lady chatterly chap 6 - 9

Chapter 6



'Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.

'Oh, but they do! I don't think since the human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as
much as they do today. Genuine liking! Take myself. I really like women
better than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'

Connie pondered this.

'Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.

'I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to a woman at this
moment?'

'Yes, talking...'

'And what more could I do if you were a man, than talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'

'Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'

'A woman wants you to like her and talk to her, and at the same time
love her and desire her; and it seems to me the two things are mutually
exclusive.'

'But they shouldn't be!'

'No doubt water ought not to be so wet as it is; it overdoes it in
wetness. But there it is! I like women and talk to them, and therefore
I don't love them and desire them. The two things don't happen at the
same time in me.'

'I think they ought to.'

'All right. The fact that things ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.

Connie considered this. 'It isn't true,' she said. 'Men can love women
and talk to them. I don't see how they can love them WITHOUT talking,
and being friendly and intimate. How can they?'

'Well,' he said, 'I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like
talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in
one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is
concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example,
probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but
don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence
of love, or an entangled appearance.

'But doesn't it make you sad?'

'Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the
men who have affairs...No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a
woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and
never see one...why, I presume I'm cold, and really LIKE some women
very much.'

'Do you like me?'

'Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is
there?'

'None at all!' said Connie. 'But oughtn't there to be?'

'WHY, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went
and kissed him?'

'But isn't there a difference?'

'Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent
human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in
abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental
male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'

'I should hate it.'

'Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run
across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just like
women. Who's going to force me into loving or pretending to love them,
working up the sex game?'

'No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'

'You may feel it, I don't.'

'Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'

'Has a man for a woman?'

She pondered the other side of the question.

'Not much,' she said truthfully.

'Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like
proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial
sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'

Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn,
so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was
the point, of her or anything?

It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold.
Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was
no good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman,
even Michaelis didn't.

And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex
game, they were worse than ever.

It was just dismal, and one had to put up with it. It was quite true,
men had no real glamour for a woman: if you could fool yourself into
thinking they had, even as she had fooled herself over Michaelis, that
was the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was
nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail
parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You
had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But
what a ghastly thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and
yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean
sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with
Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening.
Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.

On one of her bad days she went out alone to walk in the wood,
ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The
report of a gun not far off startled and angered her.

Then, as she went, she heard voices, and recoiled. People! She didn't
want people. But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it
was a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a
child. She strode swinging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment
uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene.

Turning the corner, she saw two figures in the drive beyond her: the
keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.

'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice,
and the child sobbed louder.

Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked
at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.

'What's the matter? Why is she crying?' demanded Constance, peremptory
but a little breathless.

A faint smile like a sneer came on the man's face. 'Nay, yo mun ax
'er,' he replied callously, in broad vernacular.

Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour.
Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes
blazing rather vaguely.

'I asked YOU,' she panted.

He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. 'You did, your Ladyship,'
he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: 'but I canna tell yer.'
And he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.

Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten.
'What is it, dear? Tell me why you're crying!' she said, with the
conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious.
Still more sweetness on Connie's part.

'There, there, don't you cry! Tell me what they've done to you!'...an
intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of
her knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.

'Don't you cry then!' she said, bending in front of the child. 'See
what I've got for you!'

Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd
eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing.
'There, tell me what's the matter, tell me!' said Connie, putting the
coin into the child's chubby hand, which closed over it.

'It's the...it's the...pussy!'

Shudders of subsiding sobs.

'What pussy, dear?'

After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the
bramble brake.

'There!'

Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched
out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.

'Oh!' she said in repulsion.

'A poacher, your Ladyship,' said the man satirically.

She glanced at him angrily. 'No wonder the child cried,' she said, 'if
you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!'

He looked into Connie's eyes, laconic, contemptuous, not hiding his
feelings. And again Connie flushed; she felt she had been making a
scene, the man did not respect her.

'What is your name?' she said playfully to the child. 'Won't you tell
me your name?'

Sniffs; then very affectedly in a piping voice: 'Connie Mellors!'

'Connie Mellors! Well, that's a nice name! And did you come out with
your Daddy, and he shot a pussy? But it was a bad pussy!'

The child looked at her, with bold, dark eyes of scrutiny, sizing her
up, and her condolence.

'I wanted to stop with my Gran,' said the little girl.

'Did you? But where is your Gran?'

The child lifted an arm, pointing down the drive. 'At th' cottidge.'

'At the cottage! And would you like to go back to her?'

Sudden, shuddering quivers of reminiscent sobs. 'Yes!'

'Come then, shall I take you? Shall I take you to your Gran? Then your
Daddy can do what he has to do.' She turned to the man. 'It is your
little girl, isn't it?'

He saluted, and made a slight movement of the head in affirmation.

'I suppose I can take her to the cottage?' asked Connie.

'If your Ladyship wishes.'

Again he looked into her eyes, with that calm, searching detached
glance. A man very much alone, and on his own.

'Would you like to come with me to the cottage, to your Gran, dear?'

The child peeped up again. 'Yes!' she simpered.

Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little female. Nevertheless she
wiped her face and took her hand. The keeper saluted in silence.

'Good morning!' said Connie.

It was nearly a mile to the cottage, and Connie senior was well bored by
Connie junior by the time the game-keeper's picturesque little home was
in sight. The child was already as full to the brim with tricks as a
little monkey, and so self-assured.

At the cottage the door stood open, and there was a rattling heard
inside. Connie lingered, the child slipped her hand, and ran indoors.

'Gran! Gran!'

'Why, are yer back a'ready!'

The grandmother had been blackleading the stove, it was Saturday
morning. She came to the door in her sacking apron, a blacklead-brush
in her hand, and a black smudge on her nose. She was a little, rather
dry woman.

'Why, whatever?' she said, hastily wiping her arm across her face as
she saw Connie standing outside.

'Good morning!' said Connie. 'She was crying, so I just brought her
home.'

The grandmother looked around swiftly at the child:

'Why, wheer was yer Dad?'

The little girl clung to her grandmother's skirts and simpered.

'He was there,' said Connie, 'but he'd shot a poaching cat, and the
child was upset.'

'Oh, you'd no right t'ave bothered, Lady Chatterley, I'm sure! I'm sure
it was very good of you, but you shouldn't 'ave bothered. Why, did ever
you see!'--and the old woman turned to the child: 'Fancy Lady
Chatterley takin' all that trouble over yer! Why, she shouldn't 'ave
bothered!'

'It was no bother, just a walk,' said Connie smiling.

