realized that one must live and learn.

She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when
he was home for a month on leave. They
had a month's honeymoon. Then he went
back to Flanders: to be shipped over to
England again six months later, more or
less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then
twenty-three years old, and he was twenty-
nine.

His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't
die, and the bits seemed to grow together
again. For two years he remained in the
doctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a
cure, and could return to life again, with the
lower half of his body, from the hips down,
paralysed for ever.

This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and
Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the
family 'seat'. His father had died, Clifford
was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and
Constance was Lady Chatterley. They
came to start housekeeping and married
life in the rather forlorn home of the
Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income.
Clifford had a sister, but she had departed.
Otherwise there were no near relatives. The
elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled
for ever, knowing he could never have any
children, Clifford came home to the smoky
Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive
while he could.

-1-

in the other direction, to the Hague and
Berlin, to great Socialist conventions,
where the speakers spoke in every civilized
tongue, and no one was abashed.

The two girls, therefore, were from an early
age not the least daunted by either art or
ideal politics. It was their natural
atmosphere. They were at once
cosmopolitan and provincial, with the
cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes
with pure social ideals.

They had been sent to Dresden at the age
of fifteen, for music among other things.
And they had had a good time there. They
lived freely among the students, they argued
with the men over philosophical,
sociological and artistic matters, they were
just as good as the men themselves: only
better, since they were women. And they
tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths
bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang
the Wandervogel songs, and they were free.
Free! That was the great word. Out in the
open world, out in the forests of the
morning, with lusty and splendid-throated
young fellows, free to do as they liked, and
above all to say what they liked. It was the
talk that mattered supremely: the
impassioned interchange of talk. Love was
only a minor accompaniment.

Both Hilda and Constance had had their
tentative love-affairs by the time they were
eighteen. The young men with whom they
talked so passionately and sang so lustily
and camped under the trees in such
freedom wanted, of course, the love
connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then
the thing was so much talked about, it was
supposed to be so important. And the men
were so humble and craving. Why couldn't a
girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?

So they had given the gift of themselves,

-2-

herself coming to the crisis: and then she
could prolong the connexion and achieve
her orgasm and her crisis while he was
merely her tool.

Both sisters had had their love experience
by the time the war came, and they were
hurried home. Neither was ever in love with
a young man unless he and she were
verbally very near: that is unless they were
profoundly interested, TALKING to one
another. The amazing, the profound, the
unbelievable thrill there was in passionately
talking to some really clever young man by
the hour, resuming day after day for
months...this they had never realized till it
happened! The paradisal promise: Thou
shalt have men to talk to! had never been
uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew
what a promise it was.

And if after the roused intimacy of these
vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the
sex thing became more or less inevitable,
then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It
had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating
thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-
assertion, like the last word, exciting, and
very like the row of asterisks that can be put
to show the end of a paragraph, and a
break in the theme.

When the girls came home for the summer
holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and
Connie eighteen, their father could see
plainly that they had had the love
experience.

L'AMOUR AVAIT POSS PAR Lˇ, as
somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its
course. As for the mot a nervous invalid in
the last few months of her life, she wanted
her girls to be 'free', and to 'fulfil
themselves'. She herself had never been
able to be altogether herself: it had been

-3-

man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit
jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful
and never satisfied. When you don't have
them they hate you because you won't; and
when you do have them they hate you again,
for some other reason. Or for no reason at
all, except that they are discontented
children, and can't be satisfied whatever
they get, let a woman do what she may.

However, came the war, Hilda and Connie
were rushed home again after having been
home already in May, to their mother's
funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their
German young men were dead: whereupon
the sisters wept, and loved the young men
passionately, but underneath forgot them.
They didn't exist any more.

Both sisters lived in their father's, really their
mother's, Kensington housemixed with the
young Cambridge group, the group that
stood for 'freedom' and flannel trousers,
and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a
well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a
whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an
ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda,
however, suddenly married a man ten years
older than herself, an elder member of the
same Cambridge group, a man with a fair
amount of money, and a comfortable family
job in the government: he also wrote
philosophical essays. She lived with him in
a smallish house in Westminster, and
moved in that good sort of society of people
in the government who are not tip-toppers,
but who are, or would be, the real intelligent
power in the nation: people who know what
they're talking about, or talk as if they did.

