lady chaterly 17 - end chapter

Chapter 17



'You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing
London, 'you have never known either real tenderness or real
sensuality: and if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a
great difference.'

'For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. 'I've
never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving
himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their
self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be
any man's little petsy-wetsy, nor his CHAIR PLAISIR either. I wanted
a complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.

Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant
revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his
revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all
that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!

'I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with
everybody,' she said to her sister.

'I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.

'But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of
yourself.'

Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard of
insolence from that chit Connie.

'At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the
somebody else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in
crude anger.

'You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.

She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now,
though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the
dominion of OTHER WOMEN. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being
given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of
OTHER WOMEN. How awful they were, women!

She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always
been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir
Malcolm was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening,
and they liked going with him.

He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the
new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in
Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays
away from her as possible: just as with his first wife.

Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had
stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of a
healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured
selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting
sensuality, it seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit
straight thighs. Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad.
Because in his strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert
sensitiveness and power of tenderness which is the very essence of
youth, that which never dies, once it is there.

Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to
her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had live,
alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs
in black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral stuff,
or well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either
sensuality or tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness
that pranced around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They
were all daunted, daunted out of existence.

But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females!
really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin
pegs! or the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest
look of life! Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing
meaninglessly around!

But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and
blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and
good-looking they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's
blind craving for happiness, to be assured of happiness.

In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a
weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness. Oh!
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical
sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of
resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently
Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical
jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these FLANEURS, the oglers, these
eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary, worn-out for lack
of a little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes
charming women knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they
had that pull over their jigging English sisters. But they knew even
less of tenderness. Dry, with the endless dry tension of will, they too
were wearing out. The human world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it
would turn fiercely destructive. A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his
conservative anarchy! Perhaps it wouldn't be conservative much longer.
Perhaps it would develop into a very radical anarchy.

Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she
was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the
Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and
English, strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary
English that are so hopeless abroad.

She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was
going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the
Dolomites down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving
and being mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.

And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself:
Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful,
that I don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't.
It's rather awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake
of Lucerne without ever noticing that there were even mountain and
green water. I just don't care for landscape any more. Why should one
stare at it? Why should one? I refuse to.

No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or
Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real
than Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care
if she never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep.
Wragby was more real.

As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference. They
all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they
wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone.
Poor mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed
and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did
people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?

No! said Connie to herself I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go
about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of
any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too
hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.

She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor
crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying
lot, anyhow.

But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other
man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let it
go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive
people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh 'enjoying oneself'! Another
modern form of sickness.

They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer
over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon
rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across
the water, look dim.

At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the
address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not
very good-looking, not at all impressive.

'Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier
for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'

He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain
exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the
horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer
quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a
slight, or strong, odour of sewage.

But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either
side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right-angles to the
Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was
perched above, behind them.

'Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked,
rowing easy, and wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue
handkerchief.

'Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her
curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.

'Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he
asked: 'Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that
they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'

Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have
one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.

'What is there at the Villa? what boats?'

'There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But--' The BUT meant: they
won't be your property.

'How much do you charge?'

It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.

'Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.

'Less, Signora, less. The regular price--'

The sisters considered.

'Well,' said Hilda, 'come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it.
What is your name?'

His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should
come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no
card. Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his
hot, southern blue eyes, then glanced again.

'Ah!' he said, lighting up. 'Milady! Milady, isn't it?'

'Milady Costanza!' said Connie.

He nodded, repeating: 'Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully
away in his blouse.

The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon
looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant,
with the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with
dark trees, walled in from the lagoon.

Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good
fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his
ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind
of person with no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to
regulate her husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly
tiresome with the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the
winter, he was now more manageable.

The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters,
there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two
daughters; a young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince,
and a youngish English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being
chaplain to Sir Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was
penniless, good-looking, would make an excellent chauffeur, with the
necessary impudence, and basta! The Contessa was a quiet little puss
with a game on somewhere. The clergyman was a raw simple fellow from a
Bucks vicarage: luckily he had left his wife and two children at home.
And the Guthries, the family of four, were good solid Edinburgh middle
class, enjoying everything in a solid fashion, and daring everything
while risking nothing.

Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more
or less their own sort, substantial, but boring: and the girls wanted
husbands. The chaplain was not a bad fellow, but too deferential. Sir
Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his
joviality, but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many
handsome young women. Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a
thin time of it, poor thing, and who watched every other woman with a
cold watchfulness that had become her second nature, and who said cold,
nasty little things which showed what an utterly low opinion she had of
all human nature. She was also quite venomously overbearing with the
servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way. And she skilfully behaved
so that Sir Alexander should think that HE was lord and monarch of the
whole caboosh, with his stout, would-be-genial paunch, and his utterly
boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.

Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian
lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So
in the morning he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his 'site'. A
little later, Lady Cooper would he rowed off into the heart of the
city, with sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate
watercolour painter, and the house was full of rose-coloured palaces,
dark canals, swaying bridges, medieval facades, and so on. A little
later the Guthries, the prince, the countess, Sir Alexander, and
sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would go off to the Lido, where they
would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half past one.

The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this did
not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father took
them to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He took
them to all the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with them
on warm evenings in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he
took them to the theatre, to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated
water-fetes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all
holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed
bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of seals come up for
mating. Too many people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of
humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches, too
many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too
many menservants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much,
too much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of
strawberries, too many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of
watermelon on stalls: too much enjoyment, altogether far too much
enjoyment!

Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens
of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up
like a bad penny. 'Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream
or something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis
almost sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of
the mass of human flesh.

It was pleasant in a way. It was ALMOST enjoyment. But anyhow, with all
the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot
sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in
the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And
that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun,
a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be
drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!

Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women,
speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the
women. How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she
getting out of it?--The men were like great dogs in white flannel
trousers, waiting to be patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster
some woman's stomach against their own, in jazz.

Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the
stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from
the visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she
could break loose and ignore 'the creature'. He had been merely made
use of. Poor Connie was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she
simply couldn't plaster her stomach against some 'creature's' stomach.
She hated the conglomerate mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there
was hardly enough water to wet them all. She disliked Sir Alexander and
Lady Cooper. She did not want Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.

The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across
the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could
bathe quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.

Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long
way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice:
affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians
are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved,
and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any
sort.

So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted
to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute
himself to them, if they wanted him: he secretly hoped they would want
him. They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very
handy, as he was just going to be married. He told them about his
marriage, and they were suitably interested.

He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably
meant business: business being L'AMORE, love. So he got a mate to help
him, for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two
ladies, two mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was
justly proud of them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and
gave him orders, he rather hoped it would be the young milady who would
select him for L'AMORE. She would give more money too.

The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier,
so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola
man, a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from
the islands.

Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of
little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a
little like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive,
loquacious, and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with
a strength and ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were
ladies, remote from him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.

He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and
rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a man as
Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the
easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those
sweet Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and
flower-like in the back of that labyrinth of a town.

Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes
man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog,
wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!

Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water.
Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The
money-deadness! Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.

Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He did
not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He was a
little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather doggy
Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus
refused the devil's money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker,
master of the whole situation.

Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind
of stupor, to find letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He
wrote very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book.
And for this reason Connie found them not very interesting.

She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping
saltiness of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but
health, health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she
was lulled away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was
pregnant. She knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and
sea-bathing and lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away,
away in a gondola, was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another
fullness of health, satisfying and stupefying.

She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten
days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and
the fullness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was in
a sort of stupor of well-being.

From which a letter of Clifford roused her.

We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife
of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself
unwelcome. He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it,
however, that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer
fair lady firmly established in his bed, in PURIS NATURALIBUS; or one
should say, in IMPURIS NATURALIBUS. She had broken a window and got in
that way. Unable to evict the somewhat man-handled Venus from his
couch, he beat a retreat and retired, it is said, to his mother's house
in Tevershall. Meanwhile the Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the
cottage, which she claims is her home, and Apollo, apparently, is
domiciled in Tevershall.

I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I
had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our
ibis, our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have
repeated it had she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the
wood if THAT woman's going to be about!

I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white
hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it
rains. But I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality.
However, it suits his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more
mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality--

This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied well-being with
vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she ad got to be bothered by
that beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter
from Mellors. They had agreed not to write at all, but now she wanted
to hear from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child
that was coming. Let him write!

But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low
people were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence,
compared to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a
clear sky was almost the most important thing in life.

She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote
to Mrs Bolton for exact information.

Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa
Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola,
and he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a
quiet, almost taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.

She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:

You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford.
He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful. Of
course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is a dull
house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence among us
once more.

About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems
his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her
sitting on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was
come back to him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his
legal wife, and he wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have
anything to do with her, and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not
go in himself; he went back into the wood without ever opening the
door.

But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he
went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without a
rag on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he
must take her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His
mother told me about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd
die rather than ever live with her again, so he took his things and
went straight to his mother's on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night
and went to the wood next day through the park, never going near the
cottage. It seems he never saw his wife that day. But the day after she
was at her brother Dan's at Beggarlee, swearing and carrying on, saying
she was his legal wife, and that he'd been having women at the
cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his drawer, and
gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know what all.
Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking in
Mr Mellors' bedroom early one morning, and a motor-car had been in the
lane.

Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through the
park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was no end
of talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and
fetched away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the
handle of the pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back
to Stacks Gate she went and lodged with that Mrs Swain at Beggarlee,
because her brother Dan's wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going to
old Mrs Mellors' house, to catch him, and she began swearing he'd got
in bed with her in the cottage and she went to a lawyer to make him pay
her an allowance. She's grown heavy, and more common than ever, and as
strong as a bull. And she goes about saying the most awful things about
him, how he has women at the cottage, and how he behaved to her when
they were married, the low, beastly things he did to her, and I don't
know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the mischief a woman can do, once
she starts talking. And no matter how low she may be, there'll be some
as will believe her, and some of the dirt will stick. I'm sure the way
she makes out that Mr Mellors was one of those low, beastly men with
women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to believe
things against anybody, especially things like that. She declared
she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if
he was so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But
of course she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older
than he is. And these common, violent women always go partly insane
when the change of life comes upon them.

This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming in
for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for not
having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married her.
Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the
last night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all that
sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting.
It would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was
perhaps really common, really low.

She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the
Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she
now dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the
keeper. How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt a
craving for utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening
respectability of the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair,
how unspeakably humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and
its unclean bite. She almost wished she could get rid of the child
again, and be quite clear. In short, she fell into a state of funk.

As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able
to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts
in the drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little
bottle of Coty's Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She
wanted him to remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends,
they were Hilda's.

She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say
she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and told
Forbes the history of the man.

'Oh,' said Forbes, 'you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled
the man down and done him in. If he has refused to creep up into the
middle classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up
for his own sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't
let you be, straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you
like. In fact the more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But
if you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll
down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital
thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you
have it. You'll see, they'll hound that man down. And what's he done,
after all? If he's made love to his wife all ends on, hasn't he a right
to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see, even a low bitch like
that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the mob against sex,
to pull him down. You have a snivel and feel sinful or awful about your
sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound the poor
devil down.'

Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done,
after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an
exquisite pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her
warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.

No no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with
tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as
if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she
heard his voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody!
And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again,
over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through
her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said:
Oh, no! I mustn't go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must
stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no
warm, flamy life till he gave it me. And I won't go back on it.

She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note
to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to
him:

I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is
making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It
will all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about
it, and I do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't
worth it. She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall
be home in ten days' time, and I do hope everything will be all right.

A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.

I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the
sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you,
Wragby misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full
amount of sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the
Lido say. So please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you
up and preparing you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it
rains.

I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer
specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures
human beings are. Some of them might just as well have a hundred legs,
like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and
dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually
nonexistent. One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is
oneself.

The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball.
Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though
dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever
it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing
surprises her. It is as if the events of other people's lives were the
necessary oxygen of her own.

She is preoccupied with the Mellors scandal, and if I will let her
begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which
even then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is
against the wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha
Courts. I have been to the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha
Couttses of this world, and when, released from the current of gossip,
I slowly rise to the surface again, I look at the daylight its wonder
that it ever should be.

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the
surface of all things, is really the BOTTOM of a deep ocean: all our
trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine
fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the
soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live,
far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air. I am
convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men
and women are a species of fish.

But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the
light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It is
our mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous life
of our fellow-men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal
destiny is to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again
into the bright ether, bursting out from the surface of Old Ocean into
real light. Then one realizes one's eternal nature.

When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to the
depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal
appetite makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of
the dense into the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can
tell the whole process. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward
plunge, down, horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of
the very bottom.

I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the
truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and
greater dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and
curiously enough, the woman has managed to get the bulk of the
colliers' wives behind her, gruesome fish, and the village is
putrescent with talk.

I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house,
having ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her
own daughter, as that chip of the female block was returning from
school; but the little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's
hand, bit it firmly, and so received from the other hand a smack in the
face which sent her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by
an indignant and harassed grandmother.

The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has
aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are
usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence,
between married couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years
of burial, she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and
the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing
in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual
postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini
says, 'in the Italian way', well that is a matter of taste. But I had
hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt
Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any case, it is a
matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody
else.

However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common
decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer
exists, and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in
voice. One would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty
years, had been an immaculate conception, and every one of our
nonconformist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable
game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him
more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these
people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if one is to believe all
accounts.

The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined
herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at
the top of her voice, that her husband has been 'keeping' women down at
the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This
has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing
has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out
against the woman.

I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was
impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as
usual, with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if
nobody care for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a
dog with a tin can tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show
of pretending the tin can isn't there. But I heard that in the village
the women call away their children if he is passing, as if he were the
Marquis de Sade in person. He goes on with a certain impudence, but I
am afraid the tin can is firmly tied to his tail, and that inwardly he
repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish ballad: 'Ah, now it bites me
where I most have sinned!'