'Why, I'm sure 'twas very kind of you, I must say! So she was crying! I
knew there'd be something afore they got far. She's frightened of 'im,
that's wheer it is. Seems 'e's almost a stranger to 'er, fair a
stranger, and I don't think they're two as'd hit it off very easy. He's
got funny ways.'

Connie didn't know what to say.

'Look, Gran!' simpered the child.

The old woman looked down at the sixpence in the little girl's hand.

'An' sixpence an' all! Oh, your Ladyship, you shouldn't, you shouldn't.
Why, isn't Lady Chatterley good to yer! My word, you're a lucky girl
this morning!'

She pronounced the name, as all the people did: Chat'ley.--Isn't Lady
Chat'ley GOOD to you!'--Connie couldn't help looking at the old woman's
nose, and the latter again vaguely wiped her face with the back of her
wrist, but missed the smudge.

Connie was moving away 'Well, thank you ever so much, Lady Chat'ley,
I'm sure. Say thank you to Lady Chat'ley!'--this last to the child.

'Thank you,' piped the child.

'There's a dear!' laughed Connie, and she moved away, saying 'Good
morning', heartily relieved to get away from the contact.

Curious, she thought, that that thin, proud man should have that
little, sharp woman for a mother!

And the old woman, as soon as Connie had gone, rushed to the bit of
mirror in the scullery, and looked at her face. Seeing it, she stamped
her foot with impatience. 'Of COURSE she had to catch me in my coarse
apron, and a dirty face! Nice idea she'd get of me!'

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use
for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its
day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to
Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home,
mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead
now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was
a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a
good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other
people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a
husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex,
the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an
excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy
than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was
cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was
a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life,
phase after phase, ÉTAPE after ÉTAPE, there was a certain grisly
satisfaction. So that's THAT! Always this was the last utterance: home,
love, marriage, Michaelis: So that's THAT! And when one died, the last
words to life would be: So that's THAT!

Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always
wanted. Money, Success, the bitch-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in
calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You
couldn't spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's THAT! No, if
you lived even another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for
something or other. Just to keep the business mechanically going, you
needed money. You had to have it. Money you HAVE to have. You needn't
really have anything else. So that's that!

Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are
alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the
rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money.
Emphatically, that's THAT!

She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him;
and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which
she helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to
make.--'Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of
writing'; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of
nowhere. Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly
proud of! The rest all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.

So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make
another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford
seemed to care very much whether his stories were considered
first-class literature or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in
it! said her father. Twelve hundred pounds last year! was the retort
simple and final.

If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on,
till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of
power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation
of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness
of money a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly it
was triumph. The bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself,
let it be to a bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while
one prostituted oneself to her, which was good.

Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He
wanted to be thought 'really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy
nonsense. What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no
good being really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most
of the 'really good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived
one life, and if you missed the bus, you were just left on the
pavement, along with the rest of the failures.

Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.
He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride on
top for a bit, and show it.

The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to
fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche
coming out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism
of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to
do? Hang it all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down ABSOLUTELY?

Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to
herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you
anywhere!

Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That
seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted
nothing more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with
what she'd got: Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley
business, money and fame, such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with
it all. Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up
and forget it. If you don't hang on to it in your mind, it's nothing.
Sex especially...nothing! Make up your mind to it, and you've solved
the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had
the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would
venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to
consider, and it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose
children you wanted. Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a
child to a rabbit! Tommy Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you
couldn't associate him with a baby, another generation. He ended in
himself. And out of all the rest of Clifford's pretty wide
acquaintance, there was not a man who did not rouse her contempt, when
she thought of having a child by him. There were several who would have
been quite possible as lover, even Mick. But to let them breed a child
on you! Ugh! Humiliation and abomination.

So that was that!

Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait!
She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if she
couldn't find one who would do.--'Go ye into the streets and by ways of
Jerusalem, and see if you can find a MAN.' It had been impossible to
find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands
of male humans. But a MAN! C'EST UNE AUTRE CHOSE!

She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an
Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.

But wait! wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the
following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France,
Italy. Wait! She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own
private affair, and the one point on which, in her own queer, female
way, she was serious to the bottom of her soul. She was not going to
risk any chance comer, not she! One might take a lover almost at any
moment, but a man who should beget a child on one...wait! wait! it's a
very different matter.--'Go ye into the streets and byways of
Jerusalem...' It was not a question of love; it was a question of a
MAN. Why, one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if he was the
man, what would one's personal hate matter? This business concerned
another part of oneself.

It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's
chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now,
mostly in the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.

This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and
as the boy was laid up with influenza, somebody always seemed to have
influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey
and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for
the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped
altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell
from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest, among
the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia,
silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy,
somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer
world. She liked the INWARDNESS of the remnant of forest, the
unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of
silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting:
obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence.
Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared
away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things. But
perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of strong
trees, meant something else.

As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a
rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney,
looked uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke
rose from the chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of
the house was dug and kept very tidy. The door was shut.

Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious
far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like
going away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again,
but still not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the
window, and saw the dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy,
not wanting to be invaded.

She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the
back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle
was roused, she would not be defeated.

So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the
land rose steeply, so the back yard was sunken, and enclosed by a low
stone wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the
little yard two paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly
unaware. He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down
over his slender loins. And his white slim back was curved over a big
bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with
a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms, and
pressing the soapy water from his ears, quick, subtle as a weasel
playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie backed away round the
corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself,
she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself,
commonplace enough, Heaven knows!

Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her
in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down
over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and
the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her.
Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and
inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature.
Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency,
the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours
that one might touch: a body!

Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it;
it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A
man washing himself in a back yard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow
soap! She was rather annoyed; why should she be made to stumble on
these vulgar privacies?

So she walked away from herself, but after a while she sat down on a
stump. She was too confused to think. But in the coil of her confusion,
she was determined to deliver her message to the fellow. She would not
be balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not time to go
out. He was probably preparing to go out somewhere.

So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came near, the cottage
looked just the same. A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her
heart beating in spite of herself.

She heard the man coming lightly downstairs. He opened the door
quickly, and startled her. He looked uneasy himself, but instantly a
laugh came on his face.

'Lady Chatterley!' he said. 'Will you come in?'

His manner was so perfectly easy and good, she stepped over the
threshold into the rather dreary little room.

'I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft,
rather breathless voice.

The man was looking at her with those blue, all-seeing eyes of his,
which made her turn her face aside a little. He thought her comely,
almost beautiful, in her shyness, and he took command of the situation
himself at once.

'Would you care to sit down?' he asked, presuming she would not. The
door stood open.

'No thanks! Sir Clifford wondered if you would and she delivered her
message, looking unconsciously into his eyes again. And now his eyes
looked warm and kind, particularly to a woman, wonderfully warm, and
kind, and at ease.

'Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'

Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of
hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she
looked round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with
something like dismay.

'Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.

'Quite alone, your Ladyship.'

'But your mother...?'

'She lives in her own cottage in the village.'

'With the child?' asked Connie.

'With the child!'

And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of
derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baffling.

'No,' he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, 'my mother comes and
cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'

Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little
mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He
was in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and
damp, his face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to
laugh they looked as if they had suffered a great deal, still without
losing their warmth. But a pallor of isolation came over him, she was
not really there for him.

She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked
up at him again, and remarked:

'I hope I didn't disturb you?'

The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.

'Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on,
but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and the
unexpected sounds ominous.'

He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his
shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he
was, thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was
something young and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He
would be a man about thirty-seven or eight.

She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he
upset her so much, in spite of herself.

And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: 'She's nice, she's real!
She's nicer than she knows.'

She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper, so
unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with
the local people. But also something very uncommon.

'The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to
Clifford; 'he might almost be a gentleman.'

'Might he?' said Clifford. 'I hadn't noticed.'

'But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.

'I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He
only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India,
I rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps
he was an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the
men were like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back
into their old places when they get home again.'

Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar
tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really
climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.

'But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.

'Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'

He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt
he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the
real truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really
exceptional human being. People must be more or less at his level, or
below it.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her
generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!




Chapter 7



When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a
long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the
huge mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very
definitely, yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.

And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily
hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little
unfinished, incomplete!

She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out
of fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She
was not very tall, a bit Scottish and short; but she had a certain
fluent, down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was
faintly tawny, her limbs had a certain stillness, her body should have
had a full, down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.

Instead of ripening its firm, down-running curves, her body was
flattening and going a little harsh. It was as if it had not had enough
sun and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.

Disappointed of its real womanhood, it had not succeeded in becoming
boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.

Her breasts were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were
unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly
had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the
days of her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was
young and expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going
slack, and a little flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her
thighs, too, they used to look so quick and glimpsy in their female
roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless.

Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much
insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and
hopeless. What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with
no gleam and sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes,
denial. Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate
porcelain, by external attention. There was nothing inside the
porcelain; but she was not even as bright as that. The mental life!
Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!

She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her
loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The
crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a
little weary; and it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope
of her haunches and her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of
richness. Gone! Only the German boy had loved it, and he was ten years
dead, very nearly. How time went by! Ten years dead, and she was only
twenty-seven. The healthy boy with his fresh, clumsy sensuality that
she had then been so scornful of! Where would she find it now? It was
gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-seconds spasms like
Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and
freshens the whole being.

Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping
fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous,
round stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand, the Arabs say,
soft and downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still
lingered hoping. But here too she was thinner, and going unripe,
astringent.

But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning
to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old
before it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might
somehow bear. Was she fit, anyhow?

She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed
bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against
Clifford, and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his
sort who defrauded a woman even of her own body.

Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very
soul.

But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going
downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things,
for he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's
husband, who had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy
lifting; but Connie did the personal things, and she did them
willingly. It was a demand on her, but she had wanted to do what she
could.

So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day
or two; when Mrs Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as
was inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted.
It was natural he should.

And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded,
had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a
dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats
away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame.
His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general
catastrophe.

And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of
the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He
was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in
a well-bred, cold sort of way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a
woman, as even Connie's father could be warm to her, with the warmth of
a man who did himself well, and intended to, but who still could
comfort a woman with a bit of his masculine glow.

But Clifford was not like that. His whole race was not like that. They
were all inwardly hard and separate, and warmth to them was just bad
taste. You had to get on without it, and hold your own; which was all
very well if you were of the same class and race. Then you could keep
yourself cold and be very estimable, and hold your own, and enjoy the
satisfaction of holding it. But if you were of another class and
another race it wouldn't do; there was no fun merely holding your own,
and feeling you belonged to the ruling class. What was the point, when
even the smartest aristocrats had really nothing positive of their own
to hold, and their rule was really a farce, not rule at all? What was
the point? It was all cold nonsense.

A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie. What was the good of it all?
What was the good of her sacrifice, her devoting her life to Clifford?
What was she serving, after all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no
warm human contacts, and that was as corrupt as any low-born Jew, in
craving for prostitution to the bitch-goddess, Success. Even Clifford's
cool and contactless assurance that he belonged to the ruling class
didn't prevent his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as he panted after
the bitch-goddess. After all, Michaelis was really more dignified in
the matter, and far, far more successful. Really, if you looked closely
at Clifford, he was a buffoon, and a buffoon is more humiliating than a
bounder.

As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more use for her than
Clifford had. He had even more need of her. Any good nurse can attend
to crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort, Michaelis was a heroic
rat, and Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.

There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford's Aunt Eva,
Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a
widow, and still something of a grande DAME. She belonged to one of the
best families, and had the character to carry it off. Connie liked her,
she was so perfectly simple and frank, as far as she intended to be
frank, and superficially kind. Inside herself she was a past-mistress
in holding her own, and holding other people a little lower. She was
not at all a snob: far too sure of herself. She was perfect at the
social sport of coolly holding her own, and making other people defer
to her.

She was kind to Connie, and tried to worm into her woman's soul with
the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.

'You're quite wonderful, in my opinion,' she said to Connie. 'You've
done wonders for Clifford. I never saw any budding genius myself, and
there he is, all the rage.' Aunt Eva was quite complacently proud of
Clifford's success. Another feather in the family cap! She didn't care
a straw about his books, but why should she?

'Oh, I don't think it's my doing,' said Connie.

'It must be! Can't be anybody else's. And it seems to me you don't get
enough out of it.'

'How?'

'Look at the way you are shut up here. I said to Clifford: If that
child rebels one day you'll have yourself to thank!'

'But Clifford never denies me anything,' said Connie.

'Look here, my dear child'--and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on
Connie's arm. 'A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not
having lived it. Believe me!' And she took another sip of brandy, which
maybe was her form of repentance.

'But I do live my life, don't I?'

'Not in my idea! Clifford should bring you to London, and let you go
about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for
you? If I were you I should think it wasn't good enough. You'll let
your youth slip by, and you'll spend your old age, and your middle age
too, repenting it.'

Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.

But Connie was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the
smart world by Lady Bennerley. She didn't feel really smart, it wasn't
interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it
all; like the soil of Labrador, which his gay little flowers on its
surface, and a foot down is frozen.

Tommy Dukes was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack
Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory than
when only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for
the weather was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to
dance to.

Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in
bottles, and women would be 'immunized'.