Connie did a mild form of war-work, and
consorted with the flannel-trousers
Cambridge intransigents, who gently
mocked at everything, so far. Her 'friend'
was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of
twenty-two, who had hurried home from

-4-

armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of
generals altogether, the red-faced
Kitchener supremely. Even the war was
ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of
people.

In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or
very ridiculous: certainly everything
connected with authority, whether it were in
the army or the government or the
universities, was ridiculous to a degree.
And as far as the governing class made any
pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous
too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was
intensely ridiculous, chopping down his
trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to
shove them into the war; and himself being
so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending
more money on his country than he'd got.

When Miss Chatterley Emma came down to
London from the Midlands to do some
nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet
way about Sir Geoffrey and his determined
patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and
heir, laughed outright, though it was his
trees that were falling for trench props. But
Clifford only smiled a little uneasily.
Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But
when it came too close and oneself
became ridiculous too...? At least people of
a different class, like Connie, were earnest
about something. They believed in
something.

They were rather earnest about the
Tommies, and the threat of conscription,
and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the
children. In all these things, of course, the
authorities were ridiculously at fault. But
Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the
authorities were ridiculous AB OVO, not
because of toffee or Tommies.

And the authorities felt ridiculous, and
behaved in a rather ridiculous fashion, and

-5-

man needed support arid comfort. A man
needed to have an anchor in the safe world.
A man needed a wife.

The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister,
had lived curiously isolated, shut in with one
another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connexions. A sense of isolation intensified
the family tie, a sense of the weakness of
their position, a sense of defencelessness,
in spite of, or because of, the title and the
land. They were cut off from those industrial
Midlands in which they passed their lives.
And they were cut off from their own class
by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature
of Sir Geoffrey, their father, whom they
ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive
about.

The three had said they would all live
together always. But now Herbert was
dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to
marry. Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it: he
spoke very little. But his silent, brooding
insistence that it should be so was hard for
Clifford to bear up against.

But Emma said No! She was ten years
older than Clifford, and she felt his marrying
would be a desertion and a betrayal of what
the young ones of the family had stood for.

Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and
had his month's honeymoon with her. It was
the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate
as two people who stand together on a
sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean
much to him. They were so close, he and
she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a
little in this intimacy which was beyond sex,
and beyond a man's 'satisfaction'. Clifford
anyhow was not just keen on his
'satisfaction', as so many men seemed to
be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more
personal than that. And sex was merely an

-6-

pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-
clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse little
whistle of the colliery locomotives.
Tevershall pit-bank was burning, had been
burning for years, and it would cost
thousands to put it out. So it had to burn. And
when the wind was that way, which was
often, the house was full of the stench of this
sulphurous combustion of the earth's
excrement. But even on windless days the
air always smelt of something under-earth:
sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled
persistently, incredible, like black manna
from the skies of doom.

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of
things! It was rather awful, but why kick?
You couldn't kick it away. It just went on.
Life, like all the rest! On the low dark ceiling
of cloud at night red blotches burned and
quavered, dappling and swelling and
contracting, like burns that give pain. It was
the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie
with a sort of horror; she felt she was living
underground. Then she got used to them.
And in the morning it rained.

Clifford professed to like Wragby better than
London. This country had a grim will of its
own, and the people had guts. Connie
wondered what else they had: certainly
neither eyes nor minds. The people were as
haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the
countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there
was something in their deep-mouthed
slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh
of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed
home in gangs on the asphalt from work,
that was terrible and a bit mysterious.

There had been no welcome home for the
young squire, no festivities, no deputation,
not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in
a motor-car up a dark, damp drive,
burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the

-7-

This stubborn, instinctive We think ourselves
as good as you, if you ARE Lady
Chatterley! puzzled and baffled Connie at
first extremely. The curious, suspicious,
false amiability with which the miners'
wives met her overtures; the curiously
offensive tinge of Oh dear me! I AM
somebody now, with Lady Chatterley
talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not
as good as her for all that! which she always
heard twanging in the women's half-
fawning voices, was impossible. There
was no getting past it. It was hopelessly and
offensively nonconformist.

Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do
the same: she just went by without looking
at them, and they stared as if she were a
walking wax figure. When he had to deal
with them, Clifford was rather haughty and
contemptuous; one could no longer afford
to be friendly. In fact he was altogether
rather supercilious and contemptuous of
anyone not in his own class. He stood his
ground, without any attempt at conciliation.
And he was neither liked nor disliked by the
people: he was just part of things, like the
pit-bank and Wragby itself.

