lady chatterly 10 -11

Chapter 9



Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What
is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there
was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost, it
seemed to her, she had married him because she disliked him, in a
secret, physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really
because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had
seemed, in some way, her master, beyond her.

Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her
depths: and she realized how it had been eating her life away.

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from
outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible
because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called
love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual
asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money
and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity.
His love was a sort of insanity.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.

Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many
insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was NOT
aware of the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort of
bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the signs
of insanity in modern woman. She THOUGHT she was utterly subservient
and living for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or so
often, frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a finer,
subtler will of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm for
her.

Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.

'It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. 'I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your
chair today, the sun's just lovely.'

'Yes? Will you give me that book--there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'

'Why they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the 'y' sound:
be-yutiful! 'And the scent is simply gorgeous.'

'The scent is what I object to,' he said. 'It's a little funereal.'

'Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed
by his higher fastidiousness.

'Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.

'I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'

'Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive,
withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in
her.

When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:

'I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'

Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:

'Very good, Sir Clifford!'

She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers on his
face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her
shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very
concentrated, watching that she did it right. And gradually her
fingertips knew his cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat
perfectly. He was well-fed and well-liking, his face and throat were
handsome enough and he was a gentleman.

She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite
softness, almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he
was yielding to her.

She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie.
She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge,
absolutely, to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day:
'All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've
handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall
pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and
they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in
men!'

At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different in
a gentleman, a REAL gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a
good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of him, to
use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to man's
proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner and power
in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had never
dreamed of, with which he could still bully her.

Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:

'For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long
run.

It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten
o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his
manuscript. But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his
manuscripts. But she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in
time Mrs Bolton would do even that.

For Connie had suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn to use a
typewriter. And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and
practised assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter
to her, and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he
was very patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the
occasional phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a
pleasure to instruct her.

Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up
to her room after dinner.

'Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.

'Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling.'

But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton, and asked her
to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her
all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs
Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her queen or
her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again. And
Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying to
her:

'You must say j'adoube!'

She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:

'J'adoube!'

Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession
of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from
the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him
want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him,
her genuine thrill.

To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a
little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy
Bolton's tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent.
But Connie did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of
Clifford. To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly.
She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this
titled gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and
whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was
thrilled to a weird passion. And his 'educating' her roused in her a
passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair
could have done. In truth, the very fact that there could BE no love
affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other
passion, the peculiar passion of KNOWING, knowing as he knew.

There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so
young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time,
there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and
private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie
loathed it!

But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his
service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!

Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it
was mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of
gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs
Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a
great deal more, that these women left out.' Once started, Mrs Bolton
was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them
all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their
affairs, it was wonderful, if just a TRIFLE humiliating to listen to
her. At first she had not ventured to 'talk Tevershall', as she called
it, to Clifford. But once started, it went on. Clifford was listening
for 'material', and he found it in plenty. Connie realized that his
so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal
gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was very
warm when she 'talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was
marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would
have run to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After
all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in
a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human
soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even
satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and
recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast
importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into
new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead
our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the
novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for
it is in the PASSIONAL secret places of life, above all, that the tide
of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify
the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are CONVENTIONALLY 'pure'.
Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip,
all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the
angels. Mrs Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. 'And
he was such a BAD fellow, and she was such a NICE woman.' Whereas, as
Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been
merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry
honesty made a 'bad man' of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a 'nice
woman' of her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by
Mrs Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs
Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not
at all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course
knew by sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or
two. But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an
English village.

'I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You
know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year
from a fall; eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he
slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter,
an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a
shame. Well, he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a
penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five years--yes, she's fifty-three last
autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught
Sunday school for thirty years, till her father died. And then she
started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if you
know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock,
as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five, if he's a day,
yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see
them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his
knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see. And
he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old
James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to
live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown
from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way
the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight
more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't
keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but
do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films.
Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse
than the children: and the old ones beat the band.

'Talk about morality! Nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like,
and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they're having
to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working so bad,
and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's awful,
especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can
they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go
and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for
Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things
that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better
than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me ONE fur coat,
instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she
going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring
coat, my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as
poor folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I
want a new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to
them, be thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new
finery you want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary
thankful to go about in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks
like HER get van-loads, an' I can't have a new spring coat. It's a
damned shame. Princess! Bloomin' rot about Princess! It's munney as
matters, an' cos she's got lots, they give her more! Nobody's givin' me
any, an' I've as much right as anybody else. Don't talk to me about
education. It's munney as matters. I want a new spring coat, I do, an'
I shan't get it, cos there's no munney..."

'That's all they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving
seven or eight guineas for a winter coat--colliers' daughters,
mind you--and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And then
they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls
as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day.
I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this
year, when they have a built-up platform for the Sunday School
children, like a grandstand going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard
Miss Thompson, who has the first class of girls in the Sunday
School, say there'd be over a thousand pounds in new Sunday
clothes sitting on that platform! And times are what they are!
But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And boys the same.
The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking, drinking in
the Miners' Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three times a
week. Why, it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they respect
nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and good,
really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads
to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their dads.
They're sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self. If you
tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say:
That'll keep, that will, I'm goin' t' enjoy myself while I can. Owt
else'll keep! Oh, they're rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything
falls on the older men, an' it's a bad outlook all round.'

Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable.
Now--?

'Is there much Socialism, Bolshevism, among the people?' he asked.

'Oh!' said Mrs Bolton, 'you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. I don't
believe you'll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They're too
decent for that. But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they
care for it really. They only want a bit of money in their pocket, to
spend at the Welfare, or go gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care.
When they've got no money, they'll listen to the reds spouting. But
nobody believes in it, really.'

'So you think there's no danger?'

'Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you,
they're a selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do
anything. They aren't ever serious about anything, except showing off
on motor-bikes and dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You
can't MAKE them serious. The serious ones dress up in evening clothes
and go off to the Pally to show off before a lot of girls and dance
these new Charlestons and what not. I'm sure sometimes the bus'll be
full of young fellows in evening suits, collier lads, off to the Pally:
let alone those that have gone with their girls in motors or on
motor-bikes. They don't give a serious thought to a thing--save
Doncaster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on every race.
And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long chalk.
It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on
motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.'

'But what do they do when they get there?'

'Oh, hang around--and have tea in some fine tea-place like the
Mikado--and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some
girl. The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'

'And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'

'They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But I
don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want is
just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine
clothes: and they don't care about another thing. They haven't the
brains to be socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take
anything really serious, and they never will have.'

Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or
Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys.
The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you'd
got, and how much you wanted.

Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in
the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion
came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was
really the pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now
shrunk from with dread.

Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries:
Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous
mine, and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New
London was never very rich, and in ordinary times just got along
decently. But now times were bad, and it was pits like New London that
got left.

'There's a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and
Whiteover,' said Mrs Bolton. 'You've not seen the new works at Stacks
Gate, opened after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one
day, they're something quite new: great big chemical works at the
pit-head, doesn't look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more
money out of the chemical by-products than out of the coal--I forget
what it is. And the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of
course it's brought a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a
lot of Tevershall men got on there, and doin' well, a lot better than
our own men. They say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question of a
few more years, and it'll have to shut down. And New London'll go
first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no Tevershall pit
working. It's bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it closes for
good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl it was
the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he
could on here. Oh, there's been some money made in Tevershall. And now
the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out.
Doesn't it sound awful! But of course there's a lot as'll never go till
they have to. They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth,
and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron
men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal, where men
always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes
in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be
no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines. But
they say that's what folks said when they had to give up the old
stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the more
machines, the more people, that's what it looks like! They say you
can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of
Stacks Gate, and that's funny, they're not three miles apart. But they
say so. But everybody says it's a shame something can't be started, to
keep the men going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls
traipsing off to Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to
talk about if Tevershall Collieries took a new lease of life, after
everybody saying they're finished, and a sinking ship, and the men
ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so
much, of course there was a boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made
a trust of himself and got the money safe for ever, somehow. So they
say! But they say even the masters and the owners don't get much out of
it now. You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the
pits would go on for ever and ever. Who'd have thought, when I was a
girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it's fair
haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there
deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pit-head,
and the lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery. Why,
whatever should we do if Tevershall shut down--? It doesn't bear
thinking of. Always that throng it's been, except at strikes, and even
then the fan-wheels didn't stand, except when they fetched the ponies
up. I'm sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year
to year, you really don't.'

It was Mrs Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His
income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's trust,
even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It
was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and
fame; the popular world, not the working world.

Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a
private individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace
of pleasure. And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure
lay the populace of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too
had to have their providers. And it was a much grimmer business,
providing for the populace of work, than for the populace of pleasure.
While he was doing his stories, and 'getting on' in the world,
Tevershall was going to the wall.

He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main
appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat
and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided
by the men who made money in industry.

Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her
amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much
more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of
money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled
among themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was
nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the
indispensables, the bone-bringers.

But under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this
other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.

In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his
own states. Mrs Bolton made him aware only of outside things. Inwardly
he began to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.

He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was
there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to
have forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub,
with the underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful
torch. And he said little. But his mind began to work.

He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest
things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were
written in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept
secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in
the field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of
by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding
the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical
mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the
technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than art,
than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical
science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or demons,
inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In this
activity, men were beyond any mental age calculable. But Clifford knew
that when it did come to the emotional and human life, these self-made
men were of a mental age of about thirteen, feeble boys. The
discrepancy was enormous and appalling.

But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional
and 'human' mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was
interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.

He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the
engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a
new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over
the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was
getting things into his grip.

And he seemed verily to be re-born. NOW life came into him! He had been
gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the
artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He
simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The
very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave
him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was GOING
to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with
his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice.
But a man's victory.

At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal
into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new
locomotive engine with a self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And
it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a
great heat, under peculiar conditions.

The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at
a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some
sort of external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air
supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had
proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him.

And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had
fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had
not done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had
done it.

He was not aware how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did not know
how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when
he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost
a trifle vulgar.

With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and
he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave
him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of
her. The new Achilles in him had a heel, and in this heel the woman,
the woman like Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a
certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her.
But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to
be silent whenever she was present.

Only when he was alone with Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and a
master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously
as her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body
as if he were a child, really as if he were a child.




Chapter 10



Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford
no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was
queer. He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense,
with a good deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or
Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands.