'Jolly good thing too!' she said. 'Then a woman can live her own life.'
Strangeways wanted children, and she didn't.

'How'd you like to be immunized?' Winterslow asked her, with an ugly
smile.

'I hope I am; naturally,' she said. 'Anyhow the future's going to have
more sense, and a woman needn't be dragged down by her FUNCTIONS.'

'Perhaps she'll float off into space altogether,' said Dukes.

'I do think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot of the
physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for
example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed
babies in bottles.'

'No!' cried Olive. 'That might leave all the more room for fun.'

'I suppose,' said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, 'if the
love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia,
perhaps. A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully
refreshing for everybody.'

'The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a
cheerful weekend!' said Jack. 'Sounds all right, but where should we be
by Wednesday?'

'So long as you can forget your body you are happy,' said Lady
Bennerley. 'And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are
wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget
our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.'

'Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,' said Winterslow. 'It's
quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the
physical side of it.'

'Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,' said Connie.

'It won't happen,' said Dukes. 'Our old show will come flop; our
civilization is going to fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down
the chasm. And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the
phallus!'

'Oh do! DO be impossible, General!' cried Olive.

'I believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva.

'And what will come after it?' asked Clifford.

'I haven't the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,' said the
elderly lady.

'Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunized
women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge
to what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?' said Clifford.

'Oh, don't bother! let's get on with today,' said Olive. 'Only hurry up
with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.'

'There might even be real men, in the next phase,' said Tommy. 'Real,
intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be
a change, an enormous change from us? WE'RE not men, and the women
aren't women. We're only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and
intellectual experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine
men and women, instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the
intelligence-age of seven. It would be even more amazing than men of
smoke or babies in bottles.'

'Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,' said
Olive.

'Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,' said
Winterslow.

'Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.

'Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.

'But it'll come, in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a
bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch,
instead of a democracy of pocket.'

Something echoed inside Connie: 'Give me the democracy of touch, the
resurrection of the body!' She didn't at all know what it meant, but it
comforted her, as meaningless things may do.

Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored
by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow,
and even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual
rattle of it!

Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued
plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower
body, she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious
painfulness, yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even
the housekeeper noticed it, and asked her about herself. Even Tommy
Dukes insisted she was not well, though she said she was all right.
Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that
peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false
teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and
which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. The bristling
of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill affected her with
a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off when she would
be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the tombstones and the
monuments, in these filthy Midlands.

She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little CRI DU COEUR to
her sister, Hilda. 'I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the
matter with me.'

Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She
came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the
drive she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of
grass, where the two great wild beech-trees stood, on the flat in front
of the house.

Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda pulled up her car, got out, and
kissed her sister.

'But Connie!' she cried. 'Whatever is the matter?'

'Nothing!' said Connie, rather shamefacedly; but she knew how she had
suffered in contrast to Hilda. Both sisters had the same rather golden,
glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally strong, warm physique.
But now Connie was thin and earthy-looking, with a scraggy, yellowish
neck, that stuck out of her jumper.

'But you're ill, child!' said Hilda, in the soft, rather breathless
voice that both sisters had alike. Hilda was nearly, but not quite, two
years older than Connie.

'No, not ill. Perhaps I'm bored,' said Connie a little pathetically.

The light of battle glowed in Hilda's face; she was a woman, soft and
still as she seemed, of the old amazon sort, not made to fit with men.

'This wretched place!' she said softly, looking at poor, old, lumbering
Wragby with real hate. She looked soft and warm herself, as a ripe
pear, and she was an amazon of the real old breed.

She went quietly in to Clifford. He thought how handsome she looked,
but also he shrank from her. His wife's family did not have his sort of
manners, or his sort of etiquette. He considered them rather outsiders,
but once they got inside they made him jump through the hoop.

He sat square and well-groomed in his chair, his hair sleek and blond,
and his face fresh, his blue eyes pale, and a little prominent, his
expression inscrutable, but well-bred. Hilda thought it sulky and
stupid, and he waited. He had an air of aplomb, but Hilda didn't care
what he had an air of; she was up in arms, and if he'd been Pope or
Emperor it would have been just the same.

'Connie's looking awfully unwell,' she said in her soft voice, fixing
him with her beautiful, glowering grey eyes. She looked so maidenly, so
did Connie; but he well knew the tone of Scottish obstinacy underneath.

'She's a little thinner,' he said.

'Haven't you done anything about it?'

'Do you think it necessary?' he asked, with his suavest English
stiffness, for the two things often go together.

Hilda only glowered at him without replying; repartee was not her
forte, nor Connie's; so she glowered, and he was much more
uncomfortable than if she had said things.

'I'll take her to a doctor,' said Hilda at length. 'Can you suggest a
good one round here?'

'I'm afraid I can't.'

'Then I'll take her to London, where we have a doctor we trust.'

Though boiling with rage, Clifford said nothing.

'I suppose I may as well stay the night,' said Hilda, pulling off her
gloves, 'and I'll drive her to town tomorrow.'

Clifford was yellow at the gills with anger, and at evening the whites
of his eyes were a little yellow too. He ran to liver. But Hilda was
consistently modest and maidenly.

'You must have a nurse or somebody, to look after you personally. You
should really have a manservant,' said Hilda as they sat, with apparent
calmness, at coffee after dinner. She spoke in her soft, seemingly
gentle way, but Clifford felt she was hitting him on the head with a
bludgeon.

'You think so?' he said coldly.

'I'm sure! It's necessary. Either that, or Father and I must take
Connie away for some months. This can't go on.'

'What can't go on?'

'Haven't you looked at the child!' asked Hilda, gazing at him full
stare. He looked rather like a huge, boiled crayfish at the moment; or
so she thought.

'Connie and I will discuss it,' he said.

'I've already discussed it with her,' said Hilda.

Clifford had been long enough in the hands of nurses; he hated them,
because they left him no real privacy. And a manservant!...he couldn't
stand a man hanging round him. Almost better any woman. But why not
Connie?

The two sisters drove off in the morning, Connie looking rather like an
Easter lamb, rather small beside Hilda, who held the wheel. Sir Malcolm
was away, but the Kensington house was open.

The doctor examined Connie carefully, and asked her all about her life.
'I see your photograph, and Sir Clifford's, in the illustrated papers
sometimes. Almost notorieties, aren't you? That's how the quiet little
girls grow up, though you're only a quiet little girl even now, in
spite of the illustrated papers. No, no! There's nothing organically
wrong, but it won't do! It won't do! Tell Sir Clifford he's got to
bring you to town, or take you abroad, and amuse you. You've got to be
amused, got to! Your vitality is much too low; no reserves, no
reserves. The nerves of the heart a bit queer already: oh, yes! Nothing
but nerves; I'd put you right in a month at Cannes or Biarritz. But it
mustn't go on, MUSTN'T, I tell you, or I won't be answerable for
consequences. You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got
to be amused, properly, healthily amused. You're spending your vitality
without making any. Can't go on, you know. Depression! Avoid
depression!'

