Lady Chatterley's lover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CHAPTER IX

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 realised 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.Civilised society is insane.Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.Look at Michaelis!His life and activity were just insanity.His love was a sort of insanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Very good, Sir Clifford!"

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

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

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

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

Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must say j'adoube!"

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

"J'adoube!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you ever! Miss Allsopp, old James's daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall: eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter, an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. And 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 Harison'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, the grownups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working so bad, and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new Spring coat, my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want a new Spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it! —I say to them, be thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery you want! —And they fly back at me: 'Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her get van-loads, an' I can't have a new Spring coat. It's a damned shame. Princess! bloomin' rot about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos she's got lots, they give her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've as much right as anybody else. Don't talk to me about education. It's munney as matters. I want a new Spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no munney—.' That's all they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving seven and eight guineas for a winter coat—collier's daughters, mind you—and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day. I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a thousand pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking, drinking in the Miner's Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three times a week. Why it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and good, really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their dads. They're sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self. If you tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say: That'll keep, that will, I'm goin' t' enjoy mysen while I can. Owt else'll keep! —Oh, they're rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older man, an' it's a bad look-out 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 motorbikes and dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You can't make them serious. The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to the Pally to show off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons and what not. I'm sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier lads, off to the Pally: let alone those that have gone with their girls in motors or on motorbikes. They don't give a serious thought to a thing—save Doncaster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on every race. And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long chalk. It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd rather be off on motorbikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But under Mrs. Bolton's influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial production.Somehow, he got his pecker up.In one way, Mrs. Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did.Connie kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states.Mrs. Bolton made him aware only of outside things.Inwardly he began to go soft as pulp.But outwardly he began to be effective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CHAPTER X

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 loud-speaker 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 not 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 civilised species.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No difference to what?"she asked.

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

She looked at him in amazement.

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

She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have a cough," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Shall we go, then?"he said.

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What rest of things?"she said.

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

"Why complications?"she said, disappointed.

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

"And are you sorry?"she said.

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

"Begun what?"

"Life."

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

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

She did not quite see it that way, but still....

"It's just love," she said cheerfully.

"Whatever that may be," he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Shall I come again?"she asked wistfully.

"Yes!Yes!"

She left him and went across the park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It does rather," said Connie.

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

"Perhaps you'd better."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just drizzle."

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

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

She looked at him.Had he sensed something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.

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

He looked down at her shrewdly.

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

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

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

She was at a loss for an answer.

"Why should they know?"she said.

"Folks always does," he said fatally.

Her lip quivered a little.

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

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

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

He looked away into the wood, and was silent.

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

She looked up at his averted face.

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

"Think!"he said."Think what if folks finds out—Sir Clifford an' a'—an' everybody talkin'—"

"Well, I can go away."

"Where to?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Me!"

For the first time he looked straight at her, and into her eyes.

"I don't jeer at you," he said.

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

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

There was a curious warning pleading in his voice.

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

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

"What things?"she asked.

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

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

Then he bent down and suddenly kissed her unhappy face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her swiftly, then at his watch.

"All right," he said.

He shut the door, and lit a tiny light in the hanging hurricane lamp.

"One time we'll have a long time," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I must go," she repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She felt the sudden force of his wanting her again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good night," she said.

"Good night, your Ladyship," his voice.

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

"Nay," he replied."Good night then, run!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes thanks, I'm all right."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at last Connie rose.

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

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

"Good-bye, Josephine," said Connie, kissing the baby and ruffling its red, wispy hair.

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

"Lovely auriculas," said Connie.

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

And eagerly she picked the velvet and primrose flowers.

"Enough!Enough!"said Connie.

They came to the little garden gate.

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

"By the warren."

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

"I can climb," said Connie.

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

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

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

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

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

"When?"said Connie.

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

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

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

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

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

"How did you come?"she panted.

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

"No!No!I went to Marehay."

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

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

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

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

"No!No.Not that.Only—"

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

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

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

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

He looked round.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did not answer.

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

She looked into his brooding face.

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

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

At last she sat up.

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

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

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

He looked at her amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, in the flux of new awakening, the old hard passion flamed in her for a time, and the man dwindled to a contemptible object, the mere phallus-bearer, to be torn to pieces when his service was performed.She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman gleaming and rapid, beating down the male; but while she felt this, her heart was heavy.She did not want it, it was known and barren, birthless; the adoration was her treasure.It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown.No, no, she would give up her hard bright female power; she was weary of it, stiffened with it; she would sink in the new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of adoration.It was early yet to begin to fear the man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mrs. Flint and the baby, next Monday."

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

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

"Oh, I'll see it, but I don't want to sit through a teatime with them."

"Oh," said Connie, looking at him with wide veiled eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You read to me," said Connie.

"What shall I read—verse or prose?Or drama?"

"Read Racine," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you so much! You do read Racine beautifully!" she said softly.

"Almost as beautifully as you listen to him," he said cruelly.

"What are you making?"he asked.

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

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

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

She watched him with wide, vague, veiled eyes.

"Yes, I'm sure they are," she said.

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

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

"Exactly!"he said.

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

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

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

"Good night Clifford! Do sleep well! The Racine gets into one like a dream. Good night!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

CHAPTER XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Wouldn't it!"said Connie.

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

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

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

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

Yet Mrs. Bolton was thrilled.

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

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

"Oh no, my Lady!"

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

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

"You needn't try," laughed Connie.

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

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

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

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

Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is there a rumour?"asked Clifford.

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

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

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

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

The old man was really moved.

Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase."Connie," said Clifford, "did you know there was a rumour that you are going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?"

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

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

He paused before he answered:

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

Connie went on with her flowers.

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

"July and August?" said Clifford.

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

"I won't travel abroad," said Clifford promptly.

She took her flowers to the window.

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

"For how long would you go?"

"Perhaps three weeks."

There was silence for a time.

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

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

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

"In that case," he said, "I think it would be all right, don't you?"

"I think so," she said.

"You'd enjoy the change?"

She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.

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

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

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

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

"We should need to take two men."

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

But Clifford shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children from such men!Oh God, oh God!

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

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

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

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

"Really!Winter would have given you tea."

"Oh yes, but I daren't disappoint Miss Bentley."

Miss Bentley was a sallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition, who served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.

"Did she ask after me?"said Clifford.

"Of course!—May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is! —I believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!"

"And I suppose you said I was blooming."

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

"Me!Whatever for!See me!"

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

"And do you think she'll come?"

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Lipton's and very strong! But Clifford, do you realise you are the Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?"

"I'm not flattered, even then."

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

She went upstairs to change.

That evening he said to her:

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

She looked at him.

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

He looked at her, annoyed.

"What I mean," he said, "is that if you go to Venice, you won't go in the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sérieux, will you?"

"A love affair in Venice au grand sérieux? No, I assure you! No, I'd never take a love affair in Venice more than au très petit sérieux."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did he say he hated it?"

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

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

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

"Perhaps he was too sensitive," said Connie.

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

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

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

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

"But he didn't want to leave you," said Connie.

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

"The touch of him," said Connie.

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

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

"It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!"she said.

"Oh, my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks wanted him killed. You feel the pit fair wanted to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn't been for the pit, an' them as runs the pit, there'd have been no leaving me. But they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they're together."

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

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

A queer hate flared in the woman.

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

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

---

CHAPTER XII

Connie went to the wood directly after lunch.It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white.The hazel thicket was a lacework of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins.Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves.It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer.And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy.The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-me-nots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple riches, and there were bits of bluebird's eggshell under a bush.Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!

The keeper was not at the hut.Everything was serene, brown chickens running lustily.Connie walked on towards the cottage, because she wanted to find him.

The cottage stood in the sun, off the wood's edge.In the little garden the double daffodils rose in tufts, near the wide-open door, and red double daisies made a border to the path.There was the bark of a dog, and Flossie came running.

The wide-open door!so he was at home.And the sunlight falling on the red-brick floor!As she went up the path, she saw him through the window, sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, eating.The dog wuffed softly, slowly wagging her tail.

He rose, and came to the door, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief, still chewing.

"May I come in?"she said.

"Come in!"

The sun shone into the bare room, which still smelled of a mutton chop, done in a dutch oven before the fire, because the dutch oven still stood on the fender, with the black potato-saucepan on a piece of paper beside it on the white hearth.The fire was red, rather low, the bar dropped, the kettle singing.

On the table was his plate, with potatoes and the remains of the chop; also bread in a basket, salt, and a blue mug with beer.The tablecloth was white oil-cloth.He stood in the shade.

"You are very late," she said."Do go on eating!"

She sat down on a wooden chair, in the sunlight by the door.

"I had to go to Uthwaite," he said, sitting down at table but not eating.

"Do eat," she said.

But he did not touch the food.

"Shall y'ave something?"he asked her."Shall y'ave a cup of tea?t' kettle's on t' boil."He half rose again from his chair.

"If you'll let me make it myself," she said rising.He seemed sad, and she felt she was bothering him.

"Well, teapot's in there,"—he pointed to a little, drab corner cupboard; "an' cups.An' tea's on t' mantel ower yer 'ead."

She got the black teapot, and the tin of tea from the mantelshelf.She rinsed the teapot with hot water, and stood a moment wondering where to empty it.

"Thrown it out," he said, aware of her."It's clean."

She went to the door and threw the drop of water down the path.How lovely it was here, so still, so really woodland.The oaks were putting out ochre yellow leaves; in the garden the red daisies were like red plush buttons.She glanced at the big, hollow sandstone slab of the threshold, now crossed by so few feet.

"But it's lovely here," she said."Such a beautiful stillness, everything alive and still."

He was eating again, rather slowly and unwillingly, and she could feel he was discouraged.She made the tea in silence, and set the teapot on the hob, as she knew the people did.He pushed his plate aside and went to the back place; she heard a latch click, then he came back with cheese on a plate, and butter.

She set the two cups on the table, there were only two.

"Will you have a cup of tea?"she said.

"If you like.Sugar's in th' cupboard, an' there's a little cream-jug.Milk's in a jug in th' pantry."

"Shall I take your plate away?"she asked him.He looked up at her with a faint ironical smile.

"Why ...if you like," he said, slowly eating bread and cheese.She went to the back, into the penthouse scullery, where the pump was.On the left was a door, no doubt the pantry door.She unlatched it, and almost smiled at the place he called a pantry; a long narrow whitewashed slip of a cupboard.But it managed to contain a little barrel of beer, as well as a few dishes and bits of food.She took a little milk from the yellow jug.

"How do you get your milk?"she asked him, when she came back to the table.

"Flints!They leave me a bottle at the warren end.You know, where I met you!"

But he was discouraged.

She poured out the tea, poising the cream-jug.

"No milk," he said; then he seemed to hear a noise, and looked keenly through the doorway.

"'Appen we'd better shut," he said.

"It seems a pity," she replied."Nobody will come, will they?"

"No unless it's one in a thousand, but you never know."

"And even then it's no matter," she said."It's only a cup of tea.Where are the spoons?"

He reached over, and pulled open the table drawer.Connie sat at table in the sunshine of the doorway.

"Flossie!"he said to the dog, who was lying on a little mat at the stair foot."Go an' hark, hark!"

He lifted his finger, and his "hark!"was very vivid.The dog trotted out to reconnoitre.

"Are you sad today?"she asked him.

He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.

"Sad!no, bored!I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught, and oh well, I don't like people."

He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice.

"Do you hate being a gamekeeper?"she asked.

"Being a gamekeeper, no!So long as I'm left alone.But when I have to go messing around at the police station, and various other places, and waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me ...oh well, I get mad ..."and he smiled, with a certain faint humour.

"Couldn't you be really independent?"she asked.

"Me?I suppose I could, if you mean manage to exist on my pension.I could!But I've got to work, or I should die.That is, I've got to have something that keeps me occupied.And I'm not in a good enough temper to work for myself.It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should throw it up in a month, out of bad temper.So altogether I'm very well off here, especially lately...."

He laughed at her again, with mocking humour.

"But why are you in a bad temper?" she asked. "Do you mean you are always in a bad temper?"

"Pretty well," he said, laughing."I don't quite digest my bile."

"But what bile?"she said.

"Bile!"he said."Don't you know what that is?"She was silent, and disappointed.He was taking no notice of her.

"I'm going away for a while next month," she said.

"You are!Where to?"

"Venice."

"Venice!With Sir Clifford?For how long?"

"For a month or so," she replied."Clifford won't go."

"He'll stay here?"he asked.

"Yes!He hates to travel as he is."

"Ay, poor devil!"he said, with sympathy.

There was a pause.

"You won't forget me when I'm gone, will you?"she asked.Again he lifted his eyes and looked full at her.

"Forget?"he said."You know nobody forgets.It's not a question of memory."

She wanted to say: "What then?"but she didn't.Instead, she said in a mute kind of voice: "I told Clifford I might have a child."

Now he really looked at her, intense and searching.

"You did?"he said at last."And what did he say?"

"Oh, he wouldn't mind.He'd be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be his."She dared not look up at him.

He was silent a long time, then he gazed again on her face.

"No mention of me, of course?"he said.

"No.No mention of you," she said.

"No, he'd hardly swallow me as a substitute breeder.—Then where are you supposed to be getting the child?"

"I might have a love affair in Venice," she said.

"You might," he replied slowly."So that's why you're going?"

"Not to have the love affair," she said, looking up at him, pleading.

"Just the appearance of one," he said.

There was silence.He sat staring out of the window, with a faint grin, half mockery, half bitterness, on his face.She hated his grin.

"You've not taken any precautions against having a child then?"he asked her suddenly."Because I haven't."

"No," she said faintly."I should hate that."

He looked at her, then again with the peculiar subtle grin out of the window.There was a tense silence.

At last he turned to her and said satirically:

"That was why you wanted me then, to get a child?"

She hung her head.

"No.Not really," she said.

"What then, really?"he asked rather bitingly.

She looked up at him reproachfully, saying: "I don't know."He broke into a laugh.

"Then I'm damned if I do," he said.

There was a long pause of silence, a cold silence.

"Well," he said at last."It's as your Ladyship likes.If you get the baby, Sir Clifford's welcome to it.I shan't have lost anything.On the contrary, I've had a very nice experience, very nice indeed!"and he stretched in a half suppressed sort of yawn."If you've made use of me," he said, "it's not the first time I've been made use of; and I don't suppose it's ever been as pleasant as this time; though of course one can't feel tremendously dignified about it."He stretched again, curiously, his muscles quivering, and his jaw oddly set.

"But I didn't make use of you," she said, pleading.

"At your Ladyship's service," he replied.

"No," she said."I liked your body."

"Did you?"he replied, and he laughed."Well then, we're quits, because I liked yours."

He looked at her with queer darkened eyes.

"Would you like to go upstairs now?"he asked her, in a strangled sort of voice.

"No, not here.Not now!"she said heavily, though if he had used any power over her, she would have gone, for she had no strength against him.

He turned his face away again, and seemed to forget her.

"I want to touch you like you touch me," she said."I've never really touched your body."

He looked at her, and smiled again."Now?"he said.

"No!No!Not here!At the hut.Would you mind?"

"How do I touch you?"he asked.

"When you feel me."

He looked at her, and met her heavy, anxious eyes.

"And do you like it when I feel you?"he asked, laughing at her still.

"Yes, do you?"she said.

"Oh, me!"Then he changed his tone."Yes," he said."You know without asking."Which was true.

She rose and picked up her hat."I must go," she said.

"Will you go?"he replied politely.

She wanted him to touch her, to say something to her, but he said nothing, only waited politely.

"Thank you for the tea," she said.

"I haven't thanked your Ladyship for doing me the honours of my teapot," he said.

She went down the path, and he stood in the doorway, faintly grinning.Flossie came running with her tail lifted.And Connie had to plod dumbly across into the wood, knowing he was standing there watching her, with that incomprehensible grin on his face.

She walked home very much downcast and annoyed.She didn't at all like his saying he had been made use of; because in a sense it was true.But he oughtn't to have said it.Therefore, again, she was divided between two feelings; resentment against him, and a desire to make it up with him.

She passed a very uneasy and irritated teatime, and at once went up to her room.But when she was there it was no good; she could neither sit nor stand.She would have to do something about it.She would have to go back to the hut; if he was not there, well and good.

She slipped out of the side door, and took her way direct and a little sullen.When she came to the clearing she was terribly uneasy.But there he was again, in his shirtsleeves, stooping, letting the hens out of the coops, among the chicks that were now growing a little gawky, but were much more trim than hen-chickens.

She went straight across to him.

"You see I've come!"she said.

"Ay, I see it!"he said, straightening his back, and looking at her with a faint amusement.

"Do you let the hens out now?"she asked.

"Yes, they've sat themselves to skin and bone," he said."An' now they're not all that anxious to come out an' feed.There's no self in a sitting hen; she's all in the eggs or the chicks."

The poor mother hens; such blind devotion!even to eggs not their own!Connie looked at them in compassion.A helpless silence fell between the man and the woman.

"Shall us go i' th' 'ut?"he asked.

"Do you want me?"she asked, in a sort of mistrust.

"Ay, if you want to come."

She was silent.

"Come then!"he said.

And she went with him to the hut.It was quite dark when he had shut the door, so he made a small light in the lantern, as before.

"Have you left your underthings off?"he asked her.

"Yes!"

"Ay, well, then I'll take my things off too."

He spread the blankets, putting one at the side for a coverlet.She took off her hat, and shook her hair.He sat down, taking off his shoes and gaiters, and undoing his cord breeches.

"Lie down then!"he said, when he stood in his shirt.She obeyed in silence, and he lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both.

"There!"he said.

And he lifted her dress right back, till he came even to her breasts.He kissed them softly, taking the nipples in his lips in tiny caresses.

"Eh, but tha'rt nice, tha'rt nice!"he said, suddenly rubbing his face with a snuggling movement against her warm belly.

And she put her arms round him under his shirt, but she was afraid, afraid of his thin, smooth, naked body, that seemed so powerful, afraid of the violent muscles.She shrank, afraid.

And when he said, with a sort of little sigh: "Eh, tha'rt nice!"something in her quivered, and something in her spirit stiffened in resistance: stiffened from the terribly physical intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession.And this time the sharp ecstacy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical.Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis.This was the divine love!After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance.It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax.Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it.

Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart, and though she lay perfectly still, her impulse was to heave her loins, and throw the man out, escape his ugly grip, and the butting overriding of his absurd haunches.His body was a foolish, impudent, imperfect thing, a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness.For surely a complete evolution would eliminate this performance, this "function."

And yet when he had finished, soon over, and lay very very still, receding into silence, and a strange, motionless distance, far, farther than the horizon of her awareness, her heart began to weep.She could feel him ebbing away, ebbing away, leaving her there like a stone on a shore.He was withdrawing, his spirit was leaving her.He knew.

And in real grief, tormented by her own double consciousness and reaction, she began to weep.He took no notice, or did not even know.The storm of weeping swelled and shook her, and shook him.

"Ay!"he said, "It was no good that time.You wasn't there."So he knew!Her sobs became violent.

"But what's amiss?"he said."It's once in a while that way."

"I ...I can't love you," she sobbed, suddenly feeling her heart breaking.

"Canna ter?Well, dunna fret!There's no law says as tha's got to.Ta'e it for what it is."

He still lay with his hand on her breast.But she had drawn both her hands from him.

His words were small comfort.She sobbed aloud.

"Nay, nay," he said."Ta'e the thick wi' th' thin.This wor' a bit o' thin for once."

She wept bitterly, sobbing: "But I want to love you, and I can't.It only seems horrid."

He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused.

"It isna horrid," he said, "even if tha thinks it is.An' tha canna ma'e it horrid.Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me.Tha'lt niver force thysen to 't.There's sure to be a bad nut in a basketful.Tha mun ta'e th' rough wi' th' smooth."

He took his hand away from her breast, not touching her. And now she was untouched she took an almost perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the dialect: the thee and the tha and the thysenHe could get up if he liked, and stand there above her buttoning down those absurd corduroy breeches, straight in front of her.After all, Michaelis had had the decency to turn away.This man was so assured in himself, he didn't know what a clown other people found him, a half-bred fellow.

Yet, as he was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung to him in terror.

"Don't!Don't go!Don't leave me!Don't be cross with me!Hold me!Hold me fast!"she whispered in blind frenzy, not even knowing what she said, and clinging to him with uncanny force.It was from herself she wanted to be saved, from her own inward anger and resistance.Yet how powerful was that inward resistance that possessed her!

He took her in his arms again and drew her to him, and suddenly she became small in his arms, small and nestling.It was gone, the resistance was gone, and she began to melt in a marvellous peace.And as she melted small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him, all his blood-vessels seemed to scald with intense yet tender desire, for her, for her softness, for the penetrating beauty of her in his arms, passing into his blood.And softly, with that marvellous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins, down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming nearer and nearer to the very quick of her.And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame.She let herself go.She felt his penis risen against her with silent amazing force and assertion, and she let herself go to him.She yielded with a quiver that was like death, she went all open to him.And oh, if he were not tender to her now, how cruel, for she was all open to him and helpless!

She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible.It might come with the thrust of a sword in her softly-opened body, and that would be death.She clung in a sudden anguish of terror.But it came with a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning.And her terror subsided in her breast, her breast dared to be gone in peace, she held nothing.She dared to let go everything, all herself, and be gone in the flood.

And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass.Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone.She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

Ah, too lovely, too lovely!In the ebbing she realised all the loveliness.Now all her body clung with tender love to the unknown man, and blinding to the wilting penis, as it so tenderly, frailly, unknowingly withdrew, after the fierce thrust of its potency.As it drew out and left her body, the secret, sensitive thing, she gave an unconscious cry of pure loss, and she tried to put it back.It had been so perfect!And she loved it so!

And only now she became aware of the small, bud-like reticence and tenderness of the penis, and a little cry of wonder and poignancy escaped her again, her woman's heart crying out over the tender frailty of that which had been the power.

"It was so lovely!"she moaned."It was so lovely!"But he said nothing, only softly kissed her, lying still above her.And she moaned with a sort of bliss, as a sacrifice, and a new-born thing.

And now in her heart the queer wonder of him was awakened.A man!the strange potency of manhood upon her!Her hands strayed over him, still a little afraid.Afraid of that strange, hostile, slightly repulsive thing that he had been to her, a man.And now she touched him, and it was the sons of god with the daughters of men.How beautiful he felt, how pure in tissue!How lovely, how lovely, strong, and yet pure and delicate, such stillness of the sensitive body!Such utter stillness of potency and delicate flesh!How beautiful!How beautiful!Her hands came timorously down his back, to the soft, smallish globes of the buttocks.Beauty!What beauty!a sudden little flame of new awareness went through her.How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled?The unspeakable beauty to the touch, of the warm, living buttocks!The life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness.And the strange weight of the balls between his legs!What a mystery!What a strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one's hand!The roots, root of all that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty.

She clung to him, with a hiss of wonder that was almost awe, terror.He held her close, but he said nothing.He would never say anything.She crept nearer to him, nearer, only to be near to the sensual wonder of him.And out of his utter, incomprehensible stillness, she felt again the slow, momentous, surging rise of the phallus again, the other power.And her heart melted out with a kind of awe.

And this time his being within her was all soft and iridescent, purely soft and iridescent, such as no consciousness could seize.Her whole self quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm.She could not know what it was.She could not remember what it had been.Only that it had been more lovely than anything ever could be.Only that.And afterwards she was utterly still, utterly unknowing, she was not aware for how long.And he was still with her, in an unfathomable silence along with her.And of this, they would never speak.

When awareness of the outside began to come back, she clung to his breast, murmuring: "My love!my love!"And he held her silently.And she curled on his breast, perfect.

But his silence was fathomless.His hands held her like flowers, so still and strange."Where are you?"she whispered to him."Where are you?Speak to me!Say something to me!"

He kissed her softly, murmuring: "Ay, my lass!"

But she did not know what he meant, she did not know where he was.In his silence he seemed lost to her.

"You love me, don't you?"she murmured.

"Ay, tha knows!"he said.

"But tell me!"she pleaded.

"Ay!Ay!'asn't ter felt it?"he said dimly, but softly and surely.And she clung close to him, closer.He was so much more peaceful in love than she was, and she wanted him to reassure her.

"You do love me!"she whispered, assertive.And his hands stroked her softly, as if she were a flower, without the quiver of desire, but with delicate nearness.And still there haunted her a restless necessity to get a grip on love.

"Say you'll always love me!"she pleaded.

"Ay!"he said, abstractedly.And she felt her questions driving him away from her.

"Mustn't we get up?"he said at last.

"No!"she said.

But she could feel his consciousness straying, listening to the noises outside.

"It'll be nearly dark," he said.And she heard the pressure of circumstance in his voice.She kissed him, with a woman's grief at yielding up her hour.

He rose, and turned up the lantern, then began to pull on his clothes, quickly disappearing inside them.Then he stood there, above her, fastening his breeches and looking down at her with dark, wide eyes, his face a little flushed and his hair ruffled, curiously warm and still and beautiful in the dim light of the lantern, so beautiful, she would never tell him how beautiful.It made her want to cling fast to him, to hold him, for there was a warm, half-sleepy remoteness in his beauty that made her want to cry out and clutch him, to have him.She would never have him.So she lay on the blanket with curved, soft naked haunches, and he had no idea what she was thinking, but to him too she was beautiful, the soft, marvellous thing he could go into, beyond everything.

"I love thee that I can go into thee," he said.

"Do you like me?"she said, her heart beating.

"It heals it all up, that I can go into thee.I love thee that tha opened to me.I love thee that I came into thee like that."

He bent down and kissed her soft flank, rubbed his cheek against it, then covered it up.

"And will you never leave me?"she said.

"Dunna ask them things," he said.

"But you do believe I love you?"she said.

"Tha loved me just now, wider than iver tha thout tha would.But who knows what'll 'appen, once tha starts thinkin' about it!"

"No, don't say those things!—And you don't really think that I wanted to make use of you, do you?"

"How?"

"To have a child—?"

"Now anybody can 'ave any childt i' th'world," he said, as he sat down fastening on his leggings.

"Ah no!"she cried."You don't mean it?"

"Eh well!"he said, looking at her under his brows."This wor t' best."

She lay still.He softly opened the door.The sky was dark blue, with crystalline, turquoise rim.He went out, to shut up the hens, speaking softly to his dog.And she lay and wondered at the wonder of life, and of being.

When he came back she was still lying there, glowing like a gypsy.He sat on the stool by her.

"Tha mun come one naight ter th' cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?"he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees.

"Sholl ter?"she echoed, teasing.

He smiled.

"Ay, sholl ter?"he repeated.

"Ay!"she said, imitating the dialect sound.

"Yi!"he said.

"Yi!"she repeated.

"An' slaip wi' me," he said."It needs that.When sholt come?"

"When sholl I?"she said.

"Nay," he said, "tha canna do't.When sholt come then?"

"'Appen Sunday," she said.

"'Appen a' Sunday!Ay!"

He laughed at her quickly.

"Nay, tha canna," he protested.

"Why canna I?"she said.

He laughed.Her attempts at the dialect were so ludicrous, somehow.

"Coom then, tha mun goo!"he said.

"Mun I?"she said.

"Maun Ah!"he corrected.

"Why should I say maun when you said mun," she protested."You're not playing fair."

"Arena Ah!"he said, leaning forward and softly stroking her face.

"Tha'rt good cunt, though, aren't ter?Best bit o' cunt left on earth.When ter likes!When tha'rt willin'!"

"What is cunt?"she said.

"An' doesn't ter know?Cunt!It's thee down theer; an' what I get when I'm i'side thee, and what tha gets when I'm i'side thee; it's a' as it is, all on't."

"All on't," she teased."Cunt!It's like fuck then."

"Nay nay!Fuck's only what you do.Animals fuck.But cunt's a lot more than that.It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot beside an animal, aren't ter?even ter fuck!Cunt!Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!"

She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful.

"Is it?"she said."And do you care for me?"

He kissed her without answering.

"Tha mun goo, let me dust thee," he said.

His hand passed over the curves of her body, firmly, without desire, but with soft, intimate knowledge.

As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive.

---

CHAPTER XIII

On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood.It was a lovely morning, the pear blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world, in a wonder of white here and there.

It was cruel for Clifford, while the world bloomed, to have to be helped from chair to bath-chair.But he had forgotten, and even seemed to have a certain conceit of himself in his lameness.Connie still suffered, having to lift his inert legs into place.Mrs. Bolton did it now, or Field.

She waited for him at the top of the drive, at the edge of the screen of beeches.His chair came puffing along with a sort of valetudinarian slow importance.As he joined his wife he said:

"Sir Clifford on his foaming steed!"

"Snorting, at least!"she laughed.

He stopped and looked round at the façade of the long, low old brown house.

"Wragby doesn't wink an eyelid!"he said."But then why should it!I ride upon the achievements of the mind of man, and that beats a horse."

"I suppose it does.And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now," she said.

"Or a Rolls-Royce: Plato was an aristocrat!"

"Quite!No more black horse to thrash and maltreat.Plato never thought we'd go one better than his black steed and his white steed, and have no steeds at all, only an engine!"

"Only an engine and gas!"said Clifford.

"I hope I can have some repairs done to the old place next year.I think I shall have about a thousand to spare for that: but work costs so much!"he added.

"Oh, good!"said Connie."If only there aren't more strikes!"

"What would be the use of their striking again!Merely ruin the industry, what's left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!"

"Perhaps they don't mind ruining the industry," said Connie.

"Ah, don't talk like a woman!The industry fills their bellies, even if it can't keep their pockets quite so flush," he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs. Bolton.

"But didn't you say the other day that you were a conservative-anarchist," she asked innocently.

"And did you understand what I meant?" he retorted. "All I meant is, people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the form of life intact, and the apparatus."

Connie walked on in silence a few paces.Then she said, obstinately:

"It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell on whole.But addled eggs do break of themselves."

"I don't think people are eggs," he said."Not even angels' eggs, my dear little evangelist."

He was in rather high feather this bright morning.The larks were trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent steam.It was almost like old days, before the war.Connie didn't really want to argue.But then she did not really want to go to the wood with Clifford either.So she walked beside his chair in a certain obstinacy of spirit.

"No," he said."There will be no more strikes, if the thing is properly managed."

"Why not?"

"Because strikes will be made as good as impossible."

"But will the men let you?"she asked.

"We shan't ask them.We shall do it while they aren't looking: for their own good, to save the industry."

"For your own good too," she said.

"Naturally!For the good of everybody.But for their good even more than mine.I can live without the pits.They can't.They'll starve if there are no pits.I've got other provision."

They looked up the shallow valley at the mine, and beyond it, at the black-lidded houses of Tevershall crawling like some serpent up the hill.From the old brown church the bells were ringing: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

"But will the men let you dictate terms?"she said.

"My dear, they will have to: if one does it gently."

"But mightn't there be a mutual understanding?"

"Absolutely: when they realize that the industry comes before the individual."

"But must you own the industry?"she said.

"I don't. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St. Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor.It's the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies.Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us.And universal starvation is no high aim.Even general poverty is no lovely thing.Poverty is ugly."

"But the disparity?"

"That is fate.Why is the star Jupiter bigger than the star Neptune?You can't start altering the makeup of things!"

"But when this envy and jealousy and discontent has once started," she began.

"Do your best to stop it. Somebody's got to be boss of the show."

"But who is boss of the show?"she asked.

"The men who own and run the industries."

There was a long silence.

"It seems to me they're a bad boss," she said.

"Then you suggest what they should do."

"They don't take their boss-ship seriously enough," she said.

"They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship," he said.

"That's thrust upon me.I don't really want it," she blurted out.He stopped the chair and looked at her.

"Who's shirking their responsibility now!" he said. "Who is trying to get away now from the responsibility of their own boss-ship, as you call it?"

"But I don't want any boss-ship," she protested.

"Ah!But that is funk.You've got it: fated to it.And you should live up to it.Who has given the colliers all they have that's worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health conditions, their books, their music, everything.Who has given it them?Have colliers given it to colliers?No!All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving.There's your responsibility."

Connie listened, and flushed very red.

"I'd like to give something," she said. "But I'm not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley sells them to the people, at a good profit. Everything is sold. You don't give one heartbeat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?"

"And what must I do?"he asked, green."Ask them to come and pillage me?"

"Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous?Why are their lives so hopeless?"

"They built their own Tevershall, that's part of their display of freedom.They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives.I can't live their lives for them.Every beetle must live its own life."

"But you make them work for you.They live the life of your coal mine."

"Not at all.Every beetle finds its own food.Not one man is forced to work for me."

"Their lives are industrialised and hopeless, and so are ours," she cried.

"I don't think they are.That's just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism.You don't look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear."

Which was true. For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, in the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong, yet she couldn't say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could. Don't thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motorcar workmen. I mean Nero's mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education."

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened.There was something devastatingly true in what he said.But it was a truth that killed.

Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.

"And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, not swords.The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves."

"But can you rule them?"she asked.

"I?Oh yes!Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don't rule with my legs.I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me."

"But he wouldn't be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not," she stammered.

"I don't care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him.It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebians, mass products.It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said.

"No, my child!All that is romantic illusion.Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.The individual hardly matters.It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to.It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.We all need to fill our bellies.But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.The two functions are opposed.And the function determines the individual."

Connie looked at him with dazed eyes.

"Won't you come on?"she said.

And he started his chair.He had said his say.Now he lapsed into his peculiar and rather vacant apathy, that Connie found so trying.In the wood, anyhow, she was determined not to argue.

In front of them ran the open cleft of the riding, between the hazel walls and the gay grey trees.The chair puffed slowly on, slowly surging into the forget-me-nots that rose up in the drive like milk froth, beyond the hazel shadows.Clifford steered the middle course, where feet passing had kept a channel through the flowers.But Connie, walking behind, had watched the wheels jolt over the woodruff and the bugle, and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny.Now they made a wake through the forget-me-nots.

All the flowers were there, the first bluebells in blue pools, like standing water.

"You are quite right about its being beautiful," said Clifford. "It is so amazingly. What is quite so lovely as an English spring!"

Connie thought it sounded as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament.An English spring!Why not an Irish one?or Jewish?The chair moved slowly ahead, past tufts of sturdy bluebells that stood up like wheat, and over grey burdock leaves.When they came to the open place where the trees had been felled, the light flooded in rather stark.And the bluebells made sheets of bright blue colour, here and there, sheering off into lilac and purple.And between, the bracken was lifting its brown curled heads, like legions of young snakes with a new secret to whisper to Eve.

Clifford kept the chair going till he came to the brow of the hill; Connie followed slowly behind.The oak buds were opening soft and brown.Everything came tenderly out of the old hardness.Even the snaggy craggy oak trees put out the softest young leaves, spreading thin, brown little wings like young bat wings in the light.Why had men never any newness in them, any freshness to come forth with?Stale men!

Clifford stopped the chair at the top of the rise and looked down.The bluebells washed blue like floodwater over the broad riding, and lit up the downhill with a warm blueness.

"It's a very fine colour in itself," said Clifford, "but useless for making a painting."

"Quite!"said Connie, completely uninterested.

"Shall I venture as far as the spring?"said Clifford.

"Will the chair get up again?"she said.

"We'll try; nothing venture, nothing win!"

And the chair began to advance slowly, jolting down the beautiful broad riding washed over with blue encroaching hyacinths.Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinthian shallows!Oh pinnace on the last wild waters, sailing on the last voyage of our civilisation!Whither, Oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering!Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious.Oh Captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done!Not yet though!Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

They passed the narrow track to the hut.Thank heaven it was not wide enough for the chair: hardly wide enough for one person.The chair reached the bottom of the slope, and swerved round, to disappear.And Connie heard a low whistle behind her.She glanced sharply round: the keeper was striding downhill towards her, his dog keeping behind him.

"Is Sir Clifford going to the cottage?"he asked, looking into her eyes.

"No, only to the well."

"Ah!Good!Then I can keep out of sight.But I shall see you tonight.I shall wait for you at the park gate about ten."

He looked again direct into her eyes.

"Yes," she faltered.

They heard the Papp!Papp!of Clifford's horn, tooting for Connie.She "Coo-eed!"in reply.The keeper's face flickered with a little grimace, and with his hand he softly brushed her breast upwards, from underneath.She looked at him, frightened, and started running down the hill, calling Coo-ee!again to Clifford.The man above watched her, then turned, grinning faintly, back into his path.

She found Clifford slowly mounting to the spring, which was halfway up the slope of the dark larch wood.He was there by the time she caught him up.

"She did that all right," he said, referring to the chair.

Connie looked at the great grey leaves of burdock that grew out ghostly from the edge of the larch wood.The people call it Robin Hood's Rhubarb.How silent and gloomy it seemed by the well!Yet the water bubbled so bright, wonderful!And there were bits of eye-bright and strong blue bugle.And there, under the bank, the yellow earth was moving.A mole!It emerged, rowing its pink hands, and waving its blind gimlet of a face, with the tiny pink nose-tip uplifted.

"It seems to see with the end of its nose," said Connie.

"Better than with its eyes!"he said."Will you drink?"

"Will you?"

She took an enamel mug from a twig on a tree, and stooped to fill it for him.He drank in sips.Then she stooped again, and drank a little herself.

"So icy!"she said gasping.

"Good, isn't it!Did you wish?"

"Did you?"

"Yes, I wished.But I won't tell."

She was aware of the rapping of a woodpecker, then of the wind, soft and eerie through the larches.She looked up.White clouds were crossing the blue.

"Clouds!"she said.

"White lambs only," he replied.

A shadow crossed the little clearing.The mole had swum out onto the soft yellow earth.

"Unpleasant little beast, we ought to kill him," said Clifford.

"Look!he's like a parson in a pulpit," said she.

She gathered some sprigs of woodruff and brought them to him.

"New-mown hay!"he said."Doesn't it smell like the romantic ladies of the last century, who had their heads screwed on the right way after all!"