But Clifford was really extremely shy and
self-conscious now he was lamed. He
hated seeing anyone except just the
personal servants. For he had to sit in a
wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair.
Nevertheless he was just as carefully
dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors,
and he wore the careful Bond Street
neckties just as before, and from the top he
looked just as smart and impressive as
ever. He had never been one of the modern
ladylike young men: rather bucolic even,
with his ruddy face and broad shoulders.
But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his
eyes, at the same time bold and frightened,
assured and uncertain, revealed his nature.
His manner was often offensively

-8-

stories about people he had known. Clever,
rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious
way, meaningless. The observation was
extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no
touch, no actual contact. It was as if the
whole thing took place in a vacuum. And
since the field of life is largely an artificially-
lighted stage today, the stories were
curiously true to modern life, to the modern
psychology, that is.

Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive
about these stories. He wanted everyone to
think them good, of the best, NE PLUS
ULTRA. They appeared in the most modern
magazines, and were praised and blamed
as usual. But to Clifford the blame was
torture, like knives goading him. It was as if
the whole of his being were in his stories.

Connie helped him as much as she could.
At first she was thrilled. He talked everything
over with her monotonously, insistently,
persistently, and she had to respond with all
her might. It was as if her whole soul and
body and sex had to rouse up and pass into
theme stories of his. This thrilled her and
absorbed her.

Of physical life they lived very little. She had
to superintend the house. But the
housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for
many years, arid the dried-up, elderly,
superlatively correct female you could
hardly call her a parlour-maid, or even a
woman...who waited at table, had been in
the house for forty years. Even the very
housemaids were no longer young. It was
awful! What could you do with such a place,
but leave it alone! All these endless rooms
that nobody used, all the Midlands routine,
the mechanical cleanliness and the
mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a
new cook, an experienced woman who had
served him in his rooms in London. For the
rest the place seemed run by mechanical

-9-

father said to her: 'I hope, Connie, you
won't let circumstances force you into being
a demi-vierge.'

'A demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely.
'Why? Why not?'

'Unless you like it, of course!' said her
father hastily. To Clifford he said the same,
when the two men were alone: 'I'm afraid it
doesn't quite suit Connie to be a demi-
vierge.'

'A half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating
the phrase to be sure of it.

He thought for a moment, then flushed very
red. He was angry and offended.

'In what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked
stiffly.

'She's getting thin...angular. It's not her
style. She's not the pilchard sort of little slip
of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.'

'Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.

He wanted to say something later to Connie
about the demi-vierge business...the half-
virgin state of her affairs. But he could not
bring himself to do it. He was at once too
intimate with her and not intimate enough.
He was so very much at one with her, in his
mind and hers, but bodily they were non-
existent to one another, and neither could
bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were
so intimate, and utterly out of touch.

Connie guessed, however, that her father
had said something, and that something
was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he
didn't mind whether she were demi-vierge
or demi-monde, so long as he didn't
absolutely know, and wasn't made to see.
What the eye doesn't see and the mind

-10-

She was hostess to these people...mostly
men. She was hostess also to Clifford's
occasional aristocratic relations. Being a
soft, ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to
freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling,
brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather
strong, female loins she was considered a
little old-fashioned and 'womanly'. She
was not a 'little pilchard sort of fish', like a
boy, with a boy's flat breast and little
buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite
smart.

So the men, especially those no longer
young, were very nice to her indeed. But,
knowing what torture poor Clifford would
feel at the slightest sign of flirting on her
part, she gave them no encouragement at
all. She was quiet and vague, she had no
contact with them and intended to have
none. Clifford was extraordinarily proud of
himself.

His relatives treated her quite kindly. She
knew that the kindliness indicated a lack of
fear, and that these people had no respect
for you unless you could frighten them a
little. But again she had no contact. She let
them be kindly and disdainful, she let them
feel they had no need to draw their steel in
readiness. She had no real connexion with
them.

Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing
happened, because she was so beautifully
out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their
ideas and his books. She
entertained...there were always people in
the house. Time went on as the clock does,
half past eight instead of half past seven.

Chapter 3

Connie was aware, however, of a growing
restlessness. Out of her disconnexion, a
restlessness was taking possession of her

-11-

down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and
revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word
in what was caddish and bounderish. He
was discovered to be anti-English, and to
the class that made this discovery this was
worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut
dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse
can.

Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment
in Mayfair, and walked down Bond Street
the image of a gentleman, for you cannot
get even the best tailors to cut their low-
down customers, when the customers pay.

Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty
at an inauspicious moment in thyoung
man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate.
Michaelis had the ear of a few million
people, probably; and, being a hopeless
outsider, he would no doubt be grateful to
be asked down to Wragby at this juncture,
when the rest of the smart world was cutting
him. Being grateful, he would no doubt do
Clifford 'good' over there in America.
Kudos! A man gets a lot of kudos, whatever
that may be, by being talked about in the
right way, especially 'over there'. Clifford
was a coming man; and it was remarkable
what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the
end Michaelis did him most nobly in a play,
and Clifford was a sort of popular hero. Till
the reaction, when he found he had been
made ridiculous.

Connie wondered a little over Clifford's
blind, imperious instinct to become known:
known, that is, to the vast amorphous world
he did not himself know, and of which he
was uneasily afraid; known as a writer, as a
first-class modern writer. Connie was
aware from successful, old, hearty, bluffing
Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise
themselves, and exert themselves to put
their goods over. But her father used
channels ready-made, used by all the other

-12-

enjoyed the various kicks they got at him!
And how he hated them!

Nevertheless he travelled with his
manservant and his very neat car, this
Dublin mongrel.

There was something about him that
Connie liked. He didn't put on airs to
himself, he had no illusions about himself.
He talked to Clifford sensibly, briefly,
practically, about all the things Clifford
wanted to know. He didn't expand or let
himself go. He knew he had been asked
down to Wragby to be made use of, and like
an old, shrewd, almost indifferent business
man, or big-business man, he let himself
be asked questions, and he answered with
as little waste of feeling as possible.

'Money!' he said. 'Money is a sort of
instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a
man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's
no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent
accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a
point, I suppose.'

'But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.

'Oh, quite! You've got to get IN. You can do
nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to
beat your way in. Once you've done that,
you can't help it.'

'But could you have made money except by
plays?' asked Clifford.

'Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I
may be a bad one, but a writer and a writer
of plays is what I am, and I've got to be.
There's no question of that.'

'And you think it's a writer of popular plays
that you've got to be?' asked Connie.

-13-

'No, I've asked my man if he will find me a
Turk or something...something nearer to the
Oriental.'

Connie really wondered at this queer,
melancholy specimen of extraordinary
success; it was said he had an income of
fifty thousand dollars from America alone.
Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes
as he looked sideways, downwards, and
the light fell on him, he had the silent,
enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro
mask, with his rather full eyes, and the
strong queerly-arched brows, the
immobile, compressed mouth; that
momentary but revealed immobility, an
immobility, a timelessness which the
Buddha aims at, and which Negroes
express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in
the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race
destiny, instead of our individual resistance.
And then a swimming through, like rats in a
dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange
leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled
with compassion, and tinged with
repulsion, amounting almost to love. The
outsider! The outsider! And they called him
a bounder! How much more bounderish and
assertive Clifford looked! How much
stupider!

Michaelis knew at once he had made an
impression on her. He turned his full, hazel,
slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of
pure detachment. He was estimating her,
and the extent of the impression he had
made. With the English nothing could save
him from being the eternal outsider, not
even love. Yet women sometimes fell for
him...Englishwomen too.

He knew just where he was with Clifford.
They were two alien dogs which would have
liked to snarl at one another, but which
smiled instead, perforce. But with the

-14-

something of a wonder to her, and when her
sympathy was awakened she was quite
devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked
frankly about himself, quite frankly, without
affectation, simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing
a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.

'But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie
asked him; and again he looked at her, with
his full, searching, hazel look.

'Some birds ARE that way,' he replied.
Then, with a touch of familiar irony: 'but,
look here, what about yourself? Aren't you
by way of being a lonely bird yourself?'
Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a
few moments, and then she said: 'Only in a
way! Not altogether, like you!'

'Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked,
with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had
toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were
so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or
stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.

'Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she
looked at him. 'You are, aren't you?'

She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from
him, that made her almost lose her balance.

'Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his
head away, and looking sideways,
downwards, with that strange immobility of
an old race that is hardly here in our present
day. It was that that really made Connie lose
her power to see him detached from
herself.

He looked up at her with the full glance that
saw everything, registered everything. At
the same time, the infant crying in the night
was crying out of his breast to her, in a way
that affected her very womb.