Hilda set her jaw, and that meant something.

Michaelis heard they were in town, and came running with roses. 'Why,
whatever's wrong?' he cried. 'You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never
saw such a change! Why ever didn't you let me know? Come to Nice with
me! Come down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me. It's lovely
there just now. You want sun! You want life! Why, you're wasting away!
Come away with me! Come to Africa! Oh, hang Sir Clifford! Chuck him,
and come along with me. I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come
along and try a life! God's love! That place Wragby would kill anybody.
Beastly place! Foul place! Kill anybody! Come away with me into the
sun! It's the sun you want, of course, and a bit of normal life.'

But Connie's heart simply stood still at the thought of abandoning
Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No...no! She just
couldn't. She had to go back to Wragby.

Michaelis was disgusted. Hilda didn't like Michaelis, but she ALMOST
preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands.

Hilda talked to Clifford, who still had yellow eyeballs when they got
back. He, too, in his way, was overwrought; but he had to listen to all
Hilda said, to all the doctor had said, not what Michaelis had said, of
course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum.

'Here is the address of a good manservant, who was with an invalid
patient of the doctor's till he died last month. He is really a good
man, and fairly sure to come.'

'But I'm NOT an invalid, and I will NOT have a manservant,' said
Clifford, poor devil.

'And here are the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would
do very well; a woman of about fifty, quiet, strong, kind, and in her
way cultured...'

Clifford only sulked, and would not answer.

'Very well, Clifford. If we don't settle something by to-morrow, I
shall telegraph to Father, and we shall take Connie away.'

'Will Connie go?' asked Clifford.

'She doesn't want to, but she knows she must. Mother died of cancer,
brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks.'

So next day Clifford suggested Mrs Bolton, Tevershall parish nurse.
Apparently Mrs Betts had thought of her. Mrs Bolton was just retiring
from her parish duties to take up private nursing jobs. Clifford had a
queer dread of delivering himself into the hands of a stranger, but
this Mrs Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew
her.

The two sisters at once called on Mrs Bolton, in a newish house in a
row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking
woman of forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar and
apron, just making herself tea in a small crowded sitting-room.

Mrs Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with
a bit of a broad slur, but in heavily correct English, and from having
bossed the sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion
of herself, and a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way,
one of the governing class in the village, very much respected.

'Yes, Lady Chatterley's not looking at all well! Why, she used to be
that bonny, didn't she now? But she's been failing all winter! Oh, it's
hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer
for.'

And Mrs Bolton would come to Wragby at once, if Dr Shardlow would let
her off. She had another fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights,
but they might get a substitute, you know.

Hilda posted off to Dr Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs Bolton
drove up in Leiver's cab to Wragby with two trunks. Hilda had talks
with her; Mrs Bolton was ready at any moment to talk. And she seemed so
young! The way the passion would flush in her rather pale cheek. She
was forty-seven.

Her husband, Ted Bolton, had been killed in the pit, twenty-two years
ago, twenty-two years last Christmas, just at Christmas time, leaving
her with two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married
now, Edith, to a young man in Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The
other one was a schoolteacher in Chesterfield; she came home weekends,
when she wasn't asked out somewhere. Young folks enjoyed themselves
nowadays, not like when she, Ivy Bolton, was young.

Ted Bolton was twenty-eight when he was killed in an explosion down
th' pit. The butty in front shouted to them all to lie down quick,
there were four of them. And they all lay down in time, only Ted, and
it killed him. Then at the inquiry, on the masters' side they said Ted
had been frightened, and trying to run away, and not obeying orders, so
it was like his fault really. So the compensation was only three
hundred pounds, and they made out as if it was more of a gift than
legal compensation, because it was really the man's own fault. And they
wouldn't let her have the money down; she wanted to have a little shop.
But they said she'd no doubt squander it, perhaps in drink! So she had
to draw it thirty shillings a week. Yes, she had to go every Monday
morning down to the offices, and stand there a couple of hours waiting
her turn; yes, for almost four years she went every Monday. And what
could she do with two little children on her hands? But Ted's mother
was very good to her. When the baby could toddle she'd keep both the
children for the day, while she, Ivy Bolton, went to Sheffield, and
attended classes in ambulance, and then the fourth year she even took a
nursing course and got qualified. She was determined to be independent
and keep her children. So she was assistant at Uthwaite hospital, just
a little place, for a while. But when the Company, the Tevershall
Colliery Company, really Sir Geoffrey, saw that she could get on by
herself, they were very good to her, gave her the parish nursing, and
stood by her, she would say that for them. And she'd done it ever
since, till now it was getting a bit much for her; she needed something
a bit lighter, there was such a lot of traipsing around if you were a
district nurse.

'Yes, the Company's been very good to ME, I always say it. But I should
never forget what they said about Ted, for he was as steady and
fearless a chap as ever set foot on the cage, and it was as good as
branding him a coward. But there, he was dead, and could say nothing to
none of 'em.'

It was a queer mixture of feelings the woman showed as she talked. She
liked the colliers, whom she had nursed for so long; but she felt very
superior to them. She felt almost upper class; and at the same time a
resentment against the ruling class smouldered in her. The masters! In
a dispute between masters and men, she was always for the men. But when
there was no question of contest, she was pining to be superior, to be
one of the upper class. The upper classes fascinated her, appealing to
her peculiar English passion for superiority. She was thrilled to come
to Wragby; thrilled to talk to Lady Chatterley, my word, different from
the common colliers' wives! She said so in so many words. Yet one could
see a grudge against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge
against the masters.

'Why, yes, of course, it would wear Lady Chatterley out! It's a mercy
she had a sister to come and help her. Men don't think, high and
low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted. Oh, I've
told the colliers off about it many a time. But it's very hard for Sir
Clifford, you know, crippled like that. They were always a haughty
family, standoffish in a way, as they've a right to be. But then to be
brought down like that! And it's very hard on Lady Chatterley, perhaps
harder on her. What she misses! I only had Ted three years, but my
word, while I had him I had a husband I could never forget. He was one
in a thousand, and jolly as the day. Who'd ever have thought he'd get
killed? I don't believe it to this day somehow, I've never believed it,
though I washed him with my own hands. But he was never dead for me, he
never was. I never took it in.'