And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing
forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a
blank entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind,
and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.

Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst
something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She
fled up to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror
filled her sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole
civilized species.

But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of
industrial activity, becoming almost a CREATURE, with a hard, efficient
shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and
lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates
of the crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner
bodies of soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.

She was not even free, for Clifford must have her there. He seemed to
have a nervous terror that she should leave him. The curious pulpy part
of him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with
terror, like a child, almost like an idiot. She must be there, there at
Wragby, a Lady Chatterley, his wife. Otherwise he would be lost like an
idiot on a moor.

This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror. She
heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with
young scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things,
his power, his uncanny material power over what is called practical
men. He had become a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and
powerful one, a master. Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence
upon him, just at the crisis in his life.

But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone
to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife, a
higher being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like
a savage, a worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power
of the idol, the dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to
swear not to leave him, not to give him away.

'Clifford,' she said to him--but this was after she had the key to the
hut--'Would you really like me to have a child one day?'

He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent
pale eyes.

'I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.

'No difference to what?' she asked.

'To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect
that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child
of my own!'

She looked at him in amazement.

'I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'

She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.

'So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.

'I tell you,' he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, 'I am quite
willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch
that, I am dead against it.'

Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was
really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking
about.

'Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,' she said,
with a certain sarcasm.

'There!' he said. 'That is the point! In that case I don't mind in the
least. I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about
the house, and feel one was building up a future for it. I should have
something to strive for then, and I should know it was your child,
shouldn't I, dear? And it would seem just the same as my own. Because
it is you who count in these matters. You know that, don't you, dear? I
don't enter, I am a cypher. You are the great I-am! as far as life
goes. You know that, don't you? I mean, as far as I am concerned. I
mean, but for you I am absolutely nothing. I live for your sake and
your future. I am nothing to myself!'

Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion. It was one of
the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence. What man in his
senses would say such things to a woman! But men aren't in their
senses. What man with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden
of life-responsibility upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?

Moreover, in half an hour's time, Connie heard Clifford talking to Mrs
Bolton, in a hot, impulsive voice, revealing himself in a sort of
passionless passion to the woman, as if she were half mistress, half
foster-mother to him. And Mrs Bolton was carefully dressing him in
evening clothes, for there were important business guests in the house.

Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she
was being crushed to death by weird lies, and by the amazing cruelty of
idiocy. Clifford's strange business efficiency in a way over-awed her,
and his declaration of private worship put her into a panic. There was
nothing between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never
touched her. He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and
because they were so utterly out of touch, he tortured her with his
declaration of idolatry. It was the cruelty of utter impotence. And she
felt her reason would give way, or she would die.

She fled as much as possible to the wood. One afternoon, as she sat
brooding, watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well, the keeper
had strode up to her.

'I got you a key made, my Lady!' he said, saluting, and he offered her
the key.

'Thank you so much!' she said, startled.

'The hut's not very tidy, if you don't mind,' he said. 'I cleared it
what I could.'

'But I didn't want you to trouble!' she said.

'Oh, it wasn't any trouble. I am setting the hens in about a week. But
they won't be scared of you. I s'll have to see to them morning and
night, but I shan't bother you any more than I can help.'

'But you wouldn't bother me,' she pleaded. 'I'd rather not go to the
hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.'

He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but
distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked
thin and ill. A cough troubled him.

'You have a cough,' she said.

'Nothing--a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's
nothing.'

He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer.

She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon,
but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted
to keep his own privacy.

He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the
fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the
tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by
the clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a
shelter for the birds, and under it stood the live coops. And, one day
when she came, she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the
coops, sitting on pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in
all the heat of the pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's
heart. She, herself was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all,
just a mere thing of terrors.

Then all the live coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a grey
and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in
the soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature,
fluffing out their feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched
Connie, as she crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks
of anger and alarm, but chiefly of female anger at being approached.

Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the
hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her
hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was
pining to give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed
themselves nor drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was
delighted when one of the hens drank.

Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the
world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold
from head to foot. Mrs Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound
of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis
affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely
die if it lasted much longer.

Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the
leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain.
How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything
cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on
the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt
herself living on the brink of fainting all the time.

Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under
the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the
afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken
tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking
in terror. The slim little chick was greyish brown with dark markings,
and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms
at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life,
life! pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly
without fear! Even when it scampered a little, scrambling into the coop
again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in answer to the mother
hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened, it took it as a
game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head was poking
through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the Cosmos.

Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so
acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming
unbearable.

She had only one desire now, to go to the clearing in the wood. The
rest was a kind of painful dream. But sometimes she was kept all day at
Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were
going blank, just blank and insane.

One evening, guests or no guests, she escaped after tea. It was late,
and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The
sun was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among
the flowers. The light would last long overhead.

She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was
there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night,
so the little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was
pattering about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw
shelter, refusing to be called in by the anxious mother.

'I had to come and see the chickens!' she said, panting, glancing shyly
at the keeper, almost unaware of him. 'Are there any more?'

'Thurty-six so far!' he said. 'Not bad!'

He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.

Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in.
But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow
feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing
forth from the vast mother-body.

'I'd love to touch them,' she said, putting her fingers gingerly
through the bars of the coop. But the mother-hen pecked at her hand
fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.

'How she pecks at me! She hates me!' she said in a wondering voice.
'But I wouldn't hurt them!'

The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees
apart, and put his hand with quiet confidence slowly into the coop. The
old hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with
sure gentle fingers, he felt among the old bird's feathers and drew out
a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.

'There!' he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab
thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little
stalks of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through its almost
weightless feet into Connie's hands. But it lifted its handsome,
clean-shaped little head boldly, and looked sharply round, and gave a
little 'peep'. 'So adorable! So cheeky!' she said softly.

The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face
the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw a tear fall on to
her wrist.

And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly
he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins,
that he had hoped was quiescent for ever. He fought against it, turning
his back to her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his
knees.

He turned again to look at her. She was kneeling and holding her two
hands slowly forward, blindly, so that the chicken should run in to the
mother-hen again. And there was something so mute and forlorn in her,
compassion flamed in his bowels for her.

Without knowing, he came quickly towards her and crouched beside her
again, taking the chick from her hands, because she was afraid of the
hen, and putting it back in the coop. At the back of his loins the fire
suddenly darted stronger.

He glanced apprehensively at her. Her face was averted, and she was
crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness. His
heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and
laid his fingers on her knee.

'You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.

But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart
was broken and nothing mattered any more.

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to
travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking
motion, to the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly,
softly, stroked the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive
caress.

She had found her scrap of handkerchief and was blindly trying to dry
her face.

'Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.

And closing his hand softly on her upper arm, he drew her up and led
her slowly to the hut, not letting go of her till she was inside. Then
he cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's
blanket from the tool chest, spreading it slowly. She glanced at his
face, as she stood motionless.

His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting
to fate.

'You lie there,' he said softly, and he shut the door, so that it was
dark, quite dark.

With a queer obedience, she lay down on the blanket. Then she felt the
soft, groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her body, feeling for
her face. The hand stroked her face softly, softly, with infinite
soothing and assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss
on her cheek.

She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she
quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted
clumsiness, among her clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to
unclothe her where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath,
slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet. Then with a quiver of
exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel
for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come in to her at once, to enter
the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of
pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the woman.

She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The
activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no
more. Even the tightness of his arms round her, even the intense
movement of his body, and the springing of his seed in her, was a kind
of sleep, from which she did not begin to rouse till he had finished
and lay softly panting against her breast.

Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary?
Why had it lifted a great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it
real? Was it real?

Her tormented modern-woman's brain still had no rest. Was it real? And
she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept
herself for herself it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old,
she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more.
She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.

The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he
thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not
know him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his
mysterious stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on
hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet
not unpeaceful. His very stillness was peaceful.

She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was
like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her
knees and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing.
Then he quietly opened the door and went out.

She saw a very brilliant little moon shining above the afterglow over
the oaks. Quickly she got up and arranged herself she was tidy. Then
she went to the door of the hut.

All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead
was crystal. But it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower
shadow towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch.

'Shall we go then?' he said.

'Where?'

'I'll go with you to the gate.'

He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of the hut and came
after her.

'You aren't sorry, are you?' he asked, as he went at her side.

'No! No! Are you?' she said.

'For that! No!' he said. Then after a while he added: 'But there's the
rest of things.'

'What rest of things?' she said.

'Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications.'

'Why complications?' she said, disappointed.

'It's always so. For you as well as for me. There's always
complications.' He walked on steadily in the dark.

'And are you sorry?' she said.

'In a way!' he replied, looking up at the sky. 'I thought I'd done with
it all. Now I've begun again.'

'Begun what?'

'Life.'

'Life!' she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.

'It's life,' he said. 'There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep
clear you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open
again, I have.'

She did not quite see it that way, but still 'It's just love,' she said
cheerfully.

'Whatever that may be,' he replied.

They went on through the darkening wood in silence, till they were
almost at the gate.

'But you don't hate me, do you?' she said wistfully.

'Nay, nay,' he replied. And suddenly he held her fast against his
breast again, with the old connecting passion. 'Nay, for me it was
good, it was good. Was it for you?'

'Yes, for me too,' she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not
been conscious of much.

He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.

'If only there weren't so many other people in the world,' he said
lugubriously.

She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened it for her.

'I won't come any further,' he said.

'No!' And she held out her hand, as if to shake hands. But he took it
in both his.

'Shall I come again?' she asked wistfully.

'Yes! Yes!'

She left him and went across the park.

He stood back and watched her going into the dark, against the pallor
of the horizon. Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had
connected him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost
him that bitter privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.

He turned into the dark of the wood. All was still, the moon had set.
But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks
Gate, the traffic on the main road. Slowly he climbed the denuded
knoll. And from the top he could see the country, bright rows of lights
at Stacks Gate, smaller lights at Tevershall pit, the yellow lights of
Tevershall and lights everywhere, here and there, on the dark country,
with the distant blush of furnaces, faint and rosy, since the night was
clear, the rosiness of the outpouring of white-hot metal. Sharp, wicked
electric lights at Stacks Gate! An undefinable quick of evil in them!
And all the unease, the ever-shifting dread of the industrial night in
the Midlands. He could hear the winding-engines at Stacks Gate turning
down the seven-o'clock miners. The pit worked three shifts.