I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the
wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it
was a nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that
he had no power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its
unpleasant course. 'Ay,' he said, 'folks should do their own fuckin',
then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another
man's.'

He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ
of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate nor
respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle
again. 'It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit
me for havin' a cod atween my legs.'

These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not
help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think it
would be as well if the man left the place.

I asked him if it was true that he entertained ladies down at the
cottage, and all he said was: 'Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?'
I told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which
he replied: 'Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women.'--When I
pressed him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: 'Surely
you might ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed
summat there.' As a matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd
be hard to beat.

I asked him if it would be easy for him to find another job. He said: 'If
you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd be
easy as wink.' So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of
next week, and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe
Chambers, into as many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I
would give him a month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd rather
I kept my money, as I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him
what he meant, and he said: 'You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir
Clifford, so don't pay me nothing extra. If you think you see my shirt
hanging out, just tell me.'

Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone
away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows
her face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol,
because she merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week,
and the place will soon become normal again.

Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in
Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you
were out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away
by the end of the month.

So you see, we are deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on
mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it
philosophically.

The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of
Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it
better when she received the following from Mellors:

The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have
heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up
her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled
a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did
not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the
burnt photograph. She noticed the glass and the back-board in the
square bedroom. Unfortunately, on the back-board somebody had scribbled
little sketches, and the initials, several times repeated: C. S. R.
This, however, afforded no clue until she broke into the hut, and found
one of your books, an autobiography of the actress Judith, with your
name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page. After this, for some
days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was no less a person
than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the rector, Mr
Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal steps
against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had
a mortal fear of the police.

Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things
and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her
ladyship's name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal,
and was surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said,
of course it was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on
a calendar in the scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of
my harem. But he didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I
was a disreputable character who walked about with my breeches'
buttons undone, and I as good as told him he'd nothing to unbutton
anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I leave on Saturday week, and the
place thereof shall know me no more.

I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square,
will either give me a room or will find one for me.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and
her name's Bertha--

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He
might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she
knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to
Clifford. She resented that too. He need not be so falsely chivalrous.
She wished he had said to Clifford: 'Yes, she is my lover and my
mistress and I am proud of it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so
far.

So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that
would soon die down.

She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her
inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did
nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola
with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had
been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love
with her again. But she said to him: 'I only want one thing of men, and
that is, that they should leave me alone.'

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the
same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love.
He wanted to be WITH her.

'Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, 'how very little
people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome
as a son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness.
Yet I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from
them.'

'Ask him,' said Connie.

Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both
male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.

'Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that
look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. 'The others have a
certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' 'And,' she
thought to herself, 'like you, Duncan.'



Chapter 18



She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the
Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would
bring her to London on the Monday following, and she would then see
him. She wrote to him to the London address, asking him to send her a
letter to Hartland's hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening
at seven.

Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her
responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda,
offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch
woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women,
intimacy into which Hilda always entered ponderously.

Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on
with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on
the Orient Express, in spite of Connie's dislike of TRAINS DE LUXE, the
atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However,
it would make the journey to Paris shorter.

Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit
carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for
the grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and
handsome, sat in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.

'A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,' said her father,
noticing her glumness.

'I'm not sure I shall go back to Wragby,' she said, with startling
abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue
eyes took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is
not quite clear.

'You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'

'No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'

He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was
getting none of hers to shoulder.

'How's that, all at once?' he asked.

'I'm going to have a child.'

It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and
it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.

'How do you know?' said her father.

She smiled.

'How SHOULD I know?'

'But not Clifford's child, of course?'

'No! Another man's.'

She rather enjoyed tormenting him.

'Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.

'No! You've never seen him.'

There was a long pause.

'And what are your plans?'

'I don't know. That's the point.'

'No patching it up with Clifford?'

'I suppose Clifford would take it,' said Connie. 'He told me, after
last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long
as I went about it discreetly.'

'Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I
suppose it'll be all right.'

'In what way?' said Connie, looking into her father's eyes. They were
big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in
them, a look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of
sullen selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.

'You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put
another baronet in Wragby.'

Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.

'But I don't think I want to,' she said.

'Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the
truth from me, my child, it's this. The world goes on. Wragby stands
and will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and,
externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private
opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man
this year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as
far as Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you'll get very
little out of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You
have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down.
But you won't get much out of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's
an amusing thing to do.'

And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.

'I hope you had a real man at last,' he said to her after a while,
sensually alert.

'I did. That's the trouble. There aren't many of them about,' she said.

'No, by God!' he mused. 'There aren't! Well, my dear, to look at you,
he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn't make trouble for you?'

'Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.'

'Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.'

Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had
always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in
Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very
tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.

He drove with her to Hartland's hotel, and saw her installed: then went
round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.

She found a letter from Mellors.

I won't come round to your hotel, but I'll wait for you outside the
Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.

There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of
thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the
cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go
anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the
cut-to-pattern class thing.

'Ah, there you are! How well you look!'

'Yes! But not you.'

She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones
showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him.
There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell
from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel
inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman's now alert instinct
for happiness, she registered it at once. 'I'm happy when he's there!'
Not all the sunshine of Venice had given her this inward expansion and
warmth.

'Was it horrid for you?' she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He
was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the
curious loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to
take it and kiss it. But she did not quite dare.

'People are always horrid,' he said.

'And did you mind very much?'

'I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.'

'Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said
you felt like that.'

He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had
suffered bitterly.

'I suppose I did,' he said.

She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.

There was a long pause.

'And did you miss me?' she asked.

'I was glad you were out of it.'

Again there was a pause.

'But did people BELIEVE about you and me?' she asked.

'No! I don't think so for a moment.'

'Did Clifford?'

'I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But
naturally it made him want to see the last of me.'

'I'm going to have a child.'

The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He
looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand
at all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.

'Say you're glad!' she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a
certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things
she could not understand.

'It's the future,' he said.

'But aren't you glad?' she persisted.

'I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.'

'But you needn't be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have
it as his own, he'd be glad.'

She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.

'Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?' she
asked.

He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered
on his face.

'You wouldn't have to tell him who the father was?'

'Oh!' she said; 'he'd take it even then, if I wanted him to.'

He thought for a time.

'Ay!' he said at last, to himself. 'I suppose he would.'

There was silence. A big gulf was between them.

'But you don't want me to go back to Clifford, do you?' she asked him.

'What do you want yourself?' he replied.

'I want to live with you,' she said simply.

In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her
say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with
those haunted eyes.

'If it's worth it to you,' he said. 'I've got nothing.'

'You've got more than most men. Come, you know it,' she said.

'In one way, I know it.' He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he
resumed: 'They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it's
not that. I'm not a woman not because I don't want to shoot birds,
neither because I don't want to make money, or get on. I could have got
on in the army, easily, but I didn't like the army. Though I could
manage the men all right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy
fear of me when I got mad. No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher
authority that made the army dead: absolutely fool-dead. I like men,
and men like me. But I can't stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the
people who run this world. That's why I can't get on. I hate the
impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the world
as it is, what have I to offer a woman?'

'But why offer anything? It's not a bargain. It's just that we love one
another,' she said.