This was a new voice in Wragby, very new for Connie to hear; it roused
a new ear in her.

For the first week or so, Mrs Bolton, however, was very quiet at
Wragby, her assured, bossy manner left her, and she was nervous. With
Clifford she was shy, almost frightened, and silent. He liked that, and
soon recovered his self-possession, letting her do things for him
without even noticing her.

'She's a useful nonentity!' he said. Connie opened her eyes in wonder,
but she did not contradict him. So different are impressions on two
different people!

And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She
had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing. So
susceptible we are to what is expected of us! The colliers had been so
like children, talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while
she bandaged them, or nursed them. They had always made her feel so
grand, almost super-human in her administrations. Now Clifford made her
feel small, and like a servant, and she accepted it without a word,
adjusting herself to the upper classes.

She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to
administer to him. And she said very humbly: 'Shall I do this now, Sir
Clifford? Shall I do that?'

'No, leave it for a time. I'll have it done later.'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

'Come in again in half an hour.'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

'And just take those old papers out, will you?'

'Very well, Sir Clifford.'

She went softly, and in half an hour she came softly again. She was
bullied, but she didn't mind. She was experiencing the upper classes.
She neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a
phenomenon, the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to
her, but now to be known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley,
and after all it's the mistress of the house matters most.

Mrs Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the
passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She
also helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even
shaving him, in her soft, tentative woman's way. She was very good and
competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn't so
very different from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin,
and softly rubbed the bristles. The stand-offishness and the lack of
frankness didn't bother her; she was having a new experience.

Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for
giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed,
he said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and
her. But Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was
to her rather like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of
life, and producing, to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.

Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in
her room, and sing: 'Touch not the nettle, for the bonds of love are
ill to loose.' She had not realized till lately how ill to loose they
were, these bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She
was so glad to be alone, not always to have to talk to him. When he was
alone he tapped-tapped-tapped on a typewriter, to infinity. But when he
was not 'working', and she was there, he talked, always talked;
infinite small analysis of people and motives, and results, characters
and personalities, till now she had had enough. For years she had loved
it, until she had enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was
thankful to be alone.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of
consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass,
till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly,
subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers,
breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience
to get clear. But the bonds of such love are more ill to loose even
than most bonds; though Mrs Bolton's coming had been a great help.

But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk
or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that Mrs Bolton should come
at ten to disturb them. At ten o'clock Connie could go upstairs and be
alone. Clifford was in good hands with Mrs Bolton.

Mrs Bolton ate with Mrs Betts in the housekeeper's room, since they
were all agreeable. And it was curious how much closer the servants'
quarters seemed to have come; right up to the doors of Clifford's
study, when before they were so remote. For Mrs Betts would sometimes
sit in Mrs Bolton's room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and
felt somehow the strong, other vibration of the working people almost
invading the sitting-room, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed
was Wragby merely by Mrs Bolton's coming.

And Connie felt herself released, in another world, she felt she
breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her
roots, perhaps mortal ones, were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still,
she breathed freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.




Chapter 8



Mrs Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling she must
extend to her her female and professional protection. She was always
urging her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the
air. For Connie had got into the habit of sitting still by the fire,
pretending to read; or to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.

It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs Bolton said:
'Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the
daffs behind the keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd
see in a day's march. And you could put some in your room; wild daffs
are always so cheerful-looking, aren't they?'

Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils!
After all, one could not stew in one's own juice. The spring came
back...'Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet
approach of Ev'n or Morn.'

And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an
invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression.
But now something roused...'Pale beyond porch and portal'...the thing
to do was to pass the porches and the portals.

She was stronger, she could walk better, and in the wood the wind
would not be so tiring as it was across the park, flattening against her.
She wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful,
carrion-bodied people. 'Ye must be born again! I believe in the
resurrection of the body! Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth
and die, it shall by no means bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth
I too will emerge and see the sun!' In the wind of March endless
phrases swept through her consciousness.

Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the
celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out
bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with
crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed
pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken
floor. 'The world has grown pale with thy breath.' But it was the
breath of Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning.
Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled
wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear
itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked,
bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But
they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path,
and yellow buds unfolding themselves.

The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down
below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in
her cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking
a few primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold,
sweet and cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.

Till she came to the clearing, at the end of the wood, and saw the
green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy, like the flesh
underneath a mushroom, its stone warmed in a burst of sun. And there
was a sparkle of yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no
sound; no smoke from the chimney; no dog barking.

She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an
excuse, to see the daffodils.

And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering
and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their
faces, as they turned them away from the wind.

They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But
perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that swayed
against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up. The
erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun! And she watched the
daffodils turn golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and
lap. Even she caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers. And then,
being so still and alone, she seemed to bet into the current of her own
proper destiny. She had been fastened by a rope, and jagging and
snarring like a boat at its moorings; now she was loose and adrift.

The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping
silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold night. So
strong in their frailty!

She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She
hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with
her. She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she
hated it, especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one
needed them in this wind.

When she got home Clifford asked her:

'Where did you go?'

'Right across the wood! Look, aren't the little daffodils adorable? To
think they should come out of the earth!'

'Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.

'But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction,
that surprised her a little.

The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad
riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called
John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the
darkness of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards
from its tiny well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and
clear it was! Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh
pebbles. She heard the faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow
trickled over and downhill. Even above the hissing boom of the
larchwood, that spread its bristling, leafless, wolfish darkness on the
down-slope, she heard the tinkle as of tiny water-bells.

This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have
been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny
cleared space was lush and cold and dismal.

She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint
tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering,
or a woodpecker? It was surely hammering.

She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between
young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it
had been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick
young firs, which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the
track, and the hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood,
for trees make a silence even in their noise of wind.

She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hut made of
rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was
the quiet place where the growing pheasants were reared; the keeper in
his shirt-sleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with
a short, sharp bark, and the keeper lifted his face suddenly and saw
her. He had a startled look in his eyes.

He straightened himself and saluted, watching her in silence, as she
came forward with weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion; he
cherished his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.

'I wondered what the hammering was,' she said, feeling weak and
breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at
her.

'Ah'm gettin' th' coops ready for th' young bods,' he said, in broad
vernacular.

She did not know what to say, and she felt weak. 'I should like to sit
down a bit,' she said.

'Come and sit 'ere i' th' 'ut,' he said, going in front of her to the
hut, pushing aside some timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic
chair, made of hazel sticks.

'Am Ah t' light yer a little fire?' he asked, with the curious naiveté
of the dialect.

'Oh, don't bother,' she replied.