He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he
knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises
broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man
could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.
And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of
pain and doom. For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and
diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical
greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights
and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil
thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy
the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things
must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing,
she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot
she was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the
vulnerability of the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber-goods
and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure
as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.
Tender! Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the
growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women
of today. But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.
For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of
mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.

He went home with his gun and his dog, to the dark cottage, lit the
lamp, started the fire, and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young
onions and beer. He was alone, in a silence he loved. His room was
clean and tidy, but rather stark. Yet the fire was bright, the hearth
white, the petroleum lamp hung bright over the table, with its white
oil-cloth. He tried to read a book about India, but tonight he could
not read. He sat by the fire in his shirt-sleeves, not smoking, but
with a mug of beer in reach. And he thought about Connie.

To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for
her sake. He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he
was troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience
was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of
himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew
by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

The woman! If she could be there with him, and there were nobody else
in the world! The desire rose again, his penis began to stir like a
live bird. At the same time an oppression, a dread of exposing himself
and her to that outside Thing that sparkled viciously in the electric
lights, weighed down his shoulders. She, poor young thing, was just a
young female creature to him; but a young female creature whom he had
gone into and whom he desired again.

Stretching with the curious yawn of desire, for he had been alone and
apart from man or woman for four years, he rose and took his coat
again, and his gun, lowered the lamp and went out into the starry
night, with the dog. Driven by desire and by dread of the malevolent
Thing outside, he made his round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved
the darkness and folded himself into it. It fitted the turgidity of
his desire which, in spite of all, was like a riches; the stirring
restlessness of his penis, the stirring fire in his loins! Oh, if only
there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling electric Thing
outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life, the tenderness of
women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there were men to
fight side by side with! But the men were all outside there, glorying
in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of
mechanized greed or of greedy mechanism.

Constance, for her part, had hurried across the park, home, almost
without thinking. As yet she had no afterthought. She would be in time
for dinner.

She was annoyed to find the doors fastened, however, so that she had to
ring. Mrs Bolton opened.

'Why there you are, your Ladyship! I was beginning to wonder if you'd
gone lost!' she said a little roguishly. 'Sir Clifford hasn't asked for
you, though; he's got Mr Linley in with him, talking over something. It
looks as if he'd stay to dinner, doesn't it, my Lady?'

'It does rather,' said Connie.

'Shall I put dinner back a quarter of an hour? That would give you time
to dress in comfort.'

'Perhaps you'd better.'

Mr Linley was the general manager of the collieries, an elderly man
from the north, with not quite enough punch to suit Clifford; not up to
post-war conditions, nor post-war colliers either, with their 'ca'
canny' creed. But Connie liked Mr Linley, though she was glad to be
spared the toadying of his wife.

Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much,
so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with big, wide blue eyes and a
soft repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie
had played this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but
still, decidedly second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared
from her consciousness while she played it.

She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own
thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her FORTE.

Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She
didn't know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he
really like her? Not much, she felt. Yet he was kind. There was
something, a sort of warm naive kindness, curious and sudden, that
almost opened her womb to him. But she felt he might be kind like that
to any woman. Though even so, it was curiously soothing, comforting.
And he was a passionate man, wholesome and passionate. But perhaps he
wasn't quite individual enough; he might be the same with any woman as
he had been with her. It really wasn't personal. She was only really a
female to him.

But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female
in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the PERSON she
was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her
altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady
Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no
notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her
loins or her breasts.

She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the
dark-green dogs-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the
trees making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost
feel it in her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive
trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flamey
oak-leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward,
and spreading on the sky.

She came to the clearing, but he was not there. She had only half
expected him. The pheasant chicks were running lightly abroad, light as
insects, from the coops where the fellow hens clucked anxiously. Connie
sat and watched them, and waited. She only waited. Even the chicks she
hardly saw. She waited.

The time passed with dream-like slowness, and he did not come. She had
only half expected him. He never came in the afternoon. She must go
home to tea. But she had to force herself to leave.

As she went home, a fine drizzle of rain fell.

'Is it raining again?' said Clifford, seeing her shake her hat.

'Just drizzle.'

She poured tea in silence, absorbed in a sort of obstinacy. She did
want to see the keeper today, to see if it were really real. If it were
really real.

'Shall I read a little to you afterwards?' said Clifford.

She looked at him. Had he sensed something?

'The spring makes me feel queer--I thought I might rest a little,' she
said.

'Just as you like. Not feeling really unwell, are you?'

'No! Only rather tired--with the spring. Will you have Mrs Bolton to
play something with you?'

'No! I think I'll listen in.'

She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to
her bedroom. There she heard the loudspeaker begin to bellow, in an
idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series
of street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old
criers. She pulled on her old violet coloured mackintosh, and slipped
out of the house at the side door.

The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed,
not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to
open her light waterproof.

The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain,
full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed
flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if
they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to
hum with greenness.

There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone
under the mother-hens, only one or two last adventurous ones still
dibbed about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were
doubtful of themselves.

So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps
something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.

But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all
tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the
straw neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung
on a nail. The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.

She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The
fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise.
Nothing made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim,
twilit, silent and alive. How alive everything was!

Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding
her.

But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin
jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the
hut, half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he
crouched in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully
shutting the hens and chicks up safe against the night.

At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He
stood before her under the porch.

'You come then,' he said, using the intonation of the dialect.

'Yes,' she said, looking up at him. 'You're late!'

'Ay!' he replied, looking away into the wood.

She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.

'Did you want to come in?' she asked.

He looked down at her shrewdly.

'Won't folks be thinkin' somethink, you comin' here every night?' he
said.

'Why?' She looked up at him, at a loss. 'I said I'd come. Nobody
knows.'

'They soon will, though,' he replied. 'An' what then?'

She was at a loss for an answer.

'Why should they know?' she said.

'Folks always does,' he said fatally.

Her lip quivered a little.

'Well I can't help it,' she faltered.

'Nay,' he said. 'You can help it by not comin'--if yer want to,' he
added, in a lower tone.

'But I don't want to,' she murmured.

He looked away into the wood, and was silent.

'But what when folks finds out?' he asked at last. 'Think about it!
Think how lowered you'll feel, one of your husband's servants.'

She looked up at his averted face.

'Is it,' she stammered, 'is it that you don't want me?'

'Think!' he said. 'Think what if folks find out Sir Clifford an'
a'--an' everybody talkin'--'

'Well, I can go away.'

'Where to?'

'Anywhere! I've got money of my own. My mother left me twenty thousand
pounds in trust, and I know Clifford can't touch it. I can go away.'

'But 'appen you don't want to go away.'

'Yes, yes! I don't care what happens to me.'

'Ay, you think that! But you'll care! You'll have to care, everybody
has. You've got to remember your Ladyship is carrying on with a
game-keeper. It's not as if I was a gentleman. Yes, you'd care. You'd
care.'

'I shouldn't. What do I care about my ladyship! I hate it really. I
feel people are jeering every time they say it. And they are, they are!
Even you jeer when you say it.'

'Me!'

For the first time he looked straight at her, and into her eyes. 'I
don't jeer at you,' he said.

As he looked into her eyes she saw his own eyes go dark, quite dark,
the pupils dilating.

'Don't you care about a' the risk?' he asked in a husky voice. 'You
should care. Don't care when it's too late!'

There was a curious warning pleading in his voice.

'But I've nothing to lose,' she said fretfully. 'If you knew what it
is, you'd think I'd be glad to lose it. But are you afraid for
yourself?'

'Ay!' he said briefly. 'I am. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid o'
things.'

'What things?' she asked.

He gave a curious backward jerk of his head, indicating the outer
world.

'Things! Everybody! The lot of 'em.'

Then he bent down and suddenly kissed her unhappy face.

'Nay, I don't care,' he said. 'Let's have it, an' damn the rest. But if
you was to feel sorry you'd ever done it--!'

'Don't put me off,' she pleaded.

He put his fingers to her cheek and kissed her again suddenly.

'Let me come in then,' he said softly. 'An' take off your mackintosh.'

He hung up his gun, slipped out of his wet leather jacket, and reached
for the blankets.

'I brought another blanket,' he said, 'so we can put one over us if you
like.'

'I can't stay long,' she said. 'Dinner is half-past seven.'

He looked at her swiftly, then at his watch.

'All right,' he said.

He shut the door, and lit a tiny light in the hanging hurricane lamp.
'One time we'll have a long time,' he said.

He put the blankets down carefully, one folded for her head. Then he
sat down a moment on the stool, and drew her to him, holding her close
with one arm, feeling for her body with his free hand. She heard the
catch of his intaken breath as he found her. Under her frail petticoat
she was naked.

'Eh! what it is to touch thee!' he said, as his finger caressed the
delicate, warm, secret skin of her waist and hips. He put his face down
and rubbed his cheek against her belly and against her thighs again and
again. And again she wondered a little over the sort of rapture it was
to him. She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through
touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For
passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then
the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little
despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the
beauty of vision. She felt the glide of his cheek on her thighs and
belly and buttocks, and the close brushing of his moustache and his
soft thick hair, and her knees began to quiver. Far down in her she
felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging. And she was half afraid.
Half she wished he would not caress her so. He was encompassing her
somehow. Yet she was waiting, waiting.

And when he came into her, with an intensification of relief and
consummation that was pure peace to him, still she was waiting. She
felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own
fault. She willed herself into this separateness. Now perhaps she was
condemned to it. She lay still, feeling his motion within her, his
deep-sunk intentness, the sudden quiver of him at the springing of his
seed, then the slow-subsiding thrust. That thrust of the buttocks,
surely it was a little ridiculous. If you were a woman, and a part in
all the business, surely that thrusting of the man's buttocks was
supremely ridiculous. Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this
posture and this act!

But she lay still, without recoil. Even when he had finished, she did
not rouse herself to get a grip on her own satisfaction, as she had
done with Michaelis; she lay still, and the tears slowly filled and ran
from her eyes.

He lay still, too. But he held her close and tried to cover her poor
naked legs with his legs, to keep them warm. He lay on her with a
close, undoubting warmth.

'Are yer cold?' he asked, in a soft, small voice, as if she were close,
so close. Whereas she was left out, distant.

'No! But I must go,' she said gently.

He sighed, held her closer, then relaxed to rest again.

He had not guessed her tears. He thought she was there with him.

'I must go,' she repeated.

He lifted himself kneeled beside her a moment, kissed the inner side of
her thighs, then drew down her skirts, buttoning his own clothes
unthinking, not even turning aside, in the faint, faint light from the
lantern.

'Tha mun come ter th' cottage one time,' he said, looking down at her
with a warm, sure, easy face.

But she lay there inert, and was gazing up at him thinking: Stranger!
Stranger! She even resented him a little.

He put on his coat and looked for his hat, which had fallen, then he
slung on his gun.

'Come then!' he said, looking down at her with those warm, peaceful
sort of eyes.

She rose slowly. She didn't want to go. She also rather resented
staying. He helped her with her thin waterproof and saw she was tidy.

Then he opened the door. The outside was quite dark. The faithful dog
under the porch stood up with pleasure seeing him. The drizzle of rain
drifted greyly past upon the darkness. It was quite dark.

'Ah mun ta'e th' lantern,' he said. 'The'll be nob'dy.'

He walked just before her in the narrow path, swinging the hurricane
lamp low, revealing the wet grass, the black shiny tree-roots like
snakes, wan flowers. For the rest, all was grey rain-mist and complete
darkness.

'Tha mun come to the cottage one time,' he said, 'shall ta? We might as
well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.'

It puzzled her, his queer, persistent wanting her, when there was
nothing between them, when he never really spoke to her, and in spite
of herself she resented the dialect. His 'tha mun come' seemed not
addressed to her, but some common woman. She recognized the foxglove
leaves of the riding and knew, more or less, where they were.

'It's quarter past seven,' he said, 'you'll do it.' He had changed his
voice, seemed to feel her distance. As they turned the last bend in the
riding towards the hazel wall and the gate, he blew out the light.
'We'll see from here,' be said, taking her gently by the arm.

But it was difficult, the earth under their feet was a mystery, but he
felt his way by tread: he was used to it. At the gate he gave her his
electric torch. 'It's a bit lighter in the park,' he said; 'but take it
for fear you get off th' path.'

It was true, there seemed a ghost-glimmer of greyness in the open space
of the park. He suddenly drew her to him and whipped his hand under her
dress again, feeling her warm body with his wet, chill hand.

'I could die for the touch of a woman like thee,' he said in his
throat. 'If tha' would stop another minute.'

She felt the sudden force of his wanting her again.

'No, I must run,' she said, a little wildly.

'Ay,' he replied, suddenly changed, letting her go.

She turned away, and on the instant she turned back to him saying:
'Kiss me.'

He bent over her indistinguishable and kissed her on the left eye. She
held her mouth and he softly kissed it, but at once drew away. He hated
mouth kisses.

'I'll come tomorrow,' she said, drawing away; 'if I can,' she added.

'Ay! not so late,' he replied out of the darkness. Already she could
not see him at all.

'Goodnight,' she said.

'Goodnight, your Ladyship,' his voice.

She stopped and looked back into the wet dark. She could just see the
bulk of him. 'Why did you say that?' she said.

'Nay,' he replied. 'Goodnight then, run!'

She plunged on in the dark-grey tangible night. She found the side-door
open, and slipped into her room unseen. As she closed the door the gong
sounded, but she would take her bath all the same--she must take her
bath. 'But I won't be late any more,' she said to herself; 'it's too
annoying.'

The next day she did not go to the wood. She went instead with Clifford
to Uthwaite. He could occasionally go out now in the car, and had got a
strong young man as chauffeur, who could help him out of the car if
need be. He particularly wanted to see his godfather, Leslie Winter,
who lived at Shipley Hall, not far from Uthwaite. Winter was an elderly
gentleman now, wealthy, one of the wealthy coal-owners who had had
their hey-day in King Edward's time. King Edward had stayed more than
once at Shipley, for the shooting. It was a handsome old stucco hall,
very elegantly appointed, for Winter was a bachelor and prided himself
on his style; but the place was beset by collieries. Leslie Winter was
attached to Clifford, but personally did not entertain a great respect
for him, because of the photographs in illustrated papers and the
literature. The old man was a buck of the King Edward school, who
thought life was life and the scribbling fellows were something else.
Towards Connie the Squire was always rather gallant; he thought her an
attractive demure maiden and rather wasted on Clifford, and it was a
thousand pities she stood no chance of bringing forth an heir to
Wragby. He himself had no heir.

Connie wondered what he would say if he knew that Clifford's
game-keeper had been having intercourse with her, and saying to her
'tha mun come to th' cottage one time.' He would detest and despise
her, for he had come almost to hate the shoving forward of the working
classes. A man of her own class he would not mind, for Connie was
gifted from nature with this appearance of demure, submissive
maidenliness, and perhaps it was part of her nature. Winter called her
'dear child' and gave her a rather lovely miniature of an
eighteenth-century lady, rather against her will.

But Connie was preoccupied with her affair with the keeper. After all,
Mr Winter, who was really a gentleman and a man of the world, treated
her as a person and a discriminating individual; he did not lump her
together with all the rest of his female womanhood in his 'thee' and
'tha'.

She did not go to the wood that day nor the next, nor the day
following. She did not go so long as she felt, or imagined she felt,
the man waiting for her, wanting her. But the fourth day she was
terribly unsettled and uneasy. She still refused to go to the wood and
open her thighs once more to the man. She thought of all the things she
might do--drive to Sheffield, pay visits, and the thought of all these
things was repellent. At last she decided to take a walk, not towards
the wood, but in the opposite direction; she would go to Marehay,
through the little iron gate in the other side of the park fence. It
was a quiet grey day of spring, almost warm. She walked on unheeding,
absorbed in thoughts she was not even conscious of She was not really
aware of anything outside her, till she was startled by the loud
barking of the dog at Marehay Farm. Marehay Farm! Its pastures ran up
to Wragby park fence, so they were neighbours, but it was some time
since Connie had called.

'Bell!' she said to the big white bull-terrier. 'Bell! have you
forgotten me? Don't you know me?' She was afraid of dogs, and Bell
stood back and bellowed, and she wanted to pass through the farmyard on
to the warren path.

Mrs Flint appeared. She was a woman of Constance's own age, had been a
school-teacher, but Connie suspected her of being rather a false little
thing.

'Why, it's Lady Chatterley! Why!' And Mrs Flint's eyes glowed again,
and she flushed like a young girl. 'Bell, Bell. Why! barking at Lady
Chatterley! Bell! Be quiet!' She darted forward and slashed at the dog
with a white cloth she held in her hand, then came forward to Connie.

'She used to know me,' said Connie, shaking hands. The Flints were
Chatterley tenants.

'Of course she knows your Ladyship! She's just showing off,' said Mrs
Flint, glowing and looking up with a sort of flushed confusion, 'but
it's so long since she's seen you. I do hope you are better.'

'Yes thanks, I'm all right.'

'We've hardly seen you all winter. Will you come in and look at the
baby?'

'Well!' Connie hesitated. 'Just for a minute.'

Mrs Flint flew wildly in to tidy up, and Connie came slowly after her,
hesitating in the rather dark kitchen where the kettle was boiling by
the fire. Back came Mrs Flint.

'I do hope you'll excuse me,' she said. 'Will you come in here?'

They went into the living-room, where a baby was sitting on the rag
hearth rug, and the table was roughly set for tea. A young servant-girl
backed down the passage, shy and awkward.

The baby was a perky little thing of about a year, with red hair like
its father, and cheeky pale-blue eyes. It was a girl, and not to be
daunted. It sat among cushions and was surrounded with rag dolls and
other toys in modern excess.

'Why, what a dear she is!' said Connie, 'and how she's grown! A big
girl! A big girl!'

She had given it a shawl when it was born, and celluloid ducks for
Christmas.

'There, Josephine! Who's that come to see you? Who's this, Josephine?
Lady Chatterley--you know Lady Chatterley, don't you?'

The queer pert little mite gazed cheekily at Connie. Ladyships were
still all the same to her.

'Come! Will you come to me?' said Connie to the baby.

The baby didn't care one way or another, so Connie picked her up and
held her in her lap. How warm and lovely it was to hold a child in
one's lap, and the soft little arms, the unconscious cheeky little
legs.

'I was just having a rough cup of tea all by myself. Luke's gone to
market, so I can have it when I like. Would you care for a cup, Lady
Chatterley? I don't suppose it's what you're used to, but if you
would...'

Connie would, though she didn't want to be reminded of what she was
used to. There was a great relaying of the table, and the best cups
brought and the best tea-pot.

'If only you wouldn't take any trouble,' said Connie.

But if Mrs Flint took no trouble, where was the fun! So Connie played
with the child and was amused by its little female dauntlessness, and
got a deep voluptuous pleasure out of its soft young warmth. Young
life! And so fearless! So fearless, because so defenceless. All the
other people, so narrow with fear!

She had a cup of tea, which was rather strong, and very good bread and
butter, and bottled damsons. Mrs Flint flushed and glowed and bridled
with excitement, as if Connie were some gallant knight. And they had a
real female chat, and both of them enjoyed it.

'It's a poor little tea, though,' said Mrs Flint.

'It's much nicer than at home,' said Connie truthfully.

'Oh-h!' said Mrs Flint, not believing, of course.

But at last Connie rose.

'I must go,' she said. 'My husband has no idea where I am. He'll be
wondering all kinds of things.'

'He'll never think you're here,' laughed Mrs Flint excitedly. 'He'll be
sending the crier round.'

'Goodbye, Josephine,' said Connie, kissing the baby and ruffling its
red, wispy hair.

Mrs Flint insisted on opening the locked and barred front door. Connie
emerged in the farm's little front garden, shut in by a privet hedge.
There were two rows of auriculas by the path, very velvety and rich.

'Lovely auriculas,' said Connie.

'Recklesses, as Luke calls them,' laughed Mrs Flint. 'Have some.'

And eagerly she picked the velvet and primrose flowers.

'Enough! Enough!' said Connie.

They came to the little garden gate.

'Which way were you going?' asked Mrs Flint.

'By the Warren.'

'Let me see! Oh yes, the cows are in the gin close. But they're not up
yet. But the gate's locked, you'll have to climb.'

'I can climb,' said Connie.

'Perhaps I can just go down the close with you.'

They went down the poor, rabbit-bitten pasture. Birds were whistling in
wild evening triumph in the wood. A man was calling up the last cows,
which trailed slowly over the path-worn pasture.

'They're late, milking, tonight,' said Mrs Flint severely. 'They know
Luke won't be back till after dark.'

They came to the fence, beyond which the young fir-wood bristled dense.
There was a little gate, but it was locked. In the grass on the inside
stood a bottle, empty.

'There's the keeper's empty bottle for his milk,' explained Mrs Flint.
'We bring it as far as here for him, and then he fetches it himself.'

'When?' said Connie.

'Oh, any time he's around. Often in the morning. Well, goodbye Lady
Chatterley! And do come again. It was so lovely having you.'

Connie climbed the fence into the narrow path between the dense,
bristling young firs. Mrs Flint went running back across the pasture,
in a sun-bonnet, because she was really a schoolteacher. Constance
didn't like this dense new part of the wood; it seemed gruesome and
choking. She hurried on with her head down, thinking of the Flints'
baby. It was a dear little thing, but it would be a bit bow-legged like
its father. It showed already, but perhaps it would grow out of it. How
warm and fulfilling somehow to have a baby, and how Mrs Flint had
showed it off! She had something anyhow that Connie hadn't got, and
apparently couldn't have. Yes, Mrs Flint had flaunted her motherhood.
And Connie had been just a bit, just a little bit jealous. She couldn't
help it.

She started out of her muse, and gave a little cry of fear. A man was
there.

It was the keeper. He stood in the path like Balaam's ass, barring her
way.

'How's this?' he said in surprise.

'How did you come?' she panted.

'How did you? Have you been to the hut?'

'No! No! I went to Marehay.'

He looked at her curiously, searchingly, and she hung her head a little
guiltily.

'And were you going to the hut now?' he asked rather sternly.

'No! I mustn't. I stayed at Marehay. No one knows where I am.
I'm late. I've got to run.'

'Giving me the slip, like?' he said, with a faint ironic smile.

'No! No. Not that. Only--'

'Why, what else?' he said. And he stepped up to her and put his arms
around her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and
alive.

'Oh, not now, not now,' she cried, trying to push him away.

'Why not? It's only six o'clock. You've got half an hour. Nay! Nay! I
want you.'

He held her fast and she felt his urgency. Her old instinct was to
fight for her freedom. But something else in her was strange and inert
and heavy. His body was urgent against her, and she hadn't the heart
any more to fight.

He looked around.

'Come--come here! Through here,' he said, looking penetratingly into
the dense fir-trees, that were young and not more than half-grown.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce,
not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her
limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to
come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead
boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat
over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree,
like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and
breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was
provident--he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of
her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked
flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside
her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the
sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling
inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping
of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance,
exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like
bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the
wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon,
too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own
activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She
could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She
could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing,
withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he
would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and
soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide,
clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She
clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from
her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange
rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion,
swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness,
and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion,
but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper
through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect
concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious
inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The
man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out
into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still,
unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And
they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost. Till at
last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenceless nakedness,
and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her. He was
coming apart; but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to
leave her uncovered. He must cover her now for ever.

But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and
began to cover himself. She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree,
unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking
round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with
its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took
Connie's hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. 'We came off together that time,' he
said.

She did not answer.

'It's good when it's like that. Most folks live their lives through and
they never know it,' he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

'Do they?' she said. 'Are you glad?'

He looked back into her eyes. 'Glad,' he said, 'Ay, but never mind.' He
did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she
felt, so he must kiss her for ever.

At last she sat up.

'Don't people often come off together?' she asked with naive curiosity.

'A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.' He
spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

'Have you come off like that with other women?'

He looked at her amused.

'I don't know,' he said, 'I don't know.'

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn't want to tell
her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels.
She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to
herself.

He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the
path again.

The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. 'I won't come with
you,' he said; 'better not.'

She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so
anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say.
Nothing left.

Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her.
Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and
bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her
knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing
and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the
most naive woman. It feels like a child, she said to herself it feels
like a child in me. And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been
shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.

'If I had a child!' she thought to herself; 'if I had him inside me as
a child!'--and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realized
the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a
child to a man whom one's bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in
a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one's
bowels and one's womb, it made her feel she was very different from her
old self and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all
womanhood and the sleep of creation.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning
adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless;
she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would
lose herself become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a
slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her
adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it. She knew she
could fight it. She had a devil of self-will in her breast that could
have fought the full soft heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it.
She could even now do it, or she thought so, and she could then take up
her passion with her own will.

Ah yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing
through the woods, to call on Iacchos, the bright phallos that had no
independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the
woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a
temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallos, her own.

So, in the flux of new awakening, the old hard passion flamed in her
for a time, and the man dwindled to a contemptible object, the mere
phallos-bearer, to be torn to pieces when his service was performed.
She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman
gleaming and rapid, beating down the male; but while she felt this, her
heart was heavy. She did not want it, it was known and barren,
birthless; the adoration was her treasure.

It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown. No, no, she
would give up her hard bright female power; she was weary of it,
stiffened with it; she would sink in the new bath of life, in the
depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of
adoration. It was early yet to begin to fear the man.

'I walked over by Marehay, and I had tea with Mrs Flint,' she said to
Clifford. 'I wanted to see the baby. It's so adorable, with hair like
red cobwebs. Such a dear! Mr Flint had gone to market, so she and I and
the baby had tea together. Did you wonder where I was?'

'Well, I wondered, but I guessed you had dropped in somewhere to tea,'
said Clifford jealously. With a sort of second sight he sensed
something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible, but he
ascribed it to the baby. He thought that all that ailed Connie was that
she did not have a baby, automatically bring one forth, so to speak.

'I saw you go across the park to the iron gate, my Lady,' said Mrs
Bolton; 'so I thought perhaps you'd called at the Rectory.'

'I nearly did, then I turned towards Marehay instead.'

The eyes of the two women met: Mrs Bolton's grey and bright and
searching; Connie's blue and veiled and strangely beautiful. Mrs Bolton
was almost sure she had a lover, yet how could it be, and who could it
be? Where was there a man?

'Oh, it's so good for you, if you go out and see a bit of company
sometimes,' said Mrs Bolton. 'I was saying to Sir Clifford, it would do
her ladyship a world of good if she'd go out among people more.'

'Yes, I'm glad I went, and such a quaint dear cheeky baby, Clifford,'
said Connie. 'It's got hair just like spider-webs, and bright orange,
and the oddest, cheekiest, pale-blue china eyes. Of course it's a girl,
or it wouldn't be so bold, bolder than any little Sir Francis Drake.'

'You're right, my Lady--a regular little Flint. They were always a
forward sandy-headed family,' said Mrs Bolton.

'Wouldn't you like to see it, Clifford? I've asked them to tea for you
to see it.'

'Who?' he asked, looking at Connie in great uneasiness.

'Mrs Flint and the baby, next Monday.'

'You can have them to tea up in your room,' he said.

'Why, don't you want to see the baby?' she cried.

'Oh, I'll see it, but I don't want to sit through a tea-time with
them.'

'Oh,' cried Connie, looking at him with wide veiled eyes.

She did not really see him, he was somebody else.

'You can have a nice cosy tea up in your room, my Lady, and Mrs Flint
will be more comfortable than if Sir Clifford was there,' said Mrs
Bolton.

She was sure Connie had a lover, and something in her soul exulted. But
who was he? Who was he? Perhaps Mrs Flint would provide a clue.

Connie would not take her bath this evening. The sense of his flesh
touching her, his very stickiness upon her, was dear to her, and in a
sense holy.

Clifford was very uneasy. He would not let her go after dinner, and she
had wanted so much to be alone. She looked at him, but was curiously
submissive.

'Shall we play a game, or shall I read to you, or what shall it be?' he
asked uneasily.

'You read to me,' said Connie.

'What shall I read--verse or prose? Or drama?'

'Read Racine,' she said.

It had been one of his stunts in the past, to read Racine in the real
French grand manner, but he was rusty now, and a little self-conscious;
he really preferred the loudspeaker. But Connie was sewing, sewing a
little frock of primrose silk, cut out of one of her dresses, for
Mrs Flint's baby. Between coming home and dinner she had cut it out,
and she sat in the soft quiescent rapture of herself sewing, while the
noise of the reading went on.

Inside herself she could feel the humming of passion, like the
after-humming of deep bells.

Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She caught the sense
after the words had gone.

'Yes! Yes!' she said, looking up at him. 'It is splendid.'

Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of her eyes, and of her
soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and
still. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her
intoxicated him. So he went on helplessly with his reading, and the
throaty sound of the French was like the wind in the chimneys to her.
Of the Racine she heard not one syllable.

She was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing with the
dim, glad moan of spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same
world with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful feet,
beautiful in the phallic mystery. And in herself in all her veins, she
felt him and his child. His child was in all her veins, like a
twilight.

'For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor feet, nor golden Treasure of
hair...'

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood,
humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of
desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

But Clifford's voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual
sounds. How extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there
over the book, queer and rapacious and civilized, with broad shoulders
and no real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold
inflexible will of some bird, and no warmth, no warmth at all! One of
those creatures of the afterwards, that have no soul, but an
extra-alert will, cold will. She shuddered a little, afraid of him. But
then, the soft warm flame of life was stronger than he, and the real
things were hidden from him.

The reading finished. She was startled. She looked up, and was more
startled still to see Clifford watching her with pale, uncanny eyes,
like hate.

'Thank you SO much! You do read Racine beautifully!' she said softly.

'Almost as beautifully as you listen to him,' he said cruelly. 'What
are you making?' he asked.

'I'm making a child's dress, for Mrs Flint's baby.'

He turned away. A child! A child! That was all her obsession.

'After all,' he said in a declamatory voice, 'one gets all one wants
out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more
important than disorderly emotions.

She watched him with wide, vague, veiled eyes. 'Yes, I'm sure they
are,' she said.

'The modern world has only vulgarized emotion by letting it loose. What
we need is classic control.'

'Yes,' she said slowly, thinking of him listening with vacant face to
the emotional idiocy of the radio. 'People pretend to have emotions,
and they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic.'

'Exactly!' he said.

As a matter of fact, he was tired. This evening had tired him. He would
rather have been with his technical books, or his pit-manager, or
listening-in to the radio.

Mrs Bolton came in with two glasses of malted milk: for Clifford, to
make him sleep, and for Connie, to fatten her again. It was a regular
night-cap she had introduced.

Connie was glad to go, when she had drunk her glass, and thankful she
needn't help Clifford to bed. She took his glass and put it on the
tray, then took the tray, to leave it outside.

'Goodnight Clifford! DO sleep well! The Racine gets into one like a
dream. Goodnight!'

She had drifted to the door. She was going without kissing him
goodnight. He watched her with sharp, cold eyes. So! She did not even
kiss him goodnight, after he had spent an evening reading to her. Such
depths of callousness in her! Even if the kiss was but a formality, it
was on such formalities that life depends. She was a Bolshevik, really.
Her instincts were Bolshevistic! He gazed coldly and angrily at the
door whence she had gone. Anger!

And again the dread of the night came on him. He was a network of
nerves, when he was not braced up to work, and so full of energy: or
when he was not listening-in, and so utterly neuter: then he was
haunted by anxiety and a sense of dangerous impending void. He was
afraid. And Connie could keep the fear off him, if she would. But it
was obvious she wouldn't, she wouldn't. She was callous, cold and
callous to all that he did for her. He gave up his life for her, and
she was callous to him. She only wanted her own way. 'The lady loves
her will.'

Now it was a baby she was obsessed by. Just so that it should be her
own, all her own, and not his!

Clifford was so healthy, considering. He looked so well and ruddy in
the face, his shoulders were broad and strong, his chest deep, he had
put on flesh. And yet, at the same time, he was afraid of death. A
terrible hollow seemed to menace him somewhere, somehow, a void, and
into this void his energy would collapse. Energyless, he felt at times
he was dead, really dead.

So his rather prominent pale eyes had a queer look, furtive, and yet a
little cruel, so cold: and at the same time, almost impudent. It was a
very odd look, this look of impudence: as if he were triumphing over
life in spite of life. 'Who knoweth the mysteries of the will--for it
can triumph even against the angels--'

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful
indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was
ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to
exist.

But now he could ring for Mrs Bolton. And she would always come. That
was a great comfort. She would come in her dressing gown, with her hair
in a plait down her back, curiously girlish and dim, though the brown
plait was streaked with grey. And she would make him coffee or camomile
tea, and she would play chess or piquet with him. She had a woman's
queer faculty of playing even chess well enough, when she was three
parts asleep, well enough to make her worth beating. So, in the silent
intimacy of the night, they sat, or she sat and he lay on the bed, with
the reading-lamp shedding its solitary light on them, she almost gone
in sleep, he almost gone in a sort of fear, and they played, played
together--then they had a cup of coffee and a biscuit together, hardly
speaking, in the silence of night, but being a reassurance to one
another.

And this night she was wondering who Lady Chatterley's lover was. And
she was thinking of her own Ted, so long dead, yet for her never quite
dead. And when she thought of him, the old, old grudge against the
world rose up, but especially against the masters, that they had killed
him. They had not really killed him. Yet, to her, emotionally, they
had. And somewhere deep in herself because of it, she was a nihilist,
and really anarchic.

In her half-sleep, thoughts of her Ted and thoughts of Lady
Chatterley's unknown lover commingled, and then she felt she shared
with the other woman a great grudge against Sir Clifford and all he
stood for. At the same time she was playing piquet with him, and they
were gambling sixpences. And it was a source of satisfaction to be
playing piquet with a baronet, and even losing sixpences to him.

When they played cards, they always gambled. It made him forget
himself. And he usually won. Tonight too he was winning. So he would
not go to sleep till the first dawn appeared. Luckily it began to
appear at half past four or thereabouts.

Connie was in bed, and fast asleep all this time. But the keeper, too,
could not rest. He had closed the coops and made his round of the wood,
then gone home and eaten supper. But he did not go to bed. Instead he
sat by the fire and thought.

He thought of his boyhood in Tevershall, and of his five or six years
of married life. He thought of his wife, and always bitterly. She had
seemed so brutal. But he had not seen her now since 1915, in the spring
when he joined up. Yet there she was, not three miles away, and more
brutal than ever. He hoped never to see her again while he lived.

He thought of his life abroad, as a soldier. India, Egypt, then India
again: the blind, thoughtless life with the horses: the colonel who had
loved him and whom he had loved: the several years that he had been an
officer, a lieutenant with a very fair chance of being a captain. Then
the death of the colonel from pneumonia, and his own narrow escape from
death: his damaged health: his deep restlessness: his leaving the army
and coming back to England to be a working man again.

He was temporizing with life. He had thought he would be safe, at least
for a time, in this wood. There was no shooting as yet: he had to rear
the pheasants. He would have no guns to serve. He would be alone, and
apart from life, which was all he wanted. He had to have some sort of a
background. And this was his native place. There was even his mother,
though she had never meant very much to him. And he could go on in
life, existing from day to day, without connexion and without hope. For
he did not know what to do with himself.

He did not know what to do with himself. Since he had been an officer
for some years, and had mixed among the other officers and civil
servants, with their wives and families, he had lost all ambition to
'get on'. There was a toughness, a curious rubbernecked toughness and
unlivingness about the middle and upper classes, as he had known them,
which just left him feeling cold and different from them.

So, he had come back to his own class. To find there, what he had
forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and a vulgarity of
manner extremely distasteful. He admitted now at last, how important
manner was. He admitted, also, how important it was even TO PRETEND not
to care about the halfpence and the small things of life. But among the
common people there was no pretence. A penny more or less on the bacon
was worse than a change in the Gospel. He could not stand it.

And again, there was the wage-squabble. Having lived among the owning
classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the
wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing
was not to care, not to care about the wages.

Yet, if you were poor and wretched you HAD to care. Anyhow, it was
becoming the only thing they did care about. The CARE about money was
like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He
refused to CARE about money.

And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money?
Nothing.

Yet he could live alone, in the wan satisfaction of being alone, and
raise pheasants to be shot ultimately by fat men after breakfast. It
was futility, futility to the nth power.

But why care, why bother? And he had not cared nor bothered till now,
when this woman had come into his life. He was nearly ten years older
than she. And he was a thousand years older in experience, starting
from the bottom. The connexion between them was growing closer. He
could see the day when it would clinch up and they would have to make a
life together. 'For the bonds of love are ill to loose!'

And what then? What then? Must he start again, with nothing to start
on? Must he entangle this woman? Must he have the horrible broil with
her lame husband? And also some sort of horrible broil with his own
brutal wife, who hated him? Misery! Lots of misery! And he was no
longer young and merely buoyant. Neither was he the insouciant sort.
Every bitterness and every ugliness would hurt him: and the woman!

But even if they got clear of Sir Clifford and of his own wife, even if
they got clear, what were they going to do? What was he, himself going
to do? What was he going to do with his life? For he must do something.
He couldn't be a mere hanger-on, on her money and his own very small
pension.

It was the insoluble. He could only think of going to America, to try a
new air. He disbelieved in the dollar utterly. But perhaps, perhaps
there was something else.

He could not rest nor even go to bed. After sitting in a stupor of
bitter thoughts until midnight, he got suddenly from his chair and
reached for his coat and gun.

'Come on, lass,' he said to the dog. 'We're best outside.'

It was a starry night, but moonless. He went on a slow, scrupulous,
soft-stepping and stealthy round. The only thing he had to contend with
was the colliers setting snares for rabbits, particularly the Stacks
Gate colliers, on the Marehay side. But it was breeding season, and
even colliers respected it a little. Nevertheless the stealthy beating
of the round in search of poachers soothed his nerves and took his mind
off his thoughts.

But when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds--it was
nearly a five-mile walk--he was tired. He went to the top of the knoll
and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling
noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there
were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works.
The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half past two. But
even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the
noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with
some rosy lightning flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and
coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless,
endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its
sleep.

It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the
knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or
ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in
one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the
past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him
in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the
woman in his arms was the only necessity.

He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the
floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt
cruelly his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition
of aloneness cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast
against him in one moment of completeness and sleep.

He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then
slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock,
still clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was used to the dark, he
could see well.

Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be
near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of
unfinished aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms.
Perhaps he could find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him:
or find some way in to her. For the need was imperious.

He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round
the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a
grand sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could
already see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level
lozenge in front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark
air.

There was the house, low and long and obscure, with one light burning
downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the
woman who held the other end of the frail thread which drew him so
mercilessly, that he did not know.

He went a little nearer, gun in hand, and stood motionless on the
drive, watching the house. Perhaps even now he could find her, come at
her in some way. The house was not impregnable: he was as clever as
burglars are. Why not come to her?

He stood motionless, waiting, while the dawn faintly and imperceptibly
paled behind him. He saw the light in the house go out. But he did not
see Mrs Bolton come to the window and draw back the old curtain of
dark-blue silk, and stand herself in the dark room, looking out on the
half-dark of the approaching day, looking for the longed-for dawn,
waiting, waiting for Clifford to be really reassured that it was
daybreak. For when he was sure of daybreak, he would sleep almost at
once.

She stood blind with sleep at the window, waiting. And as she stood,
she started, and almost cried out. For there was a man out there on the
drive, a black figure in the twilight. She woke up greyly, and watched,
but without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford.

The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed
to go smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and
baggy jacket--it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. 'Yes, for there
was the dog nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him'!

And what did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he
standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a
love-sick male dog outside the house where the bitch is?

Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs Bolton like a shot. He was
Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!

To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a tiny bit in love
with him herself. When he was a lad of sixteen and she a woman of
twenty-six. It was when she was studying, and he had helped her a lot
with the anatomy and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever
boy, had a scholarship for Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French
and things: and then after all had become an overhead blacksmith
shoeing horses, because he was fond of horses, he said: but really
because he was frightened to go out and face the world, only he'd never
admit it.

But he'd been a nice lad, a nice lad, had helped her a lot, so clever
at making things clear to you. He was quite as clever as Sir Clifford:
and always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.

Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself.
Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed
of something. And no wonder it had been a failure.--For years he was
gone, all the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the
gentleman, really quite the gentleman!--Then to come back to Tevershall
and go as a game-keeper! Really, some people can't take their chances
when they've got them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the
worst, when she, Ivy Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, REALLY.

Well, well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well her ladyship
wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A
Tevershall lad born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My
word, that was a slap back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys!

But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realized: it's no good! It's
no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to
it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in.
At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness
and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap
is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force
them.

With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her
broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming
together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't
track her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came.

He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew
it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing
after her. No use!

Mrs Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him.

'Well, well!' she said. 'He's the one man I never thought of; and the
one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad,
after I lost Ted. Well, well! Whatever would he say if he knew!'

And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she
stepped softly from the room.




Chapter 11



Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were
several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything.
Sir Geoffrey's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffrey's mother had
liked CINQUECENTO furniture. Sir Geoffrey himself had liked old carved
oak chests, vestry chests. So it went on through the generations.
Clifford collected very modern pictures, at very moderate prices.

So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic
William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to
frighten the daughter of an R.A. She determined to look through it one
day, and clear it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.

Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the old
family cradle, of rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to look at it. It had
a certain charm: she looked at it a long time.

'It's thousand pities it won't be called for,' sighed Mrs Bolton, who
was helping. 'Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'

'It might be called for. I might have a child,' said Connie casually,
as if saying she might have a new hat.

'You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs Bolton.

'No! I mean as things are. It's only muscular paralysis with Sir
Clifford--it doesn't affect him,' said Connie, lying as naturally as
breathing.

Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had said: 'Of course I may
have a child yet. I'm not really mutilated at all. The potency may
easily come back, even if the muscles of the hips and legs are
paralysed. And then the seed may be transferred.'

He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard at
the question of the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning.
Connie had looked at him in terror. But she was quite quick-witted
enough to use his suggestion for her own preservation. For she would
have a child if she could: but not his.

Mrs Bolton was for a moment breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't
believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things
nowadays. They might sort of graft seed.

'Well, my Lady, I only hope and pray you may. It would be lovely for
you: and for everybody. My word, a child in Wragby, what a difference
it would make!'

'Wouldn't it!' said Connie.

And she chose three R. A. pictures of sixty years ago, to send to the
Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was
called 'the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to
send things for her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed
R. A.s. She might even call, on the strength of them. How furious
Clifford was when she called!

But oh my dear! Mrs Bolton was thinking to herself. Is it Oliver
Mellors' child you're preparing us for? Oh my dear, that WOULD be a
Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it,
neither!

Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish
blackjapanned box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or
seventy years ago, and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was
a concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes,
even three beautiful little razors in safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and
all. Underneath came a sort of ESCRITOIRE outfit: blotters, pens,
ink-bottles, paper, envelopes, memorandum books: and then a perfect
sewing-outfit, with three different sized scissors, thimbles, needles,
silks and cottons, darning egg, all of the very best quality and
perfectly finished. Then there was a little medicine store, with
bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess. Cloves and so on:
but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole thing, when shut
up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside, it fitted
together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly have spilled:
there wasn't room.

The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship
of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley
must even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a
peculiar soullessness.

Yet Mrs Bolton was thrilled.

'Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes,
three perfect ones! No! and those scissors! They're the best that money
could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'

'Do you?' said Connie. 'Then you have it.'

'Oh no, my Lady!'

'Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it,
I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't
deserve so much. Do have it!'

'Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'

'You needn't try,' laughed Connie.

And Mrs Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her
arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.

Mr Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the
box. And she HAD to have a few friends in, to show it: the
school-mistress, the chemist's wife, Mrs Weedon the undercashier's
wife. They thought it marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady
Chatterley's child.

'Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs Weedon.

But Mrs Bolton was CONVINCED, if it did come, it would be Sir
Clifford's child. So there!

Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:

'And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the
hand of God in mercy, indeed!'

'Well! We may HOPE,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same
time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible
it might even be HIS child.

Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody
called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman,
as Mrs Bolton said to Mrs Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his
old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out
of date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old
feathers.

They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even
the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would
burn at great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly
strong pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly
strong, wet wind the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any
fumes, and left a fine powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.

'But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?'
asked Winter.

'I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell
electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'

'If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid!
If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little
out of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm
gone, there may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men
again, and you won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A
splendid idea, and I hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my
own, no doubt they would have up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt!
By the way, dear boy, is there any foundation to the rumour that we may
entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?'

'Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.

'Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me, that's all I
can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world,
if there were no foundation.'

'Well, Sir,' said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes.
'There is a hope. There is a hope.'

Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.

'My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear
that! And to hear you are working in the hopes of a son: and that you
may again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy! to keep up the
level of the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to
work!--'

The old man was really moved.

Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.

'Connie,' said Clifford, 'did you know there was a rumour that you are
going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'

Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the
flowers.

'No!' she said. 'Is it a joke? Or malice?'

He paused before he answered:

'Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'

Connie went on with her flowers.

'I had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. 'He wants to know
if I am aware he has accepted Sir Alexander Cooper's Invitation for me
for July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'

'July AND August?' said Clifford.

'Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'

'I won't travel abroad,' said Clifford promptly. She took her flowers
to the window.

'Do you mind if I go?' she said. 'You know it was promised, for this
summer.'

'For how long would you go?'

'Perhaps three weeks.'

There was silence for a time.

'Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. 'I suppose I could
stand it for three weeks: if I were absolutely sure you'd want to come
back.'

'I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet simplicity, heavy
with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.

Clifford felt her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed
it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.

'In that case,' he said,

'I think it would be all right, don't you?'

'I think so,' she said.

'You'd enjoy the change?' She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.

'I should like to see Venice again,' she said, 'and to bathe from one
of the shingle islands across the lagoon. But you know I loathe the
Lido! And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and Lady
Cooper. But if Hilda is there, and we have a gondola of our own: yes,
it will be rather lovely. I DO wish you'd come.'

She said it sincerely. She would so love to make him happy, in these
ways.

'Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'

'But why not? I see other men carried in litter-chairs, who have been
wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'

'We should need to take two men.'

'Oh no! We'd manage with Field. There would always be another man
there.'

But Clifford shook his head.

'Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'

She went away gloomily. Next year! What would next year bring? She
herself did not really want to go to Venice: not now, now there was the
other man. But she was going as a sort of discipline: and also because,
if she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.

It was already May, and in June they were supposed to start. Always
these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that
worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!

It was May, but cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for corn and
hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie had to go into
Uthwaite, which was their little town, where the Chatterleys were still
THE Chatterleys. She went alone, Field driving her.

In spite of May and a new greenness, the country was dismal. It was
rather chilly, and there was smoke on the rain, and a certain sense of
exhaust vapour in the air. One just had to live from one's resistance.
No wonder these people were ugly and tough.

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of
Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs
glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the
pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and
through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter
negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for
shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the
human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the
grocers' shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers! the awful
hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the
plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture
announcements, 'A Woman's Love!', and the new big Primitive chapel,
primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and
raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of
blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs.
The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of
rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just
beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and gravelled
playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and fixing the
suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a
singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-doh-la exercises and beginning
a 'sweet children's song'. Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song,
would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed
the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle
rhythms. It was not like animals: animals MEAN something when they
yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing. Connie
sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling
petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom
the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer
mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?

A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started
upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops, the
post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where Sam
Black was peering out of the door of the Sun, that called itself an
inn, not a pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was
bowing to Lady Chatterley's car.

The church was away to the left among black trees. The car slid on
downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington,
the Nelson, the Three Tuns, and the Sun, now it passed the Miners'
Arms, then the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners'
Welfare and so, past a few new 'villas', out into the blackened road
between dark hedges and dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.

Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England!
No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come
to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious
in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous,
intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a
terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something
uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite
incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses?
When Connie saw the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield,
weird, distorted smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to
Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done
to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men?
They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no
fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it
all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper
classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she
was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She
shuddered with dread.

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!--Yes, but he was as apart from it
all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead.
The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as
far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of
England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.

The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and
in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away
in long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and
Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.

As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a
height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop
Castle, dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners'
dwellings, newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white
steam from the great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per
annum into the pockets of the Duke and the other shareholders. The
powerful old castle was a ruin, yet it hung its bulk on the low
sky-line, over the black plumes and the white that waved on the damp
air below.

A turn, and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate, as
seen from the highroad, was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the
Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in barbarous isolation
off the road. But if you looked, you saw on the left rows of handsome
'modern' dwellings, set down like a game of dominoes, with spaces and
gardens, a queer game of dominoes that some weird 'masters' were
playing on the surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings,
at the back, rose all the astonishing and frightening overhead
erections of a really modern mine, chemical works and long galleries,
enormous, and of shapes not before known to man. The head-stock and
pit-bank of the mine itself were insignificant among the huge new
installations. And in front of this, the game of dominoes stood forever
in a sort of surprise, waiting to be played.

This was Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war. But
as a matter of fact, though even Connie did not know it, downhill half
a mile below the 'hotel' was old Stacks Gate, with a little old
colliery and blackish old brick dwellings, and a chapel or two and a
shop or two and a little pub or two.

But that didn't count any more. The vast plumes of smoke and vapour
rose from the new works up above, and this was now Stacks Gate: no
chapels, no pubs, even no shops. Only the great works', which are the
modern Olympia with temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings:
then the hotel. The hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners' pub
though it looked first-classy.

Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on the
face of the earth, and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff
drifting in from anywhere, to poach Clifford's rabbits among other
occupations.

The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread out.
The county! It had once been a proud and lordly county. In front,
looming again and hanging on the brow of the sky-line, was the huge and
splendid bulk of Chadwick Hall, more window than wall, one of the most
famous Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood alone above a great park, but
out of date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a show place.
'Look how our ancestors lorded it!'

That was the past. The present lay below. God alone knows where the
future lies. The car was already turning, between little old blackened
miners' cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day,
was sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam, to whatever
gods there be. Uthwaite down in the valley, with all the steel threads
of the railways to Sheffield drawn through it, and the coal-mines and
the steel-works sending up smoke and glare from long tubes, and the
pathetic little corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble
down, still pricking the fumes, always affected Connie strangely. It
was an old market-town, centre of the dales. One of the chief inns was
the Chatterley Arms. There, in Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby, as
if it were a whole place, not just a house, as it was to outsiders:
Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby, a 'seat'.

The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with that
intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years old.
They lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you sank,
you forgot instantly the open, rolling country where the castles and
big houses still dominated, but like ghosts. Now you were just above
the tangle of naked railway-lines, and foundries and other 'works' rose
about you, so big you were only aware of walls. And iron clanked with a
huge reverberating clank, and huge lorries shook the earth, and
whistles screamed.

Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked
heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two
centuries ago, in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood,
and the old pharmacy, streets which used to lead Out to the wild open
world of the castles and stately couchant houses.

But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded
with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the
lorries were past could he salute her ladyship.

So it was. Upon the old crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish
blackened miners' dwellings crowded, lining the roads out. And
immediately after these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger
houses, plastering the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And
beyond that again, in the wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke
waved against steam, and patch after patch of raw reddish brick showed
the newer mining settlements, sometimes in the hollows, sometimes
gruesomely ugly along the sky-line of the slopes. And between, in
between, were the tattered remnants of the old coaching and cottage
England, even the England of Robin Hood, where the miners prowled with
the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts, when they were not at
work.

England, my England! But which is MY England? The stately homes of
England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion
with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days
of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the
drab stucco, that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like
the stately homes, they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down.
As for the cottages of England--there they are--great plasterings of
brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside.

'Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are
going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as
Connie passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair:
till the war the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was
too big, too expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The
gentry were departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend
their money without having to see how it was made.'

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the
halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already
blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the
agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England
blots out the old England. And the continuity is not Organic, but
mechanical.

Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of
the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really
blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the
blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone,
Eastwood was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.

Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back,
opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the
Shipley colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood
open, because through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers
used. They hung around the park.

The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their
newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above,
aside, a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the
eighteenth century. It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had
approached an older house, and the hall stood serenely spread out,
winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully. Behind, there were really
beautiful gardens.

Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter,
more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy
painted panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything
was kept in exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect,
regardless of expense. Even the corridors managed to be ample and
lovely, softly curved and full of life.

But Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was
bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in
his ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the
miners not made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men
lounging by his ornamental waters--not in the PRIVATE part of the park,
no, he drew the line there--he would say: 'the miners are perhaps not
so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable.'

But that was in the golden--monetarily--latter half of Queen Victoria's
reign. Miners were then 'good working men'.

Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then
Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural
English:

'You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would
open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening.
Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price.
Your men are good men too, I hear.'

But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of
money, and the blessings of industrialism.

However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now
there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open
soup-kitchens.

And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining
villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the
population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite
grand way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a
subtle pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It
was he who did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The
mines, the industry, had a will of its own, and this will was against
the gentleman-owner. All the colliers took part in the will, and it was
hard to live up against it. It either shoved you out of the place, or
out of life altogether.

Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to
walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had
walked, bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk
socks, with Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred
rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of
colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else,
Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an
elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The
colliers were not PERSONALLY hostile: not at all. But their spirit was
cold, and shoving him out. And, deep down, there was a profound grudge.
They 'worked for him'. And in their ugliness, they resented his
elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. 'Who's he!' It was the
DIFFERENCE they resented.

And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a
soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt
himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages.
Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.

Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie's call, suddenly.
And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.

The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It
cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up.
The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber,
and divided into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange,
bald desert of this still-one-more no-man's-land, new little streets of
semi-detacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!

Within a year of Connie's last call, it had happened. There stood
Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached 'villas' in
new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood
there twelve months before.

But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening, the
sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.

One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and
the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet
complete.

What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the
new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising
at the collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new
collier lads lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger
generation were utterly unconscious of the old England. There was a gap
in the continuity of consciousness, almost American: but industrial
really. What next?

Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in
the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living man.

The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people
were so many, and really so terrible. So she thought as she was going
home, and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black,
distorted, one shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy
ironshod boots. Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks
cringing from the pit roof, shoulders out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in
some ways patient and good men. In other ways, non-existent. Something
that men SHOULD have was bred and killed out of them. Yet they were
men. They begot children. One might bear a child to them. Terrible,
terrible thought! They were good and kindly. But they were only half,
Only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they were 'good'. But even
that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the dead in them
ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible to think of. Connie was
absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so WEIRD to
her. A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always 'in the
pit'.

Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had
made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the
coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all?
Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off
the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their
thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were
elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were
elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of
coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon:
elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of
minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of
iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and
distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron,
the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima
of mineral disintegration!

Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad
even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron
Midlands affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like
influenza.

'Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop,' she said.

'Really! Winter would have given you tea.'

'Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley.' Miss Bentley was a
shallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition who
served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.

'Did she ask after me?' said Clifford.

'Of course!--MAY I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is!--I believe
she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!'

'And I suppose you said I was blooming.'

'Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to
you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.'

'Me! Whatever for! See me!'

'Why yes, Clifford. You can't be so adored without making some slight
return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.'

'And do you think she'll come?'

'Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing!
Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?'

'The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?'

'Oh!' Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, 'your Ladyship, if
ever I should dare to presume!'

'Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And
how was her tea?'

'Oh, Lipton's and VERY strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the
ROMAN DE LA ROSE of Miss Bentley and lots like her?'

'I'm not flattered, even then.'

'They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers,
and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful.'

She went upstairs to change.

That evening he said to her:

'You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?'

She looked at him.

'But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain
that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.'

He looked at her, annoyed.

'What I mean,' he said, 'is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in
the hopes of some love affair that you can take AU GRAND SERIEUX, will
you?'

'A love affair in Venice AU GRAND SERIEUX? No. I assure you! No, I'd
never take a love affair in Venice more than AU TRES PETIT SERIEUX.'

She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking
at her.

Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper's dog Flossie
sitting in the corridor outside Clifford's room, and whimpering very
faintly.

'Why, Flossie!' she said softly. 'What are you doing here?'

And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed,
with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was
standing at attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a
faint gesture of head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again,
and she slunk out.

'Oh, good morning, Clifford!' Connie said. 'I didn't know you were
busy.' Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He
murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely. But she felt a whiff
of passion touch her, from his mere presence.

'Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry.'

'No, it's nothing of any importance.'

She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the
first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with
his curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet
distinction, an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A
hireling! One of Clifford's hirelings! 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not
in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'

Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of HER?

It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs
Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn
together, in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that
exist between people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in
small plants for the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie
especially felt a delight in putting the soft roots of young plants
into a soft black puddle, and cradling them down. On this spring
morning she felt a quiver in her womb too, as if the sunshine had
touched it and made it happy.

'It is many years since you lost your husband?' she said to Mrs Bolton
as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.

'Twenty-three!' said Mrs Bolton, as she carefully separated the young
columbines into single plants. 'Twenty-three years since they brought
him home.'

Connie's heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. 'Brought
him home!'

'Why did he get killed, do you think?' she asked. 'He was happy with
you?'

It was a woman's question to a woman. Mrs Bolton put aside a strand of
hair from her face, with the back of her hand.

'I don't know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn't give in to things: he
wouldn't really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head
for anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed.
You see he didn't really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never
to have been down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and
then, when you're over twenty, it's not very easy to come out.'

'Did he say he hated it?'

'Oh no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny
face. He was one of those who wouldn't take care: like some of the
first lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away.
He wasn't really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to
him: "You care for nought nor nobody!" But he did! The way he sat
when my first baby was born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he
looked at me with, when it was over! I had a bad time, but I had to
comfort HIM. "It's all right, lad, it's all right!" I said to him.
And he gave me a look, and that funny sort of smile. He never said
anything. But I don't believe he had any right pleasure with me at
nights after; he'd never really let himself go. I used to say to him:
Oh, let thysen go, lad!--I'd talk broad to him sometimes. And he said
nothing. But he wouldn't let himself go, or he couldn't. He didn't want
me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for letting
him in th' room. He'd no right t'ave been there. Men makes so much more
of things than they should, once they start brooding.'

'Did he mind so much?' said Connie in wonder.

'Yes, he sort of couldn't take it for natural, all that pain. And it
spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I
don't care, why should you? It's my look-out!--But all he'd ever say
was: It's not right!'

'Perhaps he was too sensitive,' said Connie.

'That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too
sensitive in the wrong place. And I believe, unbeknown to himself he
hated the pit, just hated it. He looked so quiet when he was dead, as
if he'd got free. He was such a nice-looking lad. It just broke my
heart to see him, so still and pure looking, as if he'd WANTED to die.
Oh, it broke my heart, that did. But it was the pit.'

She wept a few bitter tears, and Connie wept more. It was a warm spring
day, with a perfume of earth and of yellow flowers, many things rising
to bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine.

'It must have been terrible for you!' said Connie.

'Oh, my Lady! I never realized at first. I could only say: Oh my lad,
what did you want to leave me for!--That was all my cry. But somehow I
felt he'd come back.'

'But he DIDN'T want to leave you,' said Connie.

'Oh no, my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And I kept expecting him
back. Especially at nights. I kept waking up thinking: Why he's not in
bed with me!--It was as if MY FEELINGS wouldn't believe he'd gone. I
just felt he'd HAVE to come back and lie against me, so I could feel
him with me. That was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm.
And it took me a thousand shocks before I knew he wouldn't come back,
it took me years.'

'The touch of him,' said Connie.

'That's it, my Lady, the touch of him! I've never got over it to this
day, and never shall. And if there's a heaven above, he'll be there,
and will lie up against me so I can sleep.'

Connie glanced at the handsome, brooding face in fear. Another
passionate one out of Tevershall! The touch of him! For the bonds of
love are ill to loose!

'It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!' she said. 'Oh,
my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks
WANTED him killed. You feel the pit fair WANTED to kill him. Oh, I
felt, if it hadn't been for the pit, an' them as runs the pit, there'd
have been no leaving me. But they all WANT to separate a woman and a
man, if they're together.'

'If they're physically together,' said Connie.

'That's right, my Lady! There's a lot of hard-hearted folks in the
world. And every morning when he got up and went to th' pit, I felt it
was wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?'

A queer hate flared in the woman.

'But can a touch last so long?' Connie asked suddenly. 'That you could
feel him so long?'

'Oh my Lady, what else is there to last? Children grows away from you.
But the man, well! But even THAT they'd like to kill in you, the very
thought of the touch of him. Even your own children! Ah well! We might
have drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling's something different.
It's 'appen better never to care. But there, when I look at women who's
never really been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor
doolowls after all, no matter how they may dress up and gad. No, I'll
abide by my own. I've not much respect for people.'