't
really strong enough for the uphill work.' The man glanced round for
his dog...a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly
moved its tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle,
came into his eyes for a moment, then faded away, and his face was
expressionless. They went fairly quickly down the slope, the man with
his hand on the rail of the chair, steadying it. He looked like a free
soldier rather than a servant. And something about him reminded Connie
of Tommy Dukes.

When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward, and
opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men
looked at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a
curious, cool wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked like.
And she saw in his blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and
detachment, yet a certain warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?

Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came
quickly, courteously, to close it.

'Why did you run to open?' asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. 'Mellors would have done it.'

'I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie.

'And leave you to run after us?' said Clifford.

'Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'

Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise
of the knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted
lips. He was rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a
little frail and quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.

Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over; the
small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was
closed in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was
going to snow. All grey, all grey! the world looked worn out.

The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for
Connie.

'Not tired, are you?' he said.

'Oh, no!' she said.

But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware of.
But the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and life
seemed worn out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.

They came to the house, and around to the back, where there were no
steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low, wheeled
house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms. Then Connie
lifted the burden of his dead legs after him.

The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he
saw Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the
other chair, Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.

'Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors,' said Clifford casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.

'Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.

'Nothing, good morning!'

'Good morning, Sir.'

'Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill...I
hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper
outside the door.

His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.

'Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: 'Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'

'Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.

'Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.

'Yes, but where did he come from?'

'Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'

'And was he a collier himself?'

'Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was
keeper here for two years before the war...before he joined up. My
father always had a good opinion of him, so when he came back, and went
to the pit for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper.
I was really very glad to get him...its almost impossible to find a
good man round here for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the
people.'

'And isn't he married?'

'He was. But his wife went off with...with various men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'

'So this man is alone?'

'More or less! He has a mother in the village...and a child, I
believe.'

Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the
foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze,
smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he
stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise
information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with
mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem
impersonal, almost to idiocy.

And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill
the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is
only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed
habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt,
like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it
fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and
forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be
encountered at their worst.

So it was with Clifford. Once he was 'well', once he was back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of
all, he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But
now, as the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of
fear and horror coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been
so deep as to be numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to
assert itself in a spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still
was alert. But the paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was
gradually spreading in his affective self.

And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her
soul. When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as
it were, command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her
having a child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all
the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning
to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They
were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and
belonging to the tree. They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life
that is ineffectual.

So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a
manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in
abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of
unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep...the
bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the
living blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of
bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a
new hope.

Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life that affected her. Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began
to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based
on a habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it
all became utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words.
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His
photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most
modern of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity,
he had become in four or five years one of the best known of the young
'intellectuals'. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see.
Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people
and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was
rather like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it
was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately
conceited. It was weird and it was nothing. This was the feeling that
echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of Connie's soul: it was all flag, a
wonderful display of nothingness; At the same time a display. A
display! a display! a display!

Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play;
already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of
nothingness. It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the
passion for making a display. Sexually they were passionless, even
dead. And now it was not money that Michaelis was after. Clifford had
never been primarily out for money, though he made it where he could,
for money is the seal and stamp of success. And success was what they
wanted. They wanted, both of them, to make a real display...a man's own
very display of himself that should capture for a time the vast
populace.

It was strange...the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the
thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the
bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.

Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed
again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage.
He invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.

Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede
gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a
great success. Even Connie was thrilled...thrilled to what bit of
marrow she had left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill,
was really wonderful...and quite beautiful, in Connie's eyes. She saw
in him that ancient motionlessness of a race that can't be
disillusioned any more, an extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure.
On the far side of his supreme prostitution to the bitch-goddess he
seemed pure, pure as an African ivory mask that dreams impurity into
purity, in its ivory curves and planes.

His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply
carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of
Michaelis' life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even
Clifford was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can
put it.

So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited
him in the night...and he had not known where to find her.
Coquetry!...at his moment of triumph.

He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play...did she
think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the
last thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised
it rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew
it was nothing.

'Look here!' he said suddenly at last. 'Why don't you and I make a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'

'But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.

'Oh that!...he'll divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me...marry and
lead a regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself
to pieces. Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and
glove. Why don't we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the
top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be
carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.

'But I am married already,' she said. 'I can't leave Clifford, you
know.'

'Why not? but why not?' he cried. 'He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why
the man has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely
wrapped up in himself.'

Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.

'Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.

'Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But
that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give
a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't
he's no right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his
full, hazel eyes, almost hypnotic. 'Now I consider,' he added, 'I can
give a woman the darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can
guarantee myself.'

'And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling
nothing at all.

'Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn it, every sort of
good time.'

He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the
surface of her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered
her. Hardly even her most outside self responded, that at any other
time would have been thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she
couldn't 'go off'. She just sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt
nothing, only somewhere she smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell
of the bitch-goddess.

Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her
almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for
her to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she
SHOULD say Yes!--who can tell?

'I should have to think about it,' she said. 'I couldn't say now. It
may seem to you Clifford doesn't count, but he does. When you think how
disabled he is...'

'Oh damn it all! If a fellow's going to trade on his disabilities, I
might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the
rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's
got nothing but disabilities to recommend him...'

He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:

'You're coming round to my room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'

'All right!' she said.

He was a more excited lover that night, with his strange, small boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis
before he had really finished his. And he roused a certain craving
passion in her, with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had
to go on after he had finished, in the wild tumult and heaving of her
loins, while he heroically kept himself up, and present in her, with
all his will and self-offering, till she brought about her own crisis,
with weird little cries.

When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost
sneering little voice:

'You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'

This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks of her life.
Because that passive sort of giving himself was so obviously his only
real mode of intercourse.

'What do you mean?' she said.

'You know what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own
exertions.'

She was stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality, at the moment
when she was glowing with a sort of pleasure beyond words, and a sort
of love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern men, he was
finished almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be
active.

'But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.

He laughed grimly: 'I want it!' he said. 'That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'

'But don't you?' she insisted.

He avoided the question. 'All the darned women are like that,' he said.
'Either they don't go off at all, as if they were dead in there...or
else they wait till a chap's really done, and then they start in to
bring themselves off, and a chap's got to hang on. I never had a woman
yet who went off just at the same moment as I did.'

Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine information. She
was only stunned by his feeling against her...his incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.

'But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.

'Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'

This speech was one of the crucial blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in her. She had not been so very keen on Michaelis; till he
started it, she did not want him. It was as if she never positively
wanted him. But once he had started her, it seemed only natural for her
to come to her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for
it...almost that night she loved him, and wanted to marry him.

Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the whole show with a smash; the house of cards. Her whole sexual
feeling for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her life fell
apart from his as completely as if he had never existed.

And she went through the days drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long
living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the
same house with one another.

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that
make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!