'Nay, nay! It's more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life
won't go down the proper gutters, it just won't. So I'm a bit of a
waste ticket by myself. And I've no business to take a woman into my
life, unless my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at
least, to keep us both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in
his life, if it's going to be an isolated life, and if she's a genuine
woman. I can't be just your male concubine.'

'Why not?' she said.

'Why, because I can't. And you would soon hate it.'

'As if you couldn't trust me,' she said.

The grin flickered on his face.

'The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with
you. I'm not just my Lady's fucker, after all.'

'What else are you?'

'You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I'm something to
myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can
quite understand nobody else's seeing it.'

'And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?'

He paused a long time before replying:

'It might.'

She too stayed to think about it.

'And what is the point of your existence?'

'I tell you, it's invisible. I don't believe in the world, not in
money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If
there's got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big
change from what now is.'

'And what will the real future have to be like?'

'God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of
rage. But what it really amounts to, I don't know.'

'Shall I tell you?' she said, looking into his face. 'Shall I tell you
what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future?
Shall I tell you?'

'Tell me then,' he replied.

'It's the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is: like when
you put your hand on my tail and say I've got a pretty tail.'

The grin came flickering on his face.

'That!' he said.

Then he sat thinking.

'Ay!' he said. 'You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way
through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them,
physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and
a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of
awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily
awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best,
even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so
monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt-awareness. Sex is
really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're
afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come
alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with
one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need.'

She looked at him.

'Then why are you afraid of me?' she said.

He looked at her a long time before he answered.

'It's the money, really, and the position. It's the world in you.'

'But isn't there tenderness in me?' she said wistfully.

He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.

'Ay! It comes an' goes, like in me.'

'But can't you trust it between you and me?' she asked, gazing
anxiously at him.

She saw his face all softening down, losing its armour. 'Maybe!' he
said. They were both silent.

'I want you to hold me in your arms,' she said. 'I want you to tell me
you are glad we are having a child.'

She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards
her.

'I suppose we can go to my room,' he said. 'Though it's scandalous
again.'

But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his
face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.

They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a
room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself
on a gas ring. It was small, but decent and tidy.

She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in
the soft first flush of her pregnancy.

'I ought to leave you alone,' he said.

'No!' she said. 'Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll
keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.'

She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked
body, the only home she had ever known.

'Then I'll keep thee,' he said. 'If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee.'

He held her round and fast.

'And say you're glad about the child,' she repeated.

'Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there.'

But that was more difficult for him.

'I've a dread of puttin' children i' th' world,' he said. 'I've such a
dread o' th' future for 'em.'

'But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its
future already. Kiss it!'

He quivered, because it was true. 'Be tender to it, and that will be
its future.'--At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He
kissed her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and
the foetus within the womb.

'Oh, you love me! You love me!' she said, in a little cry like one of
her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly,
feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to
hers, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.

And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to
do, to come into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or
his integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he
had none, he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his
tenderness from her on that account. 'I stand for the touch of bodily
awareness between human beings,' he said to himself, 'and the touch of
tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money,
and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world.
And she will stand behind me there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank
God I've got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank
God she's not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she's a tender, aware
woman.' And as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too,
in the creative act that is far more than procreative.

She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between
him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.

'Did you hate Bertha Coutts?' she asked him.

'Don't talk to me about her.'

'Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as
intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn't it
rather terrible, when you've been intimate with her, to hate her so?
Why is it?'

'I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always,
always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom
that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom
against me, like vitriol in my face.'

'But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?'

'No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage,
she must try to bully me.'

'But she must have loved you.'

'No! Well, in specks she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even
that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back,
and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was
no altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.'

'But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to
make you.'

'My God, it was bloody making.'

'But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.'

'How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always
ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And
she was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot
a stoat, if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape
of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery!
It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her
own will, her own will set against everything, then it's fearful, and
she should be shot at last.'

'And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own
will?'

'Ay!--the same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again. I
wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must
be careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never,
NEVER could stand it if she came down on me and you.'

Connie pondered this.

'Then we can't be together?' she said.

'Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in
September; then till March.'

'But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,' she said.

He was silent.

'I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,' he said.

'It's not being very tender to them,' she said.

'Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for
them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only
frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be
sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'

'But you wouldn't do it,' she said.

'I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow
has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot
them.'

'Then perhaps it is just as well you daren't.'

'Well.'

Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely
to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack
had been too grim. This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps
she could get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named,
then there was an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn't one go
right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?

One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from
Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far
ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to
London and New York.

Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of
mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

Connie confided in her father.

'You see, Father, he was Clifford's game-keeper: but he was an officer
in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who
preferred to become a private soldier again.'

Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism
of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all
the humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most
loathed, the conceit of self-abasement.

'Where did your game-keeper spring from?' asked Sir Malcolm irritably.

'He was a collier's son in Tevershall. But he's absolutely
presentable.'

The knighted artist became more angry.

'Looks to me like a gold-digger,' he said. 'And you're a pretty easy
gold-mine, apparently.'

'No, Father, it's not like that. You'd know if you saw him. He's a man.
Clifford always detested him for not being humble.'

'Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.'

What Sir Malcolm could not bear was the scandal of his daughter's
having an intrigue with a game-keeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he
minded the scandal.

'I care nothing about the fellow. He's evidently been able to get round
you all right. But, by God, think of all the talk. Think of your
step-mother how she'll take it!'

'I know,' said Connie. 'Talk is beastly: especially if you live in
society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we
might perhaps say it was another man's child, and not mention Mellors'
name at all.'

'Another man's! What other man's?'

'Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life.'

'And he's a fairly well-known artist. And he's fond of me.'

'Well I'm damned! Poor Duncan! And what's he going to get out of it?'

'I don't know. But he might rather like it, even.'

'He might, might he? Well, he's a funny man if he does. Why, you've
never even had an affair with him, have you?'

'No! But he doesn't really want it. He only loves me to be near him,
but not to touch him.'

'My God, what a generation!'

'He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only
I never wanted to.'

'God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.'

'Still, you wouldn't mind so much the talk about him?'

'My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!'

'I know! It's sickening! But what can I do?'

'Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he's
lived too long.'

'Come, Father, if you haven't done a good deal of contriving and
conniving in your time, you may talk.'

'But it was different, I assure you.'

'It's ALWAYS different.'

Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And
she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about
her sister and a game-keeper. Too, too humiliating!

'Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and
have no scandal?' said Connie.

But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if
Connie was going with the man, she'd better be able to marry him. This
was Hilda's opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn't sure. The affair might still
blow over.

'But will you see him, Father?'

Poor Sir Malcolm! he was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he
was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: a lunch in a private
room at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.

Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whisky, Mellors also drank. And they
talked all the while about India, on which the young man was well
informed.

This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the
waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:

'Well, young man, and what about my daughter?'

The grin flickered on Mellors' face.

'Well, Sir, and what about her?'

'You've got a baby in her all right.'

'I have that honour!' grinned Mellors.

'Honour, by God!' Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became
Scotch and lewd. 'Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?'