But he looked at her hands; they were rather blue. So he quickly took
some larch twigs to the little brick fire-place in the corner, and in a
moment the yellow flame was running up the chimney. He made a place by
the brick hearth.

'Sit 'ere then a bit, and warm yer,' he said.

She obeyed him. He had that curious kind of protective authority she
obeyed at once. So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze, and
dropped logs on the fire, whilst outside he was hammering again. She
did not really want to sit, poked in a corner by the fire; she would
rather have watched from the door, but she was being looked after, so
she had to submit.

The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little
rustic table and stool beside her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then
a big box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs:
axe, hatchet, traps, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the
light came in through the open door. It was a jumble, but also it was a
sort of little sanctuary.

She listened to the tapping of the man's hammer; it was not so happy.
He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous
one! A woman! He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was
to be alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a
hired man, and these people were his masters.

Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He
feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he
could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.
His recoil away from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was
this wood; to hide himself there!

Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew
hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at
work. He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if
absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed
the untrustworthy world.

Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making,
turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he
rose, went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he
was working. Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he
began to draw the nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated,
and he gave absolutely no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.

So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had
seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent,
like an animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that
recoils away, away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was
recoiling away from her even now. It was the stillness, and the
timeless sort of patience, in a man impatient and passionate, that
touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his bent head, the quick quiet
hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive loins; something patient
and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been deeper and wider than
her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more deadly. And this
relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.

So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of
time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he
glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on
her face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of
fire suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he
groaned in spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any
further close human contact. He wished above all things she would go
away, and leave him to his own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female
will, and her modern female insistency. And above all he dreaded her
cool, upper-class impudence of having her own way. For after all he was
only a hired man. He hated her presence there.

Connie came to herself with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon
was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the
man, who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes
watching her.

'It is so nice here, so restful,' she said. 'I have never been here
before.'

'No?'

'I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.

'Yes?'

'Do you lock the hut when you're not here?'

'Yes, your Ladyship.'

'Do you think I could have a key too, so that I could sit here
sometimes? Are there two keys?'

'Not as Ah know on, ther' isna.'

He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated; he was putting up
an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?

'Couldn't we get another key?' she asked in her soft voice, that
underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.

'Another!' he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with
derision.

'Yes, a duplicate,' she said, flushing.

''Appen Sir Clifford 'ud know,' he said, putting her off.

'Yes!' she said, 'he might have another. Otherwise we could have one
made from the one you have. It would only take a day or so, I suppose.
You could spare your key for so long.'

'Ah canna tell yer, m'Lady! Ah know nob'dy as ma'es keys round 'ere.'

Connie suddenly flushed with anger.

'Very well!' she said. 'I'll see to it.'

'All right, your Ladyship.'

Their eyes met. His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and
indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.

But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he disliked her, when she went
against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.

'Good afternoon!'

'Afternoon, my Lady!' He saluted and turned abruptly away. She had
wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against
the self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!

And she was angry against the self-willed male. A servant too! She
walked sullenly home.

She found Mrs Bolton under the great beech-tree on the knoll, looking
for her.

'I just wondered if you'd be coming, my Lady,' the woman said brightly.

'Am I late?' asked Connie.

'Oh only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.'

'Why didn't you make it then?'

'Oh, I don't think it's hardly my place. I don't think Sir Clifford
would like it at all, my Lady.'

'I don't see why not,' said Connie.

She went indoors to Clifford's study, where the old brass kettle was
simmering on the tray.

'Am I late, Clifford?' she said, putting down the few flowers and
taking up the tea-caddy, as she stood before the tray in her hat and
scarf. 'I'm sorry! Why didn't you let Mrs Bolton make the tea?'

'I didn't think of it,' he said ironically. 'I don't quite see her
presiding at the tea-table.'

'Oh, there's nothing sacrosanct about a silver tea-pot,' said Connie.

He glanced up at her curiously.

'What did you do all afternoon?' he said.

'Walked and sat in a sheltered place. Do you know there are still
berries on the big holly-tree?'

She took off her scarf, but not her hat, and sat down to make tea. The
toast would certainly be leathery. She put the tea-cosy over the
tea-pot, and rose to get a little glass for her violets. The poor
flowers hung over, limp on their stalks.

'They'll revive again!' she said, putting them before him in their
glass for him to smell.

'Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,' he quoted.

'I don't see a bit of connexion with the actual violets,' she said.
'The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.'

She poured him his tea.

'Do you think there is a second key to that little hut not far from
John's Well, where the pheasants are reared?' she said.

'There may be. Why?'

'I happened to find it today--and I'd never seen it before. I think
it's a darling place. I could sit there sometimes, couldn't I?'

'Was Mellors there?'

'Yes! That's how I found it: his hammering. He didn't seem to like my
intruding at all. In fact he was almost rude when I asked about a
second key.'

'What did he say?'

'Oh, nothing: just his manner; and he said he knew nothing about keys.'

'There may be one in Father's study. Betts knows them all, they're all
there. I'll get him to look.'

'Oh do!' she said.

'So Mellors was almost rude?'

'Oh, nothing, really! But I don't think he wanted me to have the
freedom of the castle, quite.'

'I don't suppose he did.'

'Still, I don't see why he should mind. It's not his home, after all!
It's not his private abode. I don't see why I shouldn't sit there if I
want to.'

'Quite!' said Clifford. 'He thinks too much of himself, that man.'

'Do you think he does?'

'Oh, decidedly! He thinks he's something exceptional. You know he had a
wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to
India, I believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for
a time; always was connected with horses, a clever fellow that way.
Then some Indian colonel took a fancy to him, and he was made a
lieutenant. Yes, they gave him a commission. I believe he went back to
India with his colonel, and up to the north-west frontier. He was ill;
he was a pension. He didn't come out of the army till last year, I
believe, and then, naturally, it isn't easy for a man like that to get
back to his own level. He's bound to flounder. But he does his duty all
right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having any of the
Lieutenant Mellors touch.'

'How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'

'He doesn't...except by fits and starts. He can speak perfectly well,
for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again,
he'd better speak as the ranks speak.'

'Why didn't you tell me about him before?'

'Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all
order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened.'

Connie was inclined to agree. What was the good of discontented people
who fitted in nowhere?

In the spell of fine weather Clifford, too, decided to go to the wood.
The wind was cold, but not so tiresome, and the sunshine was like life
itself, warm and full.

'It's amazing,' said Connie, 'how different one feels when there's a
really fresh fine day. Usually one feels the very air is half dead.
People are killing the very air.'

'Do you think people are doing it?' he asked.

'I do. The steam of so much boredom, and discontent and anger out of
all the people, just kills the vitality in the air. I'm sure of it.'