-15-

When he rose, he kissed both her hands,
then both her feet, in their suede slippers,
and in silence went away to the end of the
room, where he stood with his back to her.
There was silence for some minutes. Then
he turned and came to her again as she sat
in her old place by the fire.

'And now, I suppose you'll hate me!' he
said in a quiet, inevitable way. She looked
up at him quickly.

'Why should I?' she asked.

'They mostly do,' he said; then he caught
himself up. 'I mean...a woman is supposed
to.'

'This is the last moment when I ought to hate
you,' she said resentfully.

'I know! I know! It should be so! You're
FRIGHTFULLY good to me...' he cried
miserably.

She wondered why he should be miserable.
'Won't you sit down again?' she said. He
glanced at the door.

'Sir Clifford!' he said, 'won't he...won't he
be...?' She paused a moment to consider.
'Perhaps!' she said. And she looked up at
him. 'I don't want Clifford to know not even
to suspect. It WOULD hurt him so much. But I
don't think it's wrong, do you?'

'Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too
infinitely good to me...I can hardly bear it.'

He turned aside, and she saw that in
another moment he would be sobbing.

'But we needn't let Clifford know, need
we?' she pleaded. 'It would hurt him so. And
if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts
nobody.'

-16-

possible. Yet the unscrupulousness of
Michaelis had a certain fascination for her.
He went whole lengths where Clifford only
crept a few timid paces. In his way he had
conquered the world, which was what
Clifford wanted to do. Ways and means...?
Were those of Michaelis more despicable
than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor
outsider had shoved and bounced himself
forward in person, and by the back doors,
any worse than Clifford's way of advertising
himself into prominence? The bitch-
goddess, Success, was trailed by
thousands of gasping, dogs with lolling
tongues. The one that got her first was the
real dog among dogs, if you go by success!
So Michaelis could keep his tail up.

The queer thing was, he didn't. He came
back towards tea-time with a large handful
of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog
expression. Connie wondered sometimes
if it were a sort of mask to disarm
opposition, because it was almost too
fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?

His sad-dog sort of extinguished self
persisted all the evening, though through it
Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie
didn't feel it, perhaps because it was not
directed against women; only against men,
and their presumptions and assumptions.
That indestructible, inward effrontery in the
meagre fellow was what made men so
down on Michaelis. His very presence was
an affront to a man of society, cloak it as he
might in an assumed good manner.

Connie was in love with him, but she
managed to sit with her embroidery and let
the men talk, and not give herself away. As
for Michaelis, he was perfect; exactly the
same melancholic, attentive, aloof young
fellow of the previous evening, millions of
degrees remote from his hosts, but
laconically playing up to them to the required

-17-

There was something curiously childlike
and defenceless about his naked body: as
children are naked. His defences were all in
his wits and cunning, his very instincts of
cunning, and when these were in abeyance
he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of
unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow
struggling helplessly.

He roused in the woman a wild sort of
compassion and yearning, and a wild,
craving physical desire. The physical desire
he did not satisfy in her; he was always
come and finished so quickly, then
shrinking down on her breast, and
recovering somewhat his effrontery while
she lay dazed, disappointed, lost.

But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep
him there inside her when his crisis was
over. And there he was generous and
curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her,
giving to her, while she was active...wildly,
passionately active, coming to her own
crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her
achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction
from his hard, erect passivity, he had a
curious sense of pride and satisfaction.

'Ah, how good!' she whispered
tremulously, and she became quite still,
clinging to him. And he lay there in his own
isolation, but somehow proud.

He stayed that time only the three days, and
to Clifford was exactly the same as on the
first evening; to Connie also. There was no
breaking down his external man.

He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive
melancholy note as ever, sometimes witty,
and touched with a queer, sexless
affection. A kind of hopeless affection he
seemed to feel for her, and the essential
remoteness remained the same. He was
hopeless at the very core of him, and he

-18-

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

There was Charles May, an Irishman, who
wrote scientifically about stars. There was
Hammond, another writer. All were about

-19-

thing between me and Julia; and of course I
should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'

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

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

'It's quite true, you can't live without cash,'
said May. 'You've got to have a certain
amount of it to be able to live and get
along...even to be free to THINK you must
have a certain amount of money, or your

-20-

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

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

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

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

'No,' said Hammond. 'It's wrong. You, for
example, May, you squander half your force

-21-

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

'What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.

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

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

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

How many evenings had Connie sat and
listened to the manifestations of these four

-22-

evening, when the conversation drifted
again to love.

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

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

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

'My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk
each other over, all of us. I'm rather worse
than anybody else, myself. Because I
infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the
concocted sugaries; now they ARE poison;
when I begin saying what a fine fellow
Clifford is, etc., etc., then poor Clifford is to
be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say
spiteful things about me, then I shall know I

-23-

But, mind you, it's like this: while you LIVE
your life, you are in some way an Organic
whole with all life. But once you start the
mental life you pluck the apple. You've
severed the connexion between, the apple
and the tree: the organic connexion. And if
you've got nothing in your life BUT the
mental life, then you yourself are a plucked
apple...you've fallen off the tree. And then it
is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as
it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple
to go bad.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Then the individual, especially the
PERSONAL man, is bourgeois: so he must
be suppressed. You must submerge

-24-

ourselves with a formula, like a machine.
The logical mind pretends to rule the roost,
and the roost turns into pure hate. We're all
Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The
Russians are Bolshevists without
hypocrisy.'

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

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

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

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

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

'But you do believe in something?'

-25-

pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my
chicken?'

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

'Yes, life is all too simple!'

Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

-26-

to the colliery railway, and the new works at
Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked,
it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the
wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell
Clifford.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a certain pathos. The wood still
had some of the mystery of wild, old
England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during
the war had given it a blow. How still the

-27-

'Yes,' she said slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Does it matter very much? Do these things
really affect us very deeply?...You had that
lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing
almost. It seems to me that it isn't these little
acts and little connexions we make in our
lives that matter so very much. They pass
away, and where are they? Where...Where
are the snows of yesteryear?...It's what
endures through one's life that matters; my
own life matters to me, in its long
continuance and development. But what do
the occasional connexions matter? And the
occasional sexual connexions especially! If
people don't exaggerate them ridiculously,
they pass like the mating of birds. And so
they should. What does it matter? It's the life-
long companionship that matters. It's the
living together from day to day, not the

-28-

believe you would ever care for a man who
was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm
wouldn't let you.'

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

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

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

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

Was it just that? She was to be content to
weave a steady life with him, all one fabric,
but perhaps brocaded with the occasional

-29-

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And do you like it?'

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

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

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

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

'Not tired, are you?' he said.

'Oh, no!' she said.

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

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

The keeper, waiting at attention to be
dismissed, watched everything narrowly,
missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of

-31-

the pit for a blacksmith's job, I just took him
back here as keeper. I was really very glad
to get him...its almost impossible to find a
good man round here for a
gamekeeper...and it needs a man who
knows the people.'

'And isn't he married?'

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

'So this man is alone?'

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

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

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

-32-

blood, deep inside their souls and bodies.
And it would need a new hope.

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

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

Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the
central figure for a play; already he had
sketched in the plot, and written the first act.
For Michaelis was even better than Clifford
at making a display of nothingness. It was
the last bit of passion left in these men: the

-33-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she
felt nothing. These men, they were all alike,
they left everything out. They just went off
from the top of their heads as if they were

-34-

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

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

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

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

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

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

'All right!' she said.

He was a more excited lover that night, with
his strange, small boy's frail nakedness.
Connie found it impossible to come to her
crisis before he had really finished his. And
he roused a certain craving passion in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness;

-35-

there...or else they wait till a chap's really
done, and then they start in to bring
themselves off, and a chap's got to hang
on. I never had a woman yet who went off
just at the same moment as I did.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothingness! To accept the great
nothingness of life seemed to be the one

-36-

'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

-37-

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.

-38-

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?'

-39-

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 red 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

-40-

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

-41-

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,

-42-

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

-43-

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

-44-

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, baking.

'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

-45-

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!

-46-

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

-47-

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 it 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,

-48-

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

-49-

'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

-50-

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

-51-

'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

-52-

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

-53-

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 lie 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,

-54-

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.

-55-

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-

-56-

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 iii the wood the wind would not be so
tiring as it was across the bark, flatten
against her. She wanted to forget, to forget

-57-

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 wayed 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.

-58-

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 hot 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 na‹vet‚ of the dialect.

-59-

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

-60-

'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

-61-

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.

-62-

'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.

-63-

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,'

-64-

'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...'

-65-

She was not sure whether she had been
insulted and mortally of fended, 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.

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

-66-

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 lingers 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.

-67-

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

-68-

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,

-69-

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

-70-

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

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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.

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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

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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 atty 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

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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

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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

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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

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