'Good!'

'I'll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I
never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother,
oh, holy saints!' He rolled his eyes to heaven. 'But you warmed her up,
oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set
fire to her haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can
tell you. She needed it. Oh, she's a nice girl, she's a nice girl, and
I knew she'd be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack
on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A game-keeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if
you ask me. Ha-ha! But now, look here, speaking seriously, what are we
going to do about it? Speaking seriously, you know!'

Speaking seriously, they didn't get very far. Mellors, though a little
tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as
intelligent as possible: which isn't saying much.

'So you're a game-keeper! Oh, you're quite right! That sort of game is
worth a man's while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch
her bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she's going
to come up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?'

'Thirty-nine.'

The knight lifted his eyebrows.

'As much as that! Well, you've another good twenty years, by the look
of you. Oh, game-keeper or not, you're a good cock. I can see that with
one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with
never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy, I'll bet you've a
good cod on you; oh, you're a bantam, I can see that. You're a fighter.
Game-keeper! Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn't trust my game to you! But
look here, seriously, what are we going to do about it? The world's
full of blasted old women.'

Seriously, they didn't do anything about it, except establish the old
free-masonry of male sensuality between them.

'And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely
on me. Game-keeper! Christ, but it's rich! I like it! Oh, I like it!
Shows the girl's got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own
income, moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I'll leave her
what I've got. By God, I will. She deserves it for showing spunk, in a
world of old women. I've been struggling to get myself clear of the
skirts of old women for seventy years, and haven't managed it yet. But
you're the man, I can see that.'

'I'm glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion,
that I'm the monkey.'

'Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all
the old women?'

They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time
for the rest of the day.

The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet
place.

'It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round,' said
Hilda.

'I had a lot o' fun out of it,' said he.

'I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until
you were both free to marry and have children.'

'The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,' said he.

'I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has
enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.'

'But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do
you?' said he.

'If you'd been in her own class.'

'Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo.'

There was silence.

'I think,' said Hilda, 'it will be best if she names quite another man
as co-respondent and you stay out of it altogether.'

'But I thought I'd put my foot right in.'

'I mean in the divorce proceedings.'

He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan
scheme to him.

'I don't follow,' he said.

'We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as
co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,' said Hilda.

'You mean a man?'

'Of course!'

'But she's got no other?'

He looked in wonder at Connie.

'No, no!' she said hastily. 'Only that old friendship, quite simple, no
love.'

'Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of
you?'

'Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a
woman,' said Hilda.

'One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?'

'A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an
artist.'

'Duncan Forbes!' he said at once, for Connie had talked to him.

'And how would you shift the blame on to him?'

'They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his
apartment.'

'Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,' he said.

'What else do you suggest?' said Hilda. 'If your name appears, you will
get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible
person to be mixed up with.'

'All that!' he said grimly.

There was a long silence.

'We could go right away,' he said.

'There is no right away for Connie,' said Hilda. 'Clifford is too well
known.'

Again the silence of pure frustration.

'The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being
persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be
divorced. So how are you both going about it?'

He was silent for a long time.

'How are you going about it for us?' he said.

'We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co-respondent: then we
must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your
divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.'

'Sounds like a lunatic asylum.'

'Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.

'What is worse?'

'Criminals, I suppose.'

'Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,' he said,
grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.

'Well!' he said at last. 'I agree to anything. The world is a raving
idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you're
right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.'

He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.

'Ma lass!' he said. 'The world's goin' to put salt on thy tail.'

'Not if we don't let it,' she said.

She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.

Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent
game-keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of
them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet
of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of
himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange
colours, ultra-modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity
of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did
not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane on the point of his
art: it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.

They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his
smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the
game-keeper would say. He knew already Connie's and Hilda's opinions.

'It is like a pure bit of murder,' said Mellors at last; a speech
Duncan by no means expected from a game-keeper.

'And who is murdered?' asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.

'Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.'

A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of
dislike in the other man's voice, and the note of contempt. And he
himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!

Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with
flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on
the wing, at the pictures.

'Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,' sneered the
artist.

'Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are
stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of
self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.'

In another wave of hate the artist's face looked yellow. But with a
sort of silent HAUTEUR he turned the pictures to the wall.

'I think we may go to the dining-room,' he said. And they trailed off,
dismally.

After coffee, Duncan said:

'I don't at all mind posing as the father of Connie's child. But only
on the condition that she'll come and pose as a model for me. I've
wanted her for years, and she's always refused.' He uttered it with the
dark finality of an inquisitor announcing an AUTO DA FE.

'Ah!' said Mellors. 'You only do it on condition, then?'

'Quite! I only do it on that condition.' The artist tried to put the
utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little
too much.

'Better have me as a model at the same time,' said Mellors. 'Better do
us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a
blacksmith, before I was a game-keeper.'

'Thank you,' said the artist. 'I don't think Vulcan has a figure that
interests me.'

'Not even if it was tubified and titivated up?'

There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.

It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored
the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words
were wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the
women.

'You didn't like him, but he's better than that, really. He's really
kind,' Connie explained as they left.

'He's a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,' said Mellors.

'No, he wasn't nice today.'

'And will you go and be a model to him?'

'Oh, I don't really mind any more. He won't touch me. And I don't mind
anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.'

'But he'll only shit on you on canvas.'

'I don't care. He'll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I
don't mind if he does that. I wouldn't have him touch me, not for
anything. But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty
staring, let him stare. He can make as many empty tubes and
corrugations out of me as he likes. It's his funeral. He hated you for
what you said: that his tubified art is sentimental and self-important.
But of course it's true.'



Chapter 19



Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really
in love with another man, and do hope you will divorce me. I am staying
at present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with
us. I'm awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly.
You don't really need me any more, and I can't bear to come back to
Wragby. I'm awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and
find someone better. I'm not really the right person for you, I am too
impatient and selfish, I suppose. But I can't ever come back to live
with you again. And I feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your
sake. But if you don't let yourself get worked up, you'll see you won't
mind so frightfully. You didn't really care about me personally. So do
forgive me and get rid of me.

Clifford was not INWARDLY surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he
had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely
refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as
the most terrible blow and shock to him, He had kept the surface of his
confidence in her quite serene.

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner
intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of
dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it
does fall.

Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs Bolton a terrible
shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.

'Why, Sir Clifford, whatever's the matter?'

No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and
felt his face, took his pulse.

'Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!'

No answer!

'Oh dear, oh dear! Then I'll telephone to Sheffield for Dr Carrington,
and Dr Lecky may as well run round straight away.'

She was moving to the door, when he said in a hollow tone:

'No!'

She stopped and gazed at him. His face was yellow, blank, and like the
face of an idiot.

'Do you mean you'd rather I didn't fetch the doctor?'

'Yes! I don't want him,' came the sepulchral voice.

'Oh, but Sir Clifford, you're ill, and I daren't take the
responsibility. I MUST send for the doctor, or I shall be blamed.'

A pause: then the hollow voice said:

'I'm not ill. My wife isn't coming back.' It was as if an image spoke.

'Not coming back? you mean her ladyship?' Mrs Bolton moved a little
nearer to the bed. 'Oh, don't you believe it. You can trust her
ladyship to come back.'

The image in the bed did not change, but it pushed a letter over the
counterpane.

'Read it!' said the sepulchral voice.

'Why, if it's a letter from her ladyship, I'm sure her ladyship
wouldn't want me to read her letter to you, Sir Clifford. You can tell
me what she says, if you wish.'

'Read it!' repeated the voice.

'Why, if I must, I do it to obey you, Sir Clifford,' she said. And she
read the letter.

'Well, I AM surprised at her ladyship,' she said. 'She promised so
faithfully she'd come back!'

The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but
motionless distraction. Mrs Bolton looked at it and was worried. She
knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed
soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.

She was a little impatient of Sir Clifford. Any man in his senses must
have KNOWN his wife was in love with somebody else, and was going to
leave him. Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely
aware of it, only he wouldn't admit it to himself. If he would have
admitted it, and prepared himself for it: or if he would have admitted
it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have
been acting like a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to
kid himself it wasn't so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and
pretended it was the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had
now brought on that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which
is a form of insanity. 'It comes', she thought to herself, hating him a
little, 'because he always thinks of himself. He's so wrapped up in his
own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he's like a mummy
tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!'

But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her duty to pull
him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make
him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He
would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more
dislocated.

The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady in Tennyson,
he must weep or he must die.

So Mrs Bolton began to weep first. She covered her face with her hand
and burst into little wild sobs. 'I would never have believed it of her
ladyship, I wouldn't!' she wept, suddenly summoning up all her old
grief and sense of woe, and weeping the tears of her own bitter
chagrin. Once she started, her weeping was genuine enough, for she had
had something to weep for.

Clifford thought of the way he had been betrayed by the woman Connie,
and in a contagion of grief, tears filled his eyes and began to run
down his cheeks. He was weeping for himself. Mrs Bolton, as soon as she
saw the tears running over his blank face, hastily wiped her own wet
cheeks on her little handkerchief, and leaned towards him.

'Now, don't you fret, Sir Clifford!' she said, in a luxury of emotion.
'Now, don't you fret, don't, you'll only do yourself an injury!'

His body shivered suddenly in an indrawn breath of silent sobbing, and
the tears ran quicker down his face. She laid her hand on his arm, and
her own tears fell again. Again the shiver went through him, like a
convulsion, and she laid her arm round his shoulder. 'There, there!
There, there! Don't you fret, then, don't you! Don't you fret!' she
moaned to him, while her own tears fell. And she drew him to her, and
held her arms round his great shoulders, while he laid his face on her
bosom and sobbed, shaking and hulking his huge shoulders, whilst she
softly stroked his dusky-blond hair and said: 'There! There! There!
There then! There then! Never you mind! Never you mind, then!'

And he put his arms round her and clung to her like a child, wetting
the bib of her starched white apron, and the bosom of her pale-blue
cotton dress, with his tears. He had let himself go altogether, at
last.

So at length she kissed him, and rocked him on her bosom, and in her
heart she said to herself: 'Oh, Sir Clifford! Oh, high and mighty
Chatterleys! Is this what you've come down to!' And finally he even
went to sleep, like a child. And she felt worn out, and went to her own
room, where she laughed and cried at once, with a hysteria of her own.
It was so ridiculous! It was so awful! Such a come-down! So shameful!
And it WAS so upsetting as well.

After this, Clifford became like a child with Mrs Bolton. He would hold
her hand, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly
kissed him, he said! 'Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!' And when she
sponged his great blond body, he would say the same! 'Do kiss me!' and
she would lightly kiss his body, anywhere, half in mockery.

And he lay with a queer, blank face like a child, with a bit of the
wonderment of a child. And he would gaze on her with wide, childish
eyes, in a relaxation of madonna-worship. It was sheer relaxation on
his part, letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish
position that was really perverse. And then he would put his hand into
her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation, the
exultation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.

Mrs Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it.
Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him. And they drew into a closer
physical intimacy, an intimacy of perversity, when he was a child
stricken with an apparent candour and an apparent wonderment, that
looked almost like a religious exaltation: the perverse and literal
rendering of: 'except ye become again as a little child'. While she
was the Magna Mater, full of power and potency, having the great blond
child-man under her will and her stroke entirely.

The curious thing was that when this child-man, which Clifford was now
and which he had been becoming for years, emerged into the world, it
was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be. This
perverted child-man was now a REAL business-man; when it was a question
of affairs, he was an absolute he-man, sharp as a needle, and
impervious as a bit of steel. When he was out among men, seeking his
own ends, and 'making good' his colliery workings, he had an almost
uncanny shrewdness, hardness, and a straight sharp punch. It was as if
his very passivity and prostitution to the Magna Mater gave him insight
into material business affairs, and lent him a certain remarkable
inhuman force. The wallowing in private emotion, the utter abasement of
his manly self, seemed to lend him a second nature, cold, almost
visionary, business-clever. In business he was quite inhuman.

And in this Mrs Bolton triumphed. 'How he's getting on!' she would say
to herself in pride. 'And that's my doing! My word, he'd never have got
on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man
forward. She wanted too much for herself.'

At the same time, in some corner of her weird female soul, how she
despised him and hated him! He was to her the fallen beast, the
squirming monster. And while she aided and abetted him all she could,
away in the remotest corner of her ancient healthy womanhood she
despised him with a savage contempt that knew no bounds. The merest
tramp was better than he.

His behaviour with regard to Connie was curious. He insisted on seeing
her again. He insisted, moreover, on her coming to Wragby. On this
point he was finally and absolutely fixed. Connie had promised to come
back to Wragby, faithfully.

'But is it any use?' said Mrs Bolton. 'Can't you let her go, and be rid
of her?'

'No! She said she was coming back, and she's got to come.'

Mrs Bolton opposed him no more. She knew what she was dealing with.

I needn't tell you what effect your letter has had on me [he wrote to
Connie to London]. Perhaps you can imagine it if you try, though no
doubt you won't trouble to use your imagination on my behalf.

I can only say one thing in answer: I must see you personally, here at
Wragby, before I can do anything. You promised faithfully to come back
to Wragby, and I hold you to the promise. I don't believe anything nor
understand anything until I see you personally, here under normal
circumstances. I needn't tell you that nobody here suspects anything,
so your return would be quite normal. Then if you feel, after we have
talked things over, that you still remain in the same mind, no doubt we
can come to terms.

Connie showed this letter to Mellors.

'He wants to begin his revenge on you,' he said, handing the letter
back.

Connie was silent. She was somewhat surprised to find that she was
afraid of Clifford. She was afraid to go near him. She was afraid of
him as if he were evil and dangerous.

'What shall I do?' she said.

'Nothing, if you don't want to do anything.'

She replied, trying to put Clifford off. He answered:

If you don't come back to Wragby now, I shall consider that you are
coming back one day, and act accordingly. I shall just go on the same,
and wait for you here, if I wait for fifty years.

She was frightened. This was bullying of an insidious sort. She had no
doubt he meant what he said. He would not divorce her, and the child
would be his, unless she could find some means of establishing its
illegitimacy.

After a time of worry and harassment, she decided to go to Wragby.
Hilda would go with her. She wrote this to Clifford. He replied:

I shall not welcome your sister, but I shall not deny her the door. I
have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and
responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her.

They went to Wragby. Clifford was away when they arrived. Mrs Bolton
received them.

'Oh, your Ladyship, it isn't the happy home-coming we hoped for, is
it!' she said.

'Isn't it?' said Connie.

So this woman knew! How much did the rest of the servants know or
suspect?

She entered the house, which now she hated with every fibre in her
body. The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a
menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim.

'I can't stay long here,' she whispered to Hilda, terrified.

And she suffered going into her own bedroom, re-entering into
possession as if nothing had happened. She hated every minute inside
the Wragby walls.

They did not meet Clifford till they went down to dinner. He was
dressed, and with a black tie: rather reserved, and very much the
superior gentleman. He behaved perfectly politely during the meal and
kept a polite sort of conversation going: but it seemed all touched
with insanity.

'How much do the servants know?' asked Connie, when the woman was out
of the room.

'Of your intentions? Nothing whatsoever.'

'Mrs Bolton knows.'

He changed colour.

'Mrs Bolton is not exactly one of the servants,' he said.

'Oh, I don't mind.'

There was tension till after coffee, when Hilda said she would go up to
her room.

Clifford and Connie sat in silence when she had gone. Neither would
begin to speak. Connie was so glad that he wasn't taking the pathetic
line, she kept him up to as much haughtiness as possible. She just sat
silent and looked down at her hands.

'I suppose you don't at all mind having gone back on your word?' he
said at last.

'I can't help it,' she murmured.

'But if you can't, who can?'

'I suppose nobody.'

He looked at her with curious cold rage. He was used to her. She was as
it were embedded in his will. How dared she now go back on him, and
destroy the fabric of his daily existence? How dared she try to cause
this derangement of his personality?

'And for WHAT do you want to go back on everything?' he insisted.

'Love!' she said. It was best to be hackneyed.

'Love of Duncan Forbes? But you didn't think that worth having, when
you met me. Do you mean to say you now love him better than anything
else in life?'

'One changes,' she said.

'Possibly! Possibly you may have whims. But you still have to convince
me of the importance of the change. I merely don't believe in your love
of Duncan Forbes.'

'But why SHOULD you believe in it? You have only to divorce me, not to
believe in my feelings.'

'And why should I divorce you?'

'Because I don't want to live here any more. And you really don't want
me.'

'Pardon me! I don't change. For my part, since you are my wife, I
should prefer that you should stay under my roof in dignity and quiet.
Leaving aside personal feelings, and I assure you, on my part it is
leaving aside a great deal, it is bitter as death to me to have this
order of life broken up, here in Wragby, and the decent round of daily
life smashed, just for some whim of yours.'

After a time of silence she said:

'I can't help it. I've got to go. I expect I shall have a child.'

He too was silent for a time.

'And is it for the child's sake you must go?' he asked at length.

She nodded.

'And why? Is Duncan Forbes so keen on his spawn?'

'Surely keener than you would be,' she said.

'But really? I want my wife, and I see no reason for letting her go. If
she likes to bear a child under my roof, she is welcome, and the child
is welcome: provided that the decency and order of life is preserved.
Do you mean to tell me that Duncan Forbes has a greater hold over you?
I don't believe it.'

There was a pause.

'But don't you see,' said Connie. 'I MUST go away from you, and I must
live with the man I love.'

'No, I don't see it! I don't give tuppence for your love, nor for the
man you love. I don't believe in that sort of cant.'

'But you see, I do.'

'Do you? My dear Madam, you are too intelligent, I assure you, to
believe in your own love for Duncan Forbes. Believe me, even now you
really care more for me. So why should I give in to such nonsense!'

She felt he was right there. And she felt she could keep silent no
longer.

'Because it isn't Duncan that I DO love,' she said, looking up at him.

'We only said it was Duncan, to spare your feelings.'

'To spare my feelings?'

'Yes! Because who I really love, and it'll make you hate me, is Mr
Mellors, who was our game-keeper here.'

If he could have sprung out of his chair, he would have done so. His
face went yellow, and his eyes bulged with disaster as he glared at
her.

Then he dropped back in the chair, gasping and looking up at the
ceiling.

At length he sat up.

'Do you mean to say you're telling me the truth?' he asked, looking
gruesome.

'Yes! You know I am.'

'And when did you begin with him?'

'In the spring.'

He was silent like some beast in a trap.

'And it WAS you, then, in the bedroom at the cottage?'

So he had really inwardly known all the time.

'Yes!'

He still leaned forward in his chair, gazing at her like a cornered
beast.

'My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!'

'Why?' she ejaculated faintly.

But he seemed not to hear.

'That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on
with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my
servants! My God, my God, is there any end to the beastly lowness of
women!'

He was beside himself with rage, as she knew he would be.

'And you mean to say you want to have a child to a cad like that?'

'Yes! I'm going to.'

'You're going to! You mean you're sure! How long have you been sure?'

'Since June.'

He was speechless, and the queer blank look of a child came over him
again.

'You'd wonder,' he said at last, 'that such beings were ever allowed to
be born.'

'What beings?' she asked.

He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious, he
couldn't even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any
connexion with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.

'And do you mean to say you'd marry him?--and bear his foul name?' he
asked at length.

'Yes, that's what I want.'

He was again as if dumbfounded.

'Yes!' he said at last. 'That proves that what I've always thought
about you is correct: you're not normal, you're not in your right
senses. You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run
after depravity, the NOSTALGIE DE LA BOUE.'

Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the
incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation
of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.

'So don't you think you'd better divorce me and have done with it?' she
said.

'No! You can go where you like, but I shan't divorce you,' he said
idiotically.

'Why not?'

He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.

'Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?' she
said.

'I care nothing about the child.'

'But if it's a boy it will be legally your son, and it will inherit
your title, and have Wragby.'

'I care nothing about that,' he said.

'But you MUST! I shall prevent the child from being legally yours, if I
can. I'd so much rather it were illegitimate, and mine: if it can't be
Mellors'.'

'Do as you like about that.'

He was immovable.

'And won't you divorce me?' she said. 'You can use Duncan as a pretext!
There'd be no need to bring in the real name. Duncan doesn't mind.'

'I shall never divorce you,' he said, as if a nail had been driven in.

'But why? Because I want you to?'

'Because I follow my own inclination, and I'm not inclined to.'

It was useless. She went upstairs and told Hilda the upshot.

'Better get away tomorrow,' said Hilda, 'and let him come to his
senses.'

So Connie spent half the night packing her really private and personal
effects. In the morning she had her trunks sent to the station, without
telling Clifford. She decided to see him only to say good-bye, before
lunch.

But she spoke to Mrs Bolton.

'I must say good-bye to you, Mrs Bolton, you know why. But I can trust
you not to talk.'

'Oh, you can trust me, your Ladyship, though it's a sad blow for us
here, indeed. But I hope you'll be happy with the other gentleman.'

'The other gentleman! It's Mr Mellors, and I care for him. Sir Clifford
knows. But don't say anything to anybody. And if one day you think Sir
Clifford may be willing to divorce me, let me know, will you? I should
like to be properly married to the man I care for.'

'I'm sure you would, my Lady. Oh, you can trust me. I'll be faithful to
Sir Clifford, and I'll be faithful to you, for I can see you're both
right in your own ways.'

'Thank you! And look! I want to give you this--may I?' So Connie left
Wragby once more, and went on with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors went into
the country and got work on a farm. The idea was, he should get his
divorce, if possible, whether Connie got hers or not. And for six
months he should work at farming, so that eventually he and Connie
could have some small farm of their own, into which he could put his
energy. For he would have to have some work, even hard work, to do, and
he would have to make his own living, even if her capital started him.

So they would have to wait till spring was in, till the baby was born,
till the early summer came round again.

The Grange Farm
Old Heanor
29 September

I got on here with a bit of contriving, because I knew Richards, the
company engineer, in the army. It is a farm belonging to Butler and
Smitham Colliery Company, they use it for raising hay and oats for the
pit-ponies; not a private concern. But they've got cows and pigs and
all the rest of it, and I get thirty shillings a week as labourer.
Rowley, the farmer, puts me on to as many jobs as he can, so that I can
learn as much as possible between now and next Easter. I've not heard a
thing about Bertha. I've no idea why she didn't show up at the divorce,
nor where she is nor what she's up to. But if I keep quiet till March I
suppose I shall be free. And don't you bother about Sir Clifford. He'll
want to get rid of you one of these days. If he leaves you alone, it's
a lot.

I've got lodging in a bit of an old cottage in Engine Row very decent.
The man is engine-driver at High Park, tall, with a beard, and very
chapel. The woman is a birdy bit of a thing who loves anything
superior. King's English and allow-me! all the time. But they lost
their only son in the war, and it's sort of knocked a hole in them.
There's a long gawky lass of a daughter training for a school-teacher,
and I help her with her lessons sometimes, so we're quite the family.
But they're very decent people, and only too kind to me. I expect I'm
more coddled than you are.

I like farming all right. It's not inspiring, but then I don't ask to
be inspired. I'm used to horses, and cows, though they are very female,
have a soothing effect on me. When I sit with my head in her side,
milking, I feel very solaced. They have six rather fine Herefords.
Oat-harvest is just over and I enjoyed it, in spite of sore hands and a
lot of rain. I don't take much notice of people, but get on with them
all right. Most things one just ignores.

The pits are working badly; this is a colliery district like
Tevershall, only prettier. I sometimes sit in the Wellington and talk
to the men. They grumble a lot, but they're not going to alter
anything. As everybody says, the Notts-Derby miners have got their
hearts in the right place. But the rest of their anatomy must be in the
wrong place, in a world that has no use for them. I like them, but they
don't cheer me much: not enough of the old fighting-cock in them. They
talk a lot about nationalization, nationalization of royalties,
nationalization of the whole industry. But you can't nationalize coal
and leave all the other industries as they are. They talk about putting
coal to new uses, like Sir Clifford is trying to do. It may work here
and there, but not as a general thing, I doubt. Whatever you make
you've got to sell it. The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole
damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. And they are doomed along
with it. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there's not
much conviction in them. There's no sort of conviction about anything,
except that it's all a muddle and a hole. Even under a Soviet you've
still got to sell coal: and that's the difficulty.

We've got this great industrial population, and they've got to be fed,
so the damn show has to be kept going somehow. The women talk a lot
more than the men, nowadays, and they are a sight more cock-sure. The
men are limp, they feel a doom somewhere, and they go about as if there
was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done in
spite of all the talk, the young ones get mad because they've no money
to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've
got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out. The pits are working two days, two and a half days a week,
and there's no sign of betterment even for the winter. It means a man
bringing up a family on twenty-five and thirty shillings. The women are
the maddest of all. But then they're the maddest for spending,
nowadays.

If you could only tell them that living and spending isn't the same
thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to LIVE instead of
earn and spend, they could manage very happily on twenty-five
shillings. If the men wore scarlet trousers as I said, they wouldn't
think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing
and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash. And
amuse the women themselves, and be amused by the women. They ought to
learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old
group dances, and carve the stools they sit on, and embroider their own
emblems. Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to
solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and
live in handsomeness, without needing to spend. But you can't do it.
They're all one-track minds nowadays. Whereas the mass of people
oughtn't even to try to think, because they can't. They should be alive
and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He's the only god for
the masses, forever. The few can go in for higher cults if they like.
But let the mass be forever pagan.

But the colliers aren't pagan, far from it. They're a sad lot, a
deadened lot of men: dead to their women, dead to life. The young ones
scoot about on motor-bikes with girls, and jazz when they get a chance,
But they're very dead. And it needs money. Money poisons you when
you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.

I'm sure you're sick of all this. But I don't want to harp on myself,
and I've nothing happening to me. I don't like to think too much about
you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But, of course,
what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I'm frightened,
really. I feel the devil in the air, and he'll try to get us. Or not
the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of
people, wanting money and hating life. Anyhow, I feel great grasping
white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody
who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.
There's a bad time coming. There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a
bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there's nothing lies in
the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I
feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to
have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have
been, haven't been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of
women. So they won't be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little
glow there is between you and me. We'll be together next year. And
though I'm frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to
fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond
himself. You can't insure against the future, except by really
believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I
believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it's the only thing
in the world. I've got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And
now the little flame is all I care about in my life. There's the baby,
but that is a side issue. It's my Pentecost, the forked flame between
me and you. The old Pentecost isn't quite right. Me and God is a bit
uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there
you are! That's what I abide by, and will abide by, Cliffords and
Berthas, colliery companies and governments and the money-mass of
people all notwithstanding.

That's why I don't like to start thinking about you actually. It only
tortures me, and does you no good. I don't want you to be away from me.
But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience.
This is my fortieth winter. And I can't help all the winters that have
been. But this winter I'll stick to my little Pentecost flame, and have
some peace. And I won't let the breath of people blow it out. I believe
in a higher mystery, that doesn't let even the crocus be blown out. And
if you're in Scotland and I'm in the Midlands, and I can't put my arms
round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I've got something of you.
My soul softly flaps in the little Pentecost flame with you, like the
peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are
fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it's a delicate
thing, and takes patience and the long pause.

So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking.
I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love
this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us
now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring
comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little
flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the
time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool
water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It
is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to
philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck
oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to
be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river.

Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with
my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste
together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a
while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.

Never mind, never mind, we won't get worked up. We really trust in the
little flame, and in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown
out. There's so much of you here with me, really, that it's a pity you
aren't all here.

Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don't hear anything from him,
never mind. He can't really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to
get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn't, we'll
manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to
spew you out as the abominable thing.

Now I can't even leave off writing to you.

But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and
steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good-night to Lady
Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.



THE END