'Perhaps some condition of the atmosphere lowers the vitality of the
people?' he said.

'No, it's man that poisons the universe,' she asserted.

'Fouls his own nest,' remarked Clifford.

The chair puffed on. In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold,
and in sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming
with the joy of life, just as good as in past days, when people could
exclaim along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom.
Connie gathered a few for Clifford.

He took them and looked at them curiously.

'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' he quoted. 'It seems to fit
flowers so much better than Greek vases.'

'Ravished is such a horrid word!' she said. 'It's only people who
ravish things.'

'Oh, I don't know...snails and things,' he said.

'Even snails only eat them, and bees don't ravish.'

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were
Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were on ravished brides. How she hated
words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if
anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap
out of living things.

The walk with Clifford was not quite a success. Between him and Connie
there was a tension that each pretended not to notice, but there it
was. Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was
shoving him off. She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his
consciousness, his words, his obsession with himself, his endless
treadmill obsession with himself, and his own words.

The weather came rainy again. But after a day or two she went out in
the rain, and she went to the wood. And once there, she went towards
the hut. It was raining, but not so cold, and the wood felt so silent
and remote, inaccessible in the dusk of rain.

She came to the clearing. No one there! The hut was locked. But she sat
on the log doorstep, under the rustic porch, and snuggled into her own
warmth. So she sat, looking at the rain, listening to the many
noiseless noises of it, and to the strange soughings of wind in upper
branches, when there seemed to be no wind. Old oak-trees stood around,
grey, powerful trunks, rain-blackened, round and vital, throwing off
reckless limbs. The ground was fairly free of undergrowth, the anemones
sprinkled, there was a bush or two, elder, or guelder-rose, and a
purplish tangle of bramble: the old russet of bracken almost vanished
under green anemone ruffs. Perhaps this was one of the unravished
places. Unravished! The whole world was ravished.

Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And
so many women are like that; and men. But the earth...!

The rain was abating. It was hardly making darkness among the oaks any
more. Connie wanted to go; yet she sat on. But she was getting cold;
yet the overwhelming inertia of her inner resentment kept her there as
if paralysed.

Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched.
Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become
obsessions.

A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of
a tail. The man followed in a wet black oilskin jacket, like a
chauffeur, and face flushed a little. She felt him recoil in his quick
walk, when he saw her. She stood up in the handbreadth of dryness under
the rustic porch. He saluted without speaking, coming slowly near. She
began to withdraw.

'I'm just going,' she said.

'Was yer waitin' to get in?' he asked, looking at the hut, not at her.

'No, I only sat a few minutes in the shelter,' she said, with quiet
dignity.

He looked at her. She looked cold.

'Sir Clifford 'adn't got no other key then?' he asked.

'No, but it doesn't matter. I can sit perfectly dry under this porch.
Good afternoon!' She hated the excess of vernacular in his speech.

He watched her closely, as she was moving away. Then he hitched up his
jacket, and put his hand in his breeches pocket, taking out the key of
the hut.

''Appen yer'd better 'ave this key, an' Ah min fend for t' bods some
other road.'

She looked at him.

'What do you mean?' she asked.

'I mean as 'appen Ah can find anuther pleece as'll du for rearin' th'
pheasants. If yer want ter be 'ere, yo'll non want me messin' abaht a'
th' time.'

She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect.

'Why don't you speak ordinary English?' she said coldly.

'Me! AH thowt it WOR ordinary.'

She was silent for a few moments in anger.

'So if yer want t' key, yer'd better tacit. Or 'appen Ah'd better gi'e
't yer termorrer, an' clear all t' stuff aht fust. Would that du for
yer?'

She became more angry.

'I didn't want your key,' she said. 'I don't want you to clear anything
out at all. I don't in the least want to turn you out of your hut,
thank you! I only wanted to be able to sit here sometimes, like today.
But I can sit perfectly well under the porch, so please say no more
about it.'

He looked at her again, with his wicked blue eyes.

'Why,' he began, in the broad slow dialect. 'Your Ladyship's as welcome
as Christmas ter th' hut an' th' key an' iverythink as is. On'y this
time O' th' year ther's bods ter set, an' Ah've got ter be potterin'
abaht a good bit, seein' after 'em, an' a'. Winter time Ah ned 'ardly
come nigh th' pleece. But what wi' spring, an' Sir Clifford wantin' ter
start th' pheasants...An' your Ladyship'd non want me tinkerin' around
an' about when she was 'ere, all the time.'

She listened with a dim kind of amazement.

'Why should I mind your being here?' she asked.

He looked at her curiously.

'T'nuisance on me!' he said briefly, but significantly. She flushed.
'Very well!' she said finally. 'I won't trouble you. But I don't think
I should have minded at all sitting and seeing you look after the
birds. I should have liked it. But since you think it interferes with
you, I won't disturb you, don't be afraid. You are Sir Clifford's
keeper, not mine.'

The phrase sounded queer, she didn't know why. But she let it pass.

'Nay, your Ladyship. It's your Ladyship's own 'ut. It's as your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, every time. Yer can turn me off at a wik's
notice. It wor only...'

'Only what?' she asked, baffled.

He pushed back his hat in an odd comic way.

'On'y as 'appen yo'd like the place ter yersen, when yer did come, an'
not me messin' abaht.'

'But why?' she said, angry. 'Aren't you a civilized human being? Do you
think I ought to be afraid of you? Why should I take any notice of you
and your being here or not? Why is it important?'

He looked at her, all his face glimmering with wicked laughter.

'It's not, your Ladyship. Not in the very least,' he said.

'Well, why then?' she asked.

'Shall I get your Ladyship another key then?'

'No thank you! I don't want it.'

'Ah'll get it anyhow. We'd best 'ave two keys ter th' place.'

'And I consider you are insolent,' said Connie, with her colour up,
panting a little.

'Nay, nay!' he said quickly. 'Dunna yer say that! Nay, nay! I niver
meant nuthink. Ah on'y thought as if yo' come 'ere, Ah s'd ave ter
clear out, an' it'd mean a lot of work, settin' up somewheres else. But
if your Ladyship isn't going ter take no notice O' me, then...it's Sir
Clifford's 'ut, an' everythink is as your Ladyship likes, everythink is
as your Ladyship likes an' pleases, barrin' yer take no notice O' me,
doin' th' bits of jobs as Ah've got ter do.'

Connie went away completely bewildered. She was not sure whether she
had been insulted and mortally offended, or not. Perhaps the man
really only meant what he said; that he thought she would expect him to
keep away. As if she would dream of it! And as if he could possibly be
so important, he and his stupid presence.

She went home in confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt.