e was very strong and agile with his arms.  Then Connie lifted
the burden of his dead legs after him.
     The  keeper,  waiting at attention to be dismissed,  watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing.  He went pale, with a sort  of  fear, when he saw
Connie lifting the  inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair,
Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
     `Thanks, then, for the help,  Mellors,'  said Clifford  casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
     `Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
     `Nothing, good morning!'
     `Good morning, Sir.'
     `Good  morning! it was kind of  you to  push the chair up that hill...I
hope  it wasn't heavy  for you,'  said Connie,  looking back  at  the keeper
outside the door.
     His eyes came to  hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.
     `Oh no, not heavy!'  he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: `Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'
     `Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.
     `Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.
     `Yes, but where did he come from?'
     `Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'
     `And was he a collier himself?'
     `Blacksmith  on  the pit-bank,  I believe:  overhead smith. But he  was
keeper  here  for two years before the war...before  he joined up. My father
always had a good Opinion of him, so when he  came back, and went to the pit
for a blacksmith's job,  I just took him back here as  keeper.  I was really
very glad to  get him...its almost impossible to find a  good man round here
for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the people.'
     `And isn't he married?'
     `He was. But  his wife  went off with...with various  men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'
     `So this man is alone?'
     `More  or  less!  He has  a  mother in  the  village...and  a child,  I
believe.'
     Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which  a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground,
but the  background was like the Midlands  atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he  stared at Connie in  his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background  of his  mind  filling up  with mist, with  nothingness.  And  it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
     And dimly she  realized  one of  the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul  receives a  wounding shock, which does not kill the
body,  the soul seems to recover as  the  body  recovers.  But this  is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly  the wound to the soul  begins to make itself  felt,  like a  bruise,
which Only  slowly deepens its terrible ache, till  it fills all the psyche.
And  when we think we have  recovered and  forgotten, it  is  then  that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
     So it was  with  Clifford.  Once he was  `well',  once  he was  back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and  feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to  forget, and  to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming  up, and spreading in him.  For a time it had been so deep  as to  be
numb, as  it were non-existent. Now slowly it began  to assert itself  in  a
spread  of  fear,  almost  paralysis. Mentally  he still was  alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
     And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an  emptiness, an indifference  to  everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused,  he could still talk  brilliantly and, as it were,
command  the  future: as when,  in the wood,  he  talked about  her having a
child, and  giving  an heir to Wragby. But the day after,  all the brilliant
words  seemed  like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really  nothing,  blown away  on any gust  of wind.  They were not the leafy
words  of an effective  life,  young with  energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
     So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of  a  strike, and  it  seemed  to  Connie  there  again it was not  a
manifestation  of energy, it  was the bruise of the  war  that  had  been in
abeyance,  slowly  rising  to  the surface and  creating  the great  ache of
unrest,  and stupor of discontent. The bruise  was  deep,  deep,  deep...the
bruise  of the false inhuman war. It  would take  many years for the  living
blood of the generations to  dissolve the vast black clot of  bruised blood,
deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
     Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life  that affected her. Clifford's mental life  and hers gradually began to
feel like  nothingness. Their  marriage, their  integrated  life based on  a
habit  of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became
utterly  blank  and nothing. It  was  words,  just so  many  words. The only
reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
     There  was Clifford's  success:  the  bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost  famous,  and  his  books  brought  him  in a  thousand  pounds.  His
photograph  appeared  everywhere.  There was a  bust  of him in one  of  the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of  modern voices. With  his uncanny  lame  instinct  for publicity, he  had
become  in  four  or  five  years  one  of  the  best  known  of  the  young
`intellectuals'.  Where  the intellect came  in, Connie did  not  quite see.
Clifford was really  clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and
motives which leaves everything in  bits at the end. But  it was rather like
puppies tearing  the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and
playful, but  curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It  was weird
and it was nothing. This was the feeling  that echoed  and re-echoed  at the
bottom  of  Connie's  soul:  it  was   all  flag,  a  wonderful  display  of
nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!
     Michaelis  had  seized upon Clifford  as the central figure for a play;
already  he  had  sketched  in  the plot, and  written  the  first  act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at  making a display of nothingness.
It was the last  bit of passion left in these men: the passion  for making a
display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money
that Michaelis was after. Clifford had  never been  primarily out for money,
though he made  it where  he could,  for  money  is  the  seal and stamp  of
success. And  success was what  they wanted.  They wanted, both  of them, to
make a real  display...a  man's  own  very  display  of himself  that should
capture for a time the vast populace.
     It  was  strange...the  prostitution  to the  bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside  of it,  and  since  she had grown  numb to the
thrill  of  it,  it was  again nothingness.  Even  the  prostitution  to the
bitch-goddess  was  nothingness,  though  the   men  prostituted  themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
     Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford  was  again thrilled.  He was going  to be  displayed
again  this time,  somebody was going  to  display him, and to advantage. He
invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
     Michaelis  came:  in summer, in a  pale-coloured  suit  and white suede
gloves,  with  mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely,  and Act I was a great
success. Even Connie  was thrilled...thrilled to  what bit of marrow she had
left.  And  Michaelis,   thrilled   by  his  power  to  thrill,  was  really
wonderful...and  quite beautiful,  in  Connie's eyes. She saw  in  him  that
ancient motionlessness of a race that can't  be  disillusioned any  more, an
extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is  pure. On the far side of  his supreme
prostitution to the  bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African  ivory
mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
     His moment of sheer  thrill  with the two  Chatterleys, when  he simply
carried  Connie  and Clifford  away,  was  one of  the  supreme  moments  of
Michaelis'  life. He had succeeded:  he had carried them away. Even Clifford
was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can put it.
     So next morning Mick  was more  uneasy  than ever;  restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie  had not visited him
in the night...and he  had  not known where to find her.  Coquetry!...at his
moment of triumph.
     He went up to her sitting-room  in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his  restlessness  was evident.  He asked her about his  play...did  she
think  it good? He had to hear it  praised: that affected  him with the last
thin  thrill  of  passion  beyond  any  sexual orgasm. And  she  praised  it
rapturously. Yet all the while, at the  bottom of her soul, she knew it  was
nothing.
     `Look here!'  he said suddenly at last.  `Why  don't you and I  make  a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'
     `But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
     `Oh that!...he'll  divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want  to marry. I know it would be the best thing  for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead  the deuce of a life, simply tearing  myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
     Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she  felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their  heads  as if  they  were  squibs,  and  expected you  to  be  carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
     `But  I  am  married already,'  she said. `I can't leave  Clifford, you
know.'
     `Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you  at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
     Connie felt there was truth  in this.  But she also  felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
     `Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
     `Oh,  more  or  less, I allow. A man's got to be,  to  get through. But
that's not the  point. The point is, what sort  of a time  can a  man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he?  If  he can't he's  no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic.  `Now  I  consider,'  he  added,  `I can give a  woman  the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
     `And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on  him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
     `Every sort of a good time,  damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point,  any  nightclub you like,  know anybody  you  want to know, live  the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn  it, every sort of good
time.'
     He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her  mind was tickled at the  glowing prospects he offered  her. Hardly even
her  most outside self responded, that  at any  other  time would  have been
thrilled. She just got  no feeling from it, she  couldn't `go off'. She just
sat  and  stared and looked  dazzled, and  felt nothing, only  somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
     Mick sat  on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his  chair, glaring at her
almost  hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity  for her
to say Yes!  or whether he was more panic-stricken for  fear she should  say
Yes!---who can tell?
     `I should have to  think about it,' she said.  `I couldn't  say now. It
may seem to  you Clifford doesn't count, but  he  does. When  you  think how
disabled he is...'
     `Oh damn it all! If a  fellow's going  to trade on his  disabilities, I
might begin to say  how lonely I am, and always have been, and  all the rest
of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing
but disabilities to recommend him...'
     He turned aside,  working his  hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:
     `You're coming round to my  room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'
     `All right!' she said.
     He was a more excited lover that night, with his  strange, small  boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis  before he
had  really  finished his. And  he roused a certain craving passion  in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he  had
finished, in the  wild tumult and heaving of  her loins, while he heroically
kept himself  up, and present in her, with all  his  will and self-offering,
till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
     When at  last he  drew  away  from her, he  said, in  a  bitter, almost
sneering little voice:
     `You  couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could  you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'
     This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks  of  her life.
Because that passive  sort  of giving himself was so obviously his only real
mode of intercourse.
     `What do you mean?' she said.
     `You know  what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have  to hang  on with  my teeth till you bring yourself off  by your  own
exertions.'
     She  was stunned  by this unexpected  piece of brutality, at the moment
when she  was glowing with a  sort of pleasure  beyond words, and  a sort of
love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern  men, he  was finished
almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
     `But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.
     He laughed grimly: `I  want it!' he  said. `That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'
     `But don't you?' she insisted.
     He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they  were dead  in there...or  else
they  wait  till a chap's  really  done, and  then  they  start in to  bring
themselves off, and a chap's got  to hang on.  I  never had a woman yet  who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
     Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine  information. She
was   only  stunned   by  his  feeling  against  her...his  incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
     `But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
     `Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
     This speech was one  of the  crucial  blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in  her. She had  not  been so  very  keen on Michaelis;  till  he
started it, she did not  want him. It was as  if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it  seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
     Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the  whole show with  a smash;  the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her  life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
     And she went through the days  drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
     Nothingness! To accept  the great nothingness of  life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the  many  busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

        Chapter 6

     `Why don't  men and  women  really like  one  another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
     `Oh, but they do!  I don't think since the  human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they  do today.  Genuine liking!  Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
     Connie pondered this.
     `Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
     `I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to  a woman at this
moment?'
     `Yes, talking...'
     `And what  more could  I  do if  you were  a  man, than  talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'
     `Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'
     `A  woman wants you to like her and  talk to her, and at  the same time
love  her and  desire  her; and it seems  to me the two things are  mutually
exclusive.'
     `But they shouldn't be!'
     `No doubt water ought  not  to be so wet as  it  is; it overdoes  it in
wetness.  But there it is! I like women  and talk  to them, and therefore  I
don't love them  and desire  them. The  two things don't happen at the  same
time in me.'
     `I think they ought to.'
     `All right. The fact that  things  ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.
     Connie considered this. `It isn't  true,' she said. `Men can love women
and talk to them.  I don't see how they can love them  without talking,  and
being friendly and intimate. How can they?'
     `Well,' he said, `I don't know. What's the use  of  my  generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking
to them; but talking to them, though it makes me  intimate in one direction,
sets  me poles apart from them as far as  kissing is concerned. So there you
are!  But don't take me  as a general example, probably  I'm  just a special
case: one of the men who like  women,  but don't love  women, and even  hate
them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.
     `But doesn't it make you sad?'
     `Why should  it? Not a bit! I look at  Charlie May, and the rest of the
men who  have affairs...No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman
I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any  woman I want, and never see
one...why, I presume I'm cold, and really like some women very much.'
     `Do you like me?'
     `Very much! And you see  there's no question of kissing between us,  is
there?'
     `None at all!' said Connie. `But oughtn't there to be?'
     `Why, in God's name? I like Clifford,  but what would you say if I went
and kissed him?'
     `But isn't there a difference?'
     `Where  does it lie, as far  as we're concerned?  We're all intelligent
human  beings, and  the male and female business  is  in  abeyance.  Just in
abeyance. How  would you like me to start acting up like a  continental male
at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'
     `I should hate it.'
     `Well then!  I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run
across the female of my species.  And I  don't  miss her, I just like women.
Who's  going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working  up
the sex game?'
     `No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'
     `You may feel it, I don't.'
     `Yes, I  feel something is wrong  between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'
     `Has a man for a woman?'
     She pondered the other side of the question.
     `Not much,' she said truthfully.
     `Then let's leave  it all  alone, and just be  decent  and simple, like
proper  human  beings  with  one  another.  Be   damned  to  the  artificial
sex-compulsion! I refuse it!'
     Connie knew he was right, really.  Yet it left her  feeling so forlorn,
so forlorn  and stray. Like a  chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the
point, of her or anything?
     It was her  youth  which  rebelled.  These men seemed so old  and cold.
Everything  seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one  down so; he  was  no
good. The  men  didn't want one; they just didn't really  want a woman, even
Michaelis didn't.
     And the  bounders who pretended they did,  and  started working the sex
game, they were worse than ever.
     It was just dismal, and one had to  put up with it. It was quite  true,
men  had  no  real glamour  for  a  woman: if  you  could fool yourself into
thinking they had, even  as she  had fooled herself over Michaelis, that was
the best you could do. Meanwhile you just lived on and there was  nothing to
it.  She understood  perfectly well  why  people had  cocktail  parties, and
jazzed,  and Charlestoned till they were ready to  drop. You had to  take it
out  some  way or  other, your youth,  or it ate you up. But what a  ghastly
thing,  this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the  thing fizzed
somehow,  and  didn't  let you be comfortable. A mean  sort of life!  And no
prospect! She almost wished  she had gone off with Mick, and made  her  life
one long cocktail  party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just
mooning yourself into the grave.
     On one of  her  bad days  she  went out  alone  to  walk  in the  wood,
ponderously, heeding nothing, not even noticing where she was. The report of
a gun not far off startled and angered her.
     Then, as  she went, she heard voices, and recoiled.  People! She didn't
want people.  But her quick ear caught another sound, and she roused; it was
a child sobbing. At once she attended; someone was ill-treating a child. She
strode swinging down the  wet drive, her  sullen resentment  uppermost.  She
felt just prepared to make a scene.
     Turning the corner, she saw two  figures  in  the drive beyond her: the
keeper, and a little girl in a purple coat and moleskin cap, crying.
     `Ah,  shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the  man's angry voice,
and the child sobbed louder.
     Constance  strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned  and looked
at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.
     `What's the matter? Why is she crying?'  demanded Constance, peremptory
but a little breathless.
     A  faint smile like a sneer came on  the man's face.  `Nay,  yo mun  ax
'er,' he replied callously, in broad vernacular.
     Connie  felt as if he had hit her in the  face, and she changed colour.
Then  she  gathered  her defiance, and  looked at  him, her dark  blue  eyes
blazing rather vaguely.
     `I asked you,' she panted.
     He gave a queer  little bow, lifting his hat. `You did, your Ladyship,'
he said; then, with a  return to the vernacular: `but I canna tell yer.' And
he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.
     Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten.
`What  is it,  dear?  Tell  me  why  you're  crying!'  she  said,  with  the
conventionalized  sweetness suitable.  More  violent  sobs,  self-conscious.
Still more sweetness on Connie's part.
     `There,  there, don't you cry! Tell me what  they've done to you!'...an
intense tenderness of tone. At the  same time she felt  in the pocket of her
knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.
     `Don't you cry then!'  she said,  bending in front of the  child.  `See
what I've got for you!'
     Sobs, snuffles, a fist  taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd
eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. `There,
tell me what's  the matter, tell me!' said Connie, putting the coin into the
child's chubby hand, which closed over it.
     `It's the...it's the...pussy!'
     Shudders of subsiding sobs.
     `What pussy, dear?'
     After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed  into  the
bramble brake.
     `There!'
     Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was  a big black cat,  stretched
out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.
     `Oh!' she said in repulsion.
     `A poacher, your Ladyship,' said the man satirically.
     She glanced at him angrily. `No wonder the child  cried,' she said, `if
you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!'
     He looked  into Connie's  eyes, laconic,  contemptuous,  not hiding his
feelings. And again Connie flushed; she  felt she had been  making  a scene,
the man did not respect her.
     `What  is your name?' she said playfully to the child. `Won't you  tell
me your name?'
     Sniffs; then very affectedly in a piping voice: `Connie Mellors!'
     `Connie Mellors! Well, that's  a nice  name! And did you  come out with
your Daddy, and he shot a pussy? But it was a bad pussy!'
     The child looked at her, with bold, dark eyes of  scrutiny, sizing  her
up, and her condolence.
     `I wanted to stop with my Gran,' said the little girl.
     `Did you? But where is your Gran?'
     The child lifted an arm, pointing down the drive. `At th' cottidge.'
     `At the cottage! And would you like to go back to her?'
     Sudden, shuddering quivers of reminiscent sobs. `Yes!'
     `Come then, shall I take you? Shall I take  you to your Gran? Then your
Daddy can do what  he has to do.' She  turned to the man. `It is your little
girl, isn't it?'
     He saluted, and made a slight movement of the head in affirmation.
     `I suppose I can take her to the cottage?' asked Connie.
     `If your Ladyship wishes.'
     Again  he  looked into her  eyes,  with  that  calm, searching detached
glance. A man very much alone, and on his own.
     `Would you like to come with me to the cottage, to your Gran, dear?'
     The child peeped up again. `Yes!' she simpered.
     Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little  female. Nevertheless she
wiped her face and took her hand. The keeper saluted in silence.
     `Good morning!' said Connie.
     It was nearly  a mile to the cottage, and Connie senior was well red by
Connie  junior by the  time the game-keeper's picturesque little home was in
sight.  The child  was already as  full to  the brim with tricks as a little
monkey, and so self-assured.
     At  the  cottage the  door stood open, and  there was a  rattling heard
inside. Connie lingered, the child slipped her hand, and ran indoors.
     `Gran! Gran!'
     `Why, are yer back a'ready!'
     The  grandmother  had  been  blackleading  the  stove, it was  Saturday
morning. She came to the door in her sacking apron, a blacklead-brush in her
hand, and a black smudge on her nose. She was a little, rather dry woman.
     `Why,  whatever?' she said, hastily wiping her  arm across  her face as
she saw Connie standing outside.
     `Good morning!'  said Connie.  `She  was crying, so I just  brought her
home.'
     The grandmother looked around swiftly at the child:
     `Why, wheer was yer Dad?'
     The little girl clung to her grandmother's skirts and simpered.
     `He  was there,' said Connie, `but  he'd  shot a  poaching cat, and the
child was upset.'
     `Oh, you'd no right t'ave bothered, Lady Chatterley, I'm sure! I'm sure
it  was very good of you, but you shouldn't 'ave bothered. Why, did ever you
see!'---and the old woman turned to the child: `Fancy Lady Chatterley takin'
all that trouble over yer! Why, she shouldn't 'ave bothered!'
     `It was no bother, just a walk,' said Connie smiling.
     `Why, I'm sure 'twas very kind of you, I must say! So she was crying! I
knew  there'd be  something  afore they got  far. She's  frightened of  'im,
that's wheer it is.  Seems  'e's almost a stranger to 'er,  fair a stranger,
and I don't think  they're  two as'd  hit  it  off very easy. He's got funny
ways.'
     Connie didn't know what to say.
     `Look, Gran!' simpered the child.
     The old woman looked down at the sixpence in the little girl's hand.
     `An' sixpence an' all! Oh, your Ladyship, you shouldn't, you shouldn't.
Why, isn't  Lady Chatterley good to  yer! My word, you're  a lucky girl this
morning!'
     She pronounced the name, as all the people  did: Chat'ley.---Isn't Lady
Chat'ley good to you!'---Connie  couldn't  help looking  at the old  woman's
nose,  and the  latter  again vaguely  wiped her face  with the back  of her
wrist, but missed the smudge.
     Connie was  moving away `Well, thank you  ever so much, Lady  Chat'ley,
I'm sure. Say thank you to Lady Chat'ley!'---this last to the child.
     `Thank you,' piped the child.
     `There's a  dear!' laughed Connie,  and she moved  away,  saying  `Good
morning', heartily relieved to get away from the contact.
     Curious,  she  thought, that  that  thin, proud man  should  have  that
little, sharp woman for a mother!
     And the old woman,  as soon  as Connie had gone,  rushed to the  bit of
mirror in  the scullery, and looked at her face. Seeing it, she stamped  her
foot with impatience. `Of course she had to catch me in my coarse apron, and
a dirty face! Nice idea she'd get of me!'
     Connie went slowly home to  Wragby. `Home!'...it was a warm word to use
for that great, weary  warren. But then it was a word that  had had its day.
It was  somehow cancelled. All  the  great words, it seemed to Connie,  were
cancelled  for her generation:  love,  joy, happiness, home, mother, father,
husband, all these great, dynamic words were  half dead now, and  dying from
day to day. Home was a place  you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool
yourself about, joy was a  word  you applied to a good Charleston, happiness
was  a  term  of  hypocrisy  used to  bluff other  people,  a father was  an
individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with
and kept going  in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it  was
just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a  while, then
left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It  was as  if the  very material you
were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.
     All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was
a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase
after phase, Étape after Étape, there was  a certain grisly satisfaction. So
that's  that! Always  this was  the  last  utterance: home,  love, marriage,
Michaelis: So that's that! And when one died, the last  words to life  would
be: So that's that!
     Money?  Perhaps  one  couldn't  say the same there.  Money  one  always
wanted.  Money,  Success,  the  bitch-goddess, as  Tommy  Dukes persisted in
calling it, after Henry James, that was  a permanent necessity. You couldn't
spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's that! No, if you lived  even
another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just
to keep the business mechanically going, you  needed money. You had to  have
it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's
that!
     Since, of course, it's  not  your own fault you are alive. Once you are
alive, money is a necessity, and the  only  absolute necessity. All the rest
you  can get along without, at a pinch. But not money.  Emphatically, that's
that!
     She  thought of Michaelis, and the  money she might have had with  him;
and  even that she  didn't  want. She preferred the lesser  amount which she
helped  Clifford  to make  by  his  writing. That  she  actually  helped  to
make.---`Clifford and I  together,  we make twelve  hundred  a year  out  of
writing';  so she  put  it to herself. Make money! Make it!  Out of nowhere.
Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest
all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.
     So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make
another story out of nothingness: and a  story meant  money. Clifford seemed
to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class literature
or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing  in it! said  her  father. Twelve
hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.
     If  you were young, you just set your  teeth,  and bit on and held  on,
till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power.
It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle,  powerful emanation of will out
of yourself brought back to you  the mysterious nothingness of money  a word
on a bit of paper. It was a sort of  magic, certainly  it  was triumph.  The
bitch-goddess!  Well,  if one  had  to prostitute oneself,  let it be  to  a
bitch-goddess!  One  could always  despise her  even while  one  prostituted
oneself to her, which was good.
     Clifford, of  course, had still many  childish taboos and fetishes.  He
wanted to be thought `really  good',  which was  all  cock-a-hoopy nonsense.
What was really  good was  what actually  caught  on. It was  no good  being
really  good and getting left with  it. It seemed as if most of the  `really
good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and if you
missed  the bus, you were just  left on the pavement, along with the rest of
the failures.
     Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.
He  and she had caught the bus all right, so they might  as well ride on top
for a bit, and show it.
     The  worst of it was,  Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and  to
fall  into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche  coming
out. But it  made  Connie want  to scream. Oh God, if  the mechanism  of the
consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it
all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?
     Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even  as  she wept she  was saying  to
herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!
     Since Michaelis,  she  had made up her mind  she  wanted nothing.  That
seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted  nothing
more than what she'd got; only she wanted to  get ahead with what she'd got:
Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business, money and fame,
such  as  it  was...she wanted to go ahead with it  all. Love, sex, all that
sort of  stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget it. If you don't hang
on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially...nothing!  Make up your
mind to  it,  and you've solved the problem.  Sex and a  cocktail: they both
lasted about as long,  had the  same effect, and amounted to about the  same
thing.
     But a child,  a baby! That was  still one of the sensations.  She would
venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and
it was curious, there wasn't  a  man in the world whose children you wanted.
Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have  a child to a rabbit! Tommy
Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate him with a baby,
another  generation.  He ended  in  himself.  And out  of  all the  rest  of
Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was  not a man who did not  rouse
her contempt,  when she thought of having a child by him. There were several
who would  have  been quite  possible as  lover, even Mick. But to let  them
breed a child on you! Ugh! Humiliation and abomination.
     So that was that!
     Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait!
She  would  sift the generations  of men through her sieve,  and  see if she
couldn't find one who  would do.---`Go ye into  the  streets and by  ways of
Jerusalem, and see if you can find  a man.' It had been impossible to find a
man in the  Jerusalem of the prophet, though  there  were thousands of  male
humans. But a man! C'est une autre chose!
     She  had  an  idea that  he  would  have  to  be a  foreigner:  not  an
Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.
     But  wait! wait! Next  winter  she would  get Clifford to  London;  the
following  winter she would  get him abroad to the  South of  France, Italy.
Wait! She  was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair,
and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious to
the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer, not she!
One might  take a lover almost  at any moment, but a man who  should beget a
child  on one...wait! wait! it's a  very different matter.---`Go ye into the
streets and byways of Jerusalem...' It was not a question of  love; it was a
question of  a man. Why,  one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if
he  was  the  man,  what  would one's  personal hate  matter?  This business
concerned another part of oneself.
     It had  rained as  usual, and the paths  were too sodden for Clifford's
chair, but Connie would  go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly in
the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.
     This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and
as the boy  was  laid  up  with  influenza, somebody always seemed  to  have
influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.
     The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were  slowly dying. Grey
and clammy  and silent,  even from the shuffling of the collieries,  for the
pits were  working  short  time, and today they were stopped altogether. The
end of all things!
     In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell
from  the bare boughs, with  a hollow little crash. For the  rest, among the
old  trees was  depth  within  depth  of  grey, hopeless  inertia,  silence,
nothingness.
     Connie walked  dimly on. From the old wood came  an ancient melancholy,
somehow soothing  to  her,  better than the  harsh insentience of  the outer
world.  She  liked  the inwardness  of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking
reticence of the old trees. They seemed a  very power of silence, and  yet a
vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and
giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end;
to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all
things.  But  perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence,  the silence of
strong trees, meant something else.
     As she came out  of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage, a
rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked
uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the
chimney, and the little railed-in garden  in the front of the house  was dug
and kept very tidy. The door was shut.
     Now she was here she  felt  a little shy of  the man,  with his curious
far-seeing eyes.  She did not like bringing him orders,  and felt like going
away again. She knocked  softly, no one came.  She knocked again, but  still
not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the  window, and saw the
dark little  room,  with  its  almost sinister privacy,  not wanting  to  be
invaded.
     She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from  the
back of the cottage.  Having  failed  to make  herself heard, her mettle was
roused, she would not be defeated.
     So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage the
land rose steeply, so the back yard was sunken, and enclosed by  a low stone
wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In the little yard two
paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly unaware. He was naked
to the  hips, his velveteen breeches  slipping down  over his slender loins.
And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl  of soapy water, in which
he ducked his  head, shaking his  head with a  queer, quick  little  motion,
lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water  from his ears,
quick,  subtle as  a  weasel playing  with water, and  utterly alone. Connie
backed  away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In
spite of  herself,  she had  had a shock.  After all,  merely  a man washing
himself, commonplace enough, Heaven knows!
     Yet in some curious way it was  a visionary experience: it had  hit her
in  the middle of the body.  She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down  over
the pure, delicate, white loins,  the bones showing a  little, and the sense
of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed  her. Perfect,  white,
solitary  nudity  of a  creature that lives alone, and  inwardly  alone. And
beyond that,  a certain beauty of a  pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty,
not even  the  body  of beauty, but  a lambency, the warm, white  flame of a
single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!
     Connie had  received the  shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it;
it lay inside her.  But with her mind  she  was inclined  to ridicule. A man
washing himself in a back yard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow soap! She
was  rather  annoyed;  why  should she be  made to stumble on  these  vulgar
privacies?
     So she walked  away  from herself, but after  a while she sat down on a
stump. She was too confused to think.  But in the coil of her confusion, she
was  determined  to  deliver  her message to  the  fellow.  She would not he
balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not  time to go out. He
was probably preparing to go out somewhere.
     So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came  near, the cottage
looked  just the same.  A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her heart
beating in spite of herself.
     She  heard  the man  coming  lightly  downstairs.  He opened  the  door
quickly, and startled her.  He looked uneasy himself, but  instantly a laugh
came on his face.
     `Lady Chatterley!' he said. `Will you come in?'
     His  manner  was so perfectly  easy  and  good, she  stepped  over  the
threshold into the rather dreary little room.
     `I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft,
rather breathless voice.
     The man was looking  at  her with those blue, all-seeing  eyes  of his,
which  made her turn her face aside a little. He thought  her comely, almost
beautiful,  in her  shyness, and he took command of the situation himself at
once.
     `Would you  care to sit down?' he  asked, presuming she would not.  The
door stood open.
     `No  thanks!  Sir  Clifford wondered if you would and she delivered her
message, looking unconsciously  into his eyes again. And now his eyes looked
warm and kind, particularly to  a woman, wonderfully warm, and kind,  and at
ease.
     `Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'
     Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of
hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she  ought  to go. But  she  looked
round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with something like
dismay.
     `Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.
     `Quite alone, your Ladyship.'
     `But your mother...?'
     `She lives in her own cottage in the village.'
     `With the child?' asked Connie.
     `With the child!'
     And  his  plain, rather  worn  face  took  on  an  indefinable  look of
derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baking.
     `No,'  he said,  seeing Connie  stand at  a loss, `my mother  comes and
cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'
     Again  Connie looked at  him.  His eyes  were  smiling again,  a little
mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered  at him. He was
in trousers  and flannel shirt and a grey tie,  his  hair soft and damp, his
face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked
as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But
a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him.
     She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked
up at him again, and remarked:
     `I hope I didn't disturb you?'
     The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.
     `Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on,
but  then I  had no idea  who  was knocking.  Nobody  knocks here,  and  the
unexpected sounds ominous.'
     He  went in front of her down  the garden path to hold the gate. In his
shirt, without  the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was,
thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed  him, there was  something young
and bright in his fair hair, and his  quick eyes.  He would  be a man  about
thirty-seven or eight.
     She plodded on into the wood,  knowing  he  was  looking after her;  he
upset her so much, in spite of herself.
     And he, as he  went indoors,  was thinking:  `She's nice,  she's  real!
She's nicer than she knows.'
     She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper, so
unlike a working-man  anyhow; although  he had  something in common with the
local people. But also something very uncommon.
     `The game-keeper,  Mellors,  is a curious kind of person,'  she said to
Clifford; `he might almost be a gentleman.'
     `Might he?' said Clifford. `I hadn't noticed.'
     `But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.
     `I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He
only came out of the army  last year,  less than a year ago.  From  India, I
rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was
an officer's servant,  and  improved on his position.  Some of  the men were
like that. But it  does them no good, they have to  fall back into their old
places when they get home again.'
     Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She  saw in him the  peculiar
tight  rebuff  against anyone of  the  lower classes  who  might  be  really
climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.
     `But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.
     `Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'
     He looked  at her curiously,  uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt
he wasn't  telling  her the real truth;  he wasn't  telling himself the real
truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human
being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.
     Connie  felt  again the  tightness,  niggardliness of  the  men  of her
generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

        Chapter 7

     When Connie went up to  her bedroom she did what she had not done for a
long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge
mirror. She did  not know what she was looking for, or  at, very definitely,
yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.
     And she  thought,  as she had  thought  so often,  what a frail, easily
hurt,  rather  pathetic  thing  a  human body is, naked;  somehow  a  little
unfinished, incomplete!
     She had been supposed to have rather a good figure, but now she was out
of  fashion: a little too female, not enough like an adolescent boy. She was
not  very  tall,  a bit  Scottish  and  short; but she had a certain fluent,
down-slipping grace that might have been beauty. Her skin was faintly tawny,
her  limbs had a  certain  stillness, her  body  should  have  had  a  full,
down-slipping richness; but it lacked something.
     Instead  of  ripening  its  firm, down-running  curves,  her  body  was
flattening and going a little harsh.  It was as if it had not had enough sun
and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.
     Disappointed of its real womanhood,  it  had not succeeded in  becoming
boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.
     Her breasts  were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were
unripe, a little  bitter,  without meaning hanging there. And  her belly had
lost  the fresh,  round gleam it had  had when she was young, in the days of
her German  boy,  who  really  loved  her physically. Then  it was young and
expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little
flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look
so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too  were going
flat, slack, meaningless.
     Her  body  was  going  meaningless,  going  dull  and opaque,  so  much
insignificant substance. It made her  feel immensely depressed and hopeless.
What hope was there? She was old,  old  at  twenty-seven, with  no gleam and
sparkle  in  the  flesh.  Old  through  neglect  and  denial,  yes,  denial.
Fashionable women kept  their  bodies  bright like  delicate  porcelain,  by
external attention. There  was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not
even  as  bright  as that.  The mental  life! Suddenly  she hated  it with a
rushing fury, the swindle!
     She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her
loins. She was getting thinner, but to  her it was not becoming. The crumple
of her waist at the  back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and
it used to be so  gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her
buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German
boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very  nearly. How time went by!
Ten years  dead, and she  was only twenty-seven.  The  healthy boy  with his
fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had  then been so scornful of! Where would
she  find  it  now?  It  was  gone  out of  men.  They had  their  pathetic,
two-seconds spasms  like  Michaelis; but  no healthy human  sensuality, that
warms the blood and freshens the whole being.
     Still she thought the  most beautiful  part of her was the long-sloping
fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and  the slumberous, round
stillness of  the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand,  the Arabs say,  soft and
downward-slipping  with a long slope. Here the  life  still lingered hoping.
But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent.
     But the front of her body made  her miserable. It was already beginning
to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before
it had ever really lived.  She thought of  the child she might somehow bear.
Was she fit, anyhow?
     She  slipped into her nightdress,  and  went to bed, where  she  sobbed
bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation  against Clifford,
and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded
a woman even of her own body.
     Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very
soul.
     But  in the morning,  all the same, she  was  up at  seven,  and  going
downstairs to Clifford. She had  to help him in all the intimate things, for
he  had no man, and  refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who
had  known him  as a boy, helped him, and did any  heavy lifting; but Connie
did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her,
but she had wanted to do what she could.
     So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day
or two;  when  Mrs Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He,  as was
inevitable in the course of time,  took all the service for granted.  It was
natural he should.
     And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded,
had begun to burn  in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous
feeling,  once it  is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one
in  whom it  is  aroused.  Poor  Clifford, he was not to blame.  His was the
greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.
     And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of
the  simple,  warm, physical  contact,  was he not to blame for that? He was
never  really warm,  nor  even  kind,  only thoughtful,  considerate,  in  a
well-bred, cold sort of way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a woman,
as  even  Connie's father could be warm to her, with the warmth of a man who
did himself well, and intended to, but who still could comfort it woman with
a bit of his masculine glow.
     But Clifford was  not like that. His whole race was not like that. They
were all inwardly hard and separate,  and warmth to them was just bad taste.
You had to  get on without it, and hold your own; which was all very well if
you were of the  same class and race. Then you could keep  yourself cold and
be very estimable, and  hold your own, and enjoy the satisfaction of holding
it. But if you were of another class and another race it  wouldn't do; there
was  no fun merely holding your own, and feeling you belonged  to the ruling
class.  What was the  point, when even  the smartest aristocrats  had really
nothing positive  of their own to hold, and  their rule was really  a farce,
not rule at all? What was the point? It was all cold nonsense.
     A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie. What was the good of it all?
What was the good of her sacrifice, her devoting her life  to Clifford? What
was she serving, after  all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no warm human
contacts,  and that was as  corrupt  as  any  low-born  Jew, in craving  for
prostitution  to  the  bitch-goddess,  Success.  Even  Clifford's  cool  and
contactless  assurance that he belonged  to the ruling class didn't  prevent
his tongue lolling out  of his mouth, as he panted  after the bitch-goddess.
After all, Michaelis was really  more  dignified in the matter, and far, far
more  successful.  Really,  if  you  looked  closely  at Clifford,  he was a
buffoon, and a buffoon is more humiliating than a bounder.
     As between the two men, Michaelis really had far more  use for her than
Clifford had.  He had  even more need of her.  Any good  nurse can attend to
crippled legs! And as for the heroic effort, Michaelis was a heroic rat, and
Clifford was very much of a poodle showing off.
     There were people staying in the house, among them Clifford's Aunt Eva,
Lady Bennerley. She was a thin woman of sixty, with a red nose, a widow, and
still something of a grande dame. She belonged to one  of the best families,
and  had  the  character  to  carry  it off.  Connie liked her, she  was  so
perfectly  simple  and [rank, as  far  as she  intended  to  be  frank,  and
superficially  kind. Inside herself she was  a  past-mistress in holding her
own, and holding other people a little lower. She was not at all a snob: far
too sure of herself. She  was perfect at the  social sport of coolly holding
her own, and making other people defer to her.
     She was kind to Connie, and  tried to worm into her  woman's soul  with
the sharp gimlet of her well-born observations.
     `You're quite  wonderful,  in my  opinion,' she said to Connie. `You've
done wonders for Clifford. I never  saw any budding genius myself, and there
he is, all the rage.'  Aunt Eva was quite  complacently proud  of Clifford's
success. Another feather in the family cap!  She didn't care  a straw  about
his books, but why should she?
     `Oh, I don't think it's my doing,' said Connie.
     `It must  be! Can't be anybody else's. And it seems to me you don't get
enough out of it.'
     `How?'
     `Look  at  the  way you are shut up here.  I said to Clifford: If  that
child rebels one day you'll have yourself to thank!'
     `But Clifford never denies me anything,' said Connie.
     `Look  here, my dear child'---and Lady Bennerley laid  her thin hand on
Connie's arm.  `A  woman has to live her  life, or live to repent not having
lived it. Believe  me!' And she  took another sip of brandy, which maybe was
her form of repentance.
     `But I do live my life, don't I?'
     `Not in my idea!  Clifford  should bring  you to London, and let you go
about. His sort of friends are all right for him, but what are they for you?
If I were you I should  think it wasn't good  enough. You'll  let your youth
slip by, and you'll spend your old age, and your  middle  age too, repenting
it.'
     Her ladyship lapsed into contemplative silence, soothed by the brandy.
     But Connie  was not keen on going to London, and being steered into the
smart  world by  Lady Bennerley.  She  didn't feel  really smart, it  wasn't
interesting. And she did feel the peculiar, withering coldness under it all;
like the soil of Labrador, which his gay little flowers on its  surface, and
a foot down is frozen.
     Tommy Dukes  was at Wragby, and another man, Harry Winterslow, and Jack
Strangeways with his wife Olive. The talk was much more desultory  than when
only the cronies were there, and everybody was a bit bored, for the  weather
was bad, and there was only billiards, and the pianola to dance to.
     Olive was reading a book about the future, when babies would be bred in
bottles, and women would be `immunized'.
     `Jolly good thing too!' she said. `Then a woman can live her own life.'
Strangeways wanted children, and she didn't.
     `How'd  you like  to be immunized?' Winterslow  asked her, with an ugly
smile.
     `I hope I am; naturally,' she said. `Anyhow the future's going  to have
more sense, and a woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.'
     `Perhaps she'll float off into space altogether,' said Dukes.
     `I  do  think sufficient civilization ought to eliminate a lot  of  the
physical disabilities,' said  Clifford. `All  the love-business for example,
it might just as well go.  I suppose it  would if  we could breed babies  in
bottles.'
     `No!' cried Olive. `That might leave all the more room for fun.'
     `I   suppose,'   said  Lady   Bennerley,   contemplatively,   `if   the
love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A
little morphine in  all the  air. It  would be  wonderfully  refreshing  for
everybody.'
     `The  government  releasing  ether into the  air  on  Saturdays, for  a
cheerful weekend!' said Jack. `Sounds all right, but  where should we be  by
Wednesday?'
     `So  long  as  you  can  forget your  body you  are  happy,' said  Lady
Bennerley.  `And  the  moment you begin to  be aware of  your body, you  are
wretched. So, if civilization  is  any good, it has to help us to forget our
bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.'
     `Help us  to get rid of our bodies altogether,'  said Winterslow. `It's
quite time man began  to improve  on his own nature, especially the physical
side of it.'
     `Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,' said Connie.
     `It  won't happen,' said Dukes.  `Our old  show  will  come  flop;  our
civilization is going to  fall. It's going down the bottomless pit, down the
chasm.  And  believe me, the  only  bridge  across  the  chasm  will be  the
phallus!'
     `Oh do! do be impossible, General!' cried Olive.
     `I believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva.
     `And what will come after it?' asked Clifford.
     `I haven't  the  faintest idea, but something,  I  suppose,'  said  the
elderly lady.
     `Connie  says  people  like wisps of  smoke, and  Olive  says immunized
women, and  babies  in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is  the bridge to
what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?' said Clifford.
     `Oh, don't bother! let's get on with today,' said Olive. `Only hurry up
with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.'
     `There might even be real  men, in the  next phase,' said Tommy. `Real,
intelligent,  wholesome men,  and  wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be  a
change,  an enormous  change  from us? We're not men,  and the women  aren't
women.  We're  only  cerebrating  make-shifts,  mechanical and  intellectual
experiments. There may  even come  a civilization  of genuine men and women,
instead of our little  lot  of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age  of
seven. It would be  even  more  amazing  than  men of  smoke  or  babies  in
bottles.'
     `Oh,  when people  begin to talk  about real  women,  I give  up,' said
Olive.
     `Certainly  nothing  but  the  spirit  in us  is  worth  having,'  said
Winterslow.
     `Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.
     `Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.
     `But it'll come, in  time, when we've  shoved the cerebral stone away a
bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of
a democracy of pocket.'
     Something  echoed  inside  Connie: `Give me the democracy of touch, the
resurrection of  the  body!'  She didn't at  all know what it meant,  but it
comforted her, as meaningless things may do.
     Anyhow  everything was  terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored
by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva,  by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and
even  by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What  hell it was, the continual rattle of
it!
     Then,  when  all  the  people went, it  was  no  better.  She continued
plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body,
she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by,  with curious painfulness,
yet nothing happened.  Only she was getting  thinner;  even the  housekeeper
noticed it, and asked her  about herself Even Tommy Dukes  insisted she  was
not well, though she said she  was all right. Only she began to be afraid of
the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar  loathsome whiteness of  Carrara
marble,  detestable as  false teeth, which stuck  up on the  hillside, under
Tevershall  church,  and  which she saw with such  grim painfulness from the
park. The  bristling of the  hideous false teeth  of tombstones  on the hill
affected her with  a  grisly kind of  horror. She felt the time not  far off
when  she  would  be buried  there,  added  to  the  ghastly  host under the
tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
     She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri du coeur to
her sister, Hilda.  `I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the matter
with me.'
     Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she  had taken up her abode. She
came in March, alone, driving herself in a  nimble two-seater. Up the  drive
she came, tooting up the  incline, then sweeping round  the oval  of  grass,
where the two  great wild beech-trees stood,  on  the  flat in  front of the
house.
     Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda  pulled up her car, got out, and
kissed her sister.
     `But Connie!' she cried. `Whatever is the matter?'
     `Nothing!' said Connie, rather  shamefacedly; but she knew  how she had
suffered in  contrast to Hilda.  Both  sisters had  the same rather  golden,
glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally  strong, warm physique. But
now Connie was thin and earthy-looking, with a scraggy, yellowish neck, that
stuck out of her jumper.
     `But you're  ill, child!' said Hilda, in the  soft,  rather  breathless
voice that  both sisters had alike. Hilda  was  nearly, but not  quite,  two
years older than Connie.
     `No, not ill. Perhaps I'm bored,' said Connie a little pathetically.
     The light of battle glowed in Hilda's face; she was  a woman, soft  and
still as she seemed, of the old amazon sort, not made to fit with men.
     `This wretched place!' she said softly, looking at poor, old, lumbering
Wragby with real hate. She looked soft and warm herself, as a ripe pear, and
she was an amazon of the real old breed.
     She  went quietly in to Clifford. He thought how  handsome she  looked,
but  also  he shrank from her. His wife's family did not  have his  sort  of
manners, or his sort of etiquette. He considered them rather outsiders,  but
once they got inside they made him jump through the hoop.
     He sat square and well-groomed in  his chair, his hair sleek and blond,
and  his  face  fresh,  his  blue eyes pale,  and  a  little  prominent, his
expression inscrutable, but  well-bred. Hilda thought  it sulky  and stupid,
and he waited. He had an air of aplomb, but Hilda didn't care what he had an
air of; she  was up in arms, and if  he'd been Pope or Emperor it would have
been just the same.
     `Connie's looking awfully  unwell,' she said in her  soft voice, fixing
him with her beautiful, glowering grey eyes.  She looked so maidenly, so did
Connie; but he well knew the tone of Scottish obstinacy underneath.
     `She's a little thinner,' he said.
     `Haven't you done anything about it?'
     `Do  you  think it  necessary?' he  asked,  with  his  suavest  English
stiffness, for the two things often go together.
     Hilda only glowered  at  him without  replying;  repartee was  not  her
forte,  nor Connie's; so  she  glowered, and he was  much more uncomfortable
than if she had said things.
     `I'll take her to a doctor,' said Hilda at length. `Can  you  suggest a
good one round here?'
     `I'm afraid I can't.'
     `Then I'll take her to London, where we have a doctor we trust.'
     Though boiling with rage, Clifford said nothing.
     `I suppose  I may as well stay the night,'  said Hilda, pulling off her
gloves, `and I'll drive her to town tomorrow.'
     Clifford was yellow at the gills with anger, and  at evening the whites
of his eyes  were a  little  yellow too.  He ran  to  liver. But  Hilda  was
consistently modest and maidenly.
     `You  must have a nurse or somebody,  to look after you personally. You
should really have a manservant,'  said Hilda  as they  sat,  with  apparent
calmness,  at coffee after dinner. She  spoke  in her soft, seemingly gentle
way, but Clifford felt she was hitting him on the head with a bludgeon.
     `You think so?' he said coldly.
     `I'm  sure! It's  necessary.  Either  that, or  Father and I must  take
Connie away for some months. This can't go on.'
     `What can't go on?'
     `Haven't  you  looked  at  the child!' asked  Hilda, gazing at him full
stare. He looked rather  like  a huge, boiled  crayfish at the moment; or so
she thought.
     `Connie and I will discuss it,' he said.
     `I've already discussed it with her,' said Hilda.
     Clifford had been  long enough in the hands of nurses; he  hated  them,
because they left him no real privacy. And a manservant!...he couldn't stand
a man hanging round him. Almost better any woman. But why not Connie?
     The two sisters drove off in the morning, Connie looking rather like an
Easter lamb, rather small  beside Hilda, who held the wheel. Sir Malcolm was
away, but the Kensington house was open.
     The doctor examined Connie carefully, and asked her all about her life.
`I  see  your photograph,  and Sir  Clifford's,  in  the illustrated  papers
sometimes. Almost notorieties, aren't you? That's how the quiet little girls
grow  up, though you're only  a quiet little girl even now, in spite of  the
illustrated papers. No, no! There's nothing organically wrong,  but it won't
do! It won't do! Tell  Sir Clifford he's  got to bring you to  town, or take
you abroad, and amuse you. You've got to be amused, got to! Your vitality is
much too low; no reserves, no reserves. The nerves  of the heart a bit queer
already: oh, yes! Nothing but nerves; I'd put you right in a month at Cannes
or  Biarritz. But it  mustn't go  on, mustn't,  I  tell  you,  or I won't be
answerable for consequences. You're  spending your life without renewing it.
You've got to be  amused, properly,  healthily  amused. You're spending your
vitality  without  making  any.  Can't  go on, you  know. Depression!  Avoid
depression!'
     Hilda set her jaw, and that meant something.
     Michaelis heard they were  in town, and came running with  roses. `Why,
whatever's wrong?' he cried. `You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never  saw
such a change! Why ever didn't  you  let me know? Come to Nice with me! Come
down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me. It's  lovely  there just now.
You  want sun! You want life! Why, you're wasting away!  Come away  with me!
Come to Africa!  Oh, hang  Sir Clifford! Chuck him, and come along with  me.
I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come along and  try a life! God's
love! That place Wragby  would kill anybody. Beastly place! Foul place! Kill
anybody! Come away with me into the  sun! It's the sun you  want, of course,
and a bit of normal life.'
     But  Connie's heart simply  stood still  at  the thought  of abandoning
Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No...no! She just couldn't. She
had to go back to Wragby.
     Michaelis was disgusted.  Hilda didn't like Michaelis,  but  she almost
preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands.
     Hilda talked to  Clifford,  who still had yellow eyeballs when they got
back. He,  too, in  his way,  was overwrought;  but he had to  listen to all
Hilda  said, to all the doctor had  said, not  what Michaelis had  said,  of
course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum.
     `Here is the  address  of a good manservant,  who  was with  an invalid
patient of the doctor's till he died  last month. He is really  a  good man,
and fairly sure to come.'
     `But I'm not  an  invalid,  and  I will not  have  a  manservant,' said
Clifford, poor devil.
     `And here are  the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would
do very well; a woman of about fifty,  quiet,  strong, kind, and  in her way
cultured...'
     Clifford only sulked, and would not answer.
     `Very well,  Clifford.  If we  don't settle something  by  to-morrow, I
shall telegraph to Father, and we shall take Connie away.'
     `Will Connie go?' asked Clifford.
     `She doesn't want  to,  but she  knows she must. Mother died of cancer,
brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks.'
     So next day Clifford suggested Mrs  Bolton,  Tevershall  parish  nurse.
Apparently Mrs Betts  had thought of her. Mrs Bolton was  just retiring from
her parish  duties  to  take  up private nursing jobs.  Clifford had a queer
dread of  delivering himself into  the hands  of a  stranger,  but this  Mrs
Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew her.
     The  two sisters at once called  on  Mrs Bolton, in a newish house in a
row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking  woman of
forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar  and apron, just making
herself tea in a small crowded sitting-room.
     Mrs Bolton was most attentive and polite, seemed quite nice, spoke with
a bit of a  broad  slur,  but in heavily  correct English, and  from  having
bossed  the  sick colliers for a good many years, had a very good opinion of
herself, and  a fair amount of assurance. In short, in her tiny way, one  of
the governing class in the village, very much respected.
     `Yes, Lady Chatterley's  not  looking at all well! Why, she used  to be
that bonny, didn't  she now? But  she's  been failing  all winter! Oh,  it's
hard, it is. Poor Sir Clifford! Eh, that war, it's a lot to answer for.'
     And Mrs Bolton  would come to Wragby at once,  if Dr Shardlow would let
her  off. She had another  fortnight's parish nursing to do, by rights,  but
they might get a substitute, you know.
     Hilda posted off to Dr Shardlow, and on the following Sunday Mrs Bolton
drove up in Leiver's  cab  to Wragby with two trunks. Hilda had  talks  with
her; Mrs Bolton was ready  at any moment  to talk.  And she seemed so young!
The  way  the  passion  would  flush  in  her  rather pale  cheek.  She  was
forty-seven.
     Her husband,  Ted Bolton, had been killed in the  pit, twenty-two years
ago, twenty-two years last  Christmas, just  at Christmas  time, leaving her
with  two children, one a baby in arms. Oh, the baby was married now, Edith,
to a young  man in  Boots Cash Chemists in Sheffield. The  other  one  was a
schoolteacher in Chesterfield; she came home weekends, when she wasn't asked
out somewhere.  Young folks enjoyed themselves nowadays, not  like when she,
Ivy Bolton, was young.
     Ted Bolton  was  twenty-eight when lie was killed in  an explosion down
th' pit.  The butty  in  front  shouted to them all to lie down quick, there
were four of them. And they all lay down in  time,  only Ted, and it  killed
him. Then at  the inquiry,  on the  masters' side they  said  Ted  had  been
frightened, and trying to run  away, and not obeying orders, so  it was like
his fault really.  So  the  compensation was only  three hundred pounds, and
they made out as if it was more  of a gift than  legal compensation, because
it was really the man's  own fault. And they wouldn't let her have the money
down;  she wanted to have  a  little  shop.  But they  said  she'd  no doubt
squander it, perhaps  in drink!  So she had to  draw it  thirty shillings  a
week. Yes, she had to go every Monday morning down to the offices, and stand
there a couple  of hours  waiting her  turn;  yes, for almost four years she
went every  Monday. And what  could she do with  two little children  on her
hands?  But Ted's mother was very  good to her.  When the baby  could toddle
she'd  keep both  the children  for the day, while  she, Ivy Bolton, went to
Sheffield, and attended classes in ambulance, and  then the  fourth year she
even  took a  nursing course  and got  qualified.  She  was determined to be
independent  and  keep  her  children.  So  she  was  assistant  at Uthwaite
hospital,  just a little  place,  for a  while. But  when  the Company,  the
Tevershall Colliery Company, really Sir Geoffrey, saw that she  could get on
by herself, they were very good  to  her,  gave her the parish nursing,  and
stood by her, she  would  say that for  them. And she'd  done it ever since,
till now it  was getting a  bit much for  her;  she needed  something  a bit
lighter, there was such a lot  of traipsing around if  you  were a  district
nurse.
     `Yes, the Company's been very good to me, I always say it. But I should
never  forget what they said about Ted,  for he was as steady and fearless a
chap  as ever set  foot  on the  cage, and it was as good  as branding him a
coward. But there, he was dead, and could say nothing to none of 'em.'
     It was  a queer mixture of feelings the woman showed as she talked. She
liked the  colliers, whom  she  had nursed for so  long; but she  felt  very
superior  to  them.  She felt  almost  upper class; and at the  same time  a
resentment against the ruling  class smouldered in her.  The masters!  In  a
dispute between  masters and men, she was always for the men. But when there
was no question of contest, she was pining  to be superior, to be one of the
upper class.  The upper classes  fascinated her, appealing  to  her peculiar
English  passion  for  superiority. She  was  thrilled  to  come to  Wragby;
thrilled to  talk to Lady Chatterley,  my  word,  different from  the common
colliers'  wives! She said so in so many words. Yet  one could  see a grudge
against the Chatterleys peep out in her; the grudge against the masters.
     `Why,  yes,  of course, it would wear Lady Chatterley out! It's a mercy
she had a sister to come and help her.  Men don't think, high and low-alike,
they take what a woman does for them for granted. Oh, I've told the colliers
off  about it many a time. But  it's  very hard for  Sir Clifford, you know,
crippled like that. They were always a haughty family, standoffish in a way,
as they've a right to be.  But then  to be brought down  like that! And it's
very hard on Lady Chatterley, perhaps harder on her. What she misses! I only
had  Ted three years, but  my word, while I had  him I had a husband I could
never forget. He  was one in  a thousand, and jolly as  the day. Who'd  ever
have thought he'd get killed?  I  don't believe it to this day somehow, I've
never  believed it, though I washed him  with my own hands. But he was never
dead for me, he never was. I never took it in.'
     This was a new voice in Wragby,  very new for Connie to hear; it roused
a new ear in her.
     For  the first week  or  so, Mrs Bolton,  however,  was very  quiet  at
Wragby,  her  assured,  bossy  manner  left her, and  she was nervous.  With
Clifford she was shy, almost frightened, and silent. He liked that, and soon
recovered his self-possession,  letting her do things  for him without  even
noticing her.
     `She's  a useful nonentity!' he said. Connie opened her eyes in wonder,
but she  did not  contradict  him.  So  different  are  impressions  on  two
different people!
     And he soon became rather superb, somewhat  lordly  with the nurse. She
had rather expected it, and he played up without  knowing. So susceptible we
are  to  what is  expected  of us! The colliers had been  so  like children,
talking to her, and telling her what hurt  them, while she bandaged them, or
nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost  super-human  in
her administrations. Now  Clifford made her feel  small, and like a servant,
and she accepted it without a word, adjusting herself to the upper classes.
     She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to
administer  to  him. And  she  said  very humbly: `Shall I do  this now, Sir
Clifford? Shall I do that?'
     `No, leave it for a time. I'll have it done later.'
     `Very well, Sir Clifford.'
     `Come in again in half an hour.'
     `Very well, Sir Clifford.'
     `And just take those old papers out, will you?'
     `Very well, Sir Clifford.'
     She  went softly, and in  half an hour she  came softly  again. She was
bullied, but she didn't mind. She  was experiencing the  upper  classes. She
neither resented nor  disliked  Clifford;  he was just part of a phenomenon,
the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be
known.  She felt  more at home  with Lady Chatterley, and after all it's the
mistress of the house matters most.
     Mrs  Bolton  helped Clifford  to bed  at  night, and  slept  across the
passage from his  room, and came if  he rang  for her in the night. She also
helped  him in  the morning, and  soon valeted him  completely, even shaving
him, in her  soft, tentative woman's way. She  was  very good and competent,
and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He  wasn't so very different
from  the colliers after all, when you lathered  his chin, and softly rubbed
the  bristles. The stand-offishness  and the lack of frankness didn't bother
her; she was having a new experience.
     Clifford,  however,  inside  himself,  never  quite forgave  Connie for
giving up her personal care of him to a strange  hired woman. It killed,  he
said to himself, the real  flower of the intimacy  between  him and her. But
Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather
like an orchid, a bulb stuck  parasitic on  her tree of life, and producing,
to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.
     Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in
her room, and sing: `Touch not the nettle, for the bonds  of love are ill to
loose.' She had  not realized  till lately how ill to loose they were, these
bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She was so glad to be
alone,  not  always  to  have  to  talk  to  him.  When  he  was   alone  he
tapped-tapped-tapped  on  a  typewriter, to infinity.  But  when he was  not
`working',  and  she was  there, he talked, always  talked;  infinite  small
analysis of  people and motives, and results,  characters and personalities,
till now she had  had enough.  For years she  had loved  it,  until she  had
enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.
     It  was as if thousands  and thousands of little roots and  threads  of
consciousness in  him  and her had grown  together into a tangled mass, till
they could crowd no more,  and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she
was  unravelling  the  tangle of  his consciousness and  hers, breaking  the
threads gently, one by one, with patience  and impatience to  get clear. But
the bonds of such love are more ill to loose  even than  most  bonds; though
Mrs Bolton's coming had been a great help.
     But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk
or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that  Mrs  Bolton should come at
ten to disturb them. At  ten o'clock Connie could go upstairs  and be alone.
Clifford was in good hands with Mrs Bolton.
     Mrs  Bolton ate with Mrs Betts in the  housekeeper's  room,  since they
were  all  agreeable.  And it  was curious how  much  closer  the  servants'
quarters seemed  to  have come; right  up to the doors of Clifford's  study,
when before they  were  so remote. For Mrs Betts would sometimes sit in  Mrs
Bolton's room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and felt  somehow  the
strong,  other  vibration   of  the  working   people  almost  invading  the
sitting-room, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed was Wragby merely
by Mrs Bolton's coming.
     And  Connie felt  herself  released, in  another world,  she  felt  she
breathed differently.  But still she was  afraid  of how many of her  roots,
perhaps mortal  ones, were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still,  she breathed
freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.

        Chapter 8

     Mrs  Bolton also  kept  a  cherishing eye on  Connie, feeling she  must
extend to her her female and professional  protection. She was always urging
her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie
had  got into the habit of sitting still by the fire, pretending to read; or
to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.
     It was a blowy day soon  after  Hilda had gone,  that Mrs Bolton  said:
`Now  why  don't you go for  a walk through the wood, and look at  the daffs
behind  the  keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd  see  in  a
day's march. And you  could put  some in your room; wild daffs are always so
cheerful-looking, aren't they?'
     Connie  took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils!
After  all,  one  could  not  stew  in  one's  own juice.  The  spring  came
back...`Seasons return,  but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of
Ev'n or Morn.'
     And  the  keeper,  his thin, white  body, like a  lonely pistil  of  an
invisible flower! She had forgotten  him  in her unspeakable depression. But
now something roused...`Pale beyond porch and portal'...the thing  to do was
to pass the porches and the portals.
     She was  stronger,  she could  walk better,  and iii the  wood the wind
would not be so  tiring  as it was across the bark, flatten against her. She
wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful,  carrion-bodied
people. `Ye must be  born again! I believe in the resurrection  of the body!
Except a grain of wheat fall  into  the earth and  die, it shall by no means
bring forth.  When the crocus cometh  forth I  too will emerge  and  see the
sun!' In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.
     Little  gusts  of sunshine  blew,  strangely  bright, and  lit  up  the
celandines at  the  wood's  edge,  under  the hazel-rods, they  spangled out
bright and yellow.  And  the wood  was  still, stiller, but yet  gusty  with
crossing  sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood  seemed pale
with  the pallor of  endless  little  anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor.
`The  world  has grown  pale  with  thy breath.' But it was  the  breath  of
Persephone, this time; she was out  of hell on  a cold morning. Cold breaths
of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among
the twigs.  It,  too,  was caught and trying to  tear itself free, the wind,
like  Absalom. How  cold  the  anemones looked,  bobbing  their  naked white
shoulders over  crinoline  skirts of  green. But they stood  it. A few first
bleached little primroses too,  by  the  path,  and  yellow  buds  unfolding
themselves.
     The  roaring  and swaying was  overhead,  only  cold currents came down
below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood,  and the colour flew in her
cheeks, and burned  blue in her eyes. She  walked  ploddingly, picking a few
primroses  and  the  first violets, that  smelled sweet  and cold, sweet and
cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.
     Till  she came  to the clearing, at the end of  the wood,  and  saw the
green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy,  like the flesh underneath
a mushroom, its stone warmed  in a burst of sun. And there was  a sparkle of
yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no sound; no smoke from the
chimney; no dog barking.
     She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up;  she had an
excuse, to see the daffodils.
     And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering
and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as
they turned them away from the wind.
     They shook their  bright,  sunny little rags in bouts of distress.  But
perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.
     Constance  sat  down  with her  back to a  young  pine-tree, that wayed
against  her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up. The erect,
alive thing, with  its  top in the  sun! And she watched the  daffodils turn
golden,  in  a burst of sun that was warm on  her  hands  and lap.  Even she
caught the faint, tarry scent of  the flowers. And then, being so  still and
alone, she seemed to bet into the current of her own proper destiny. She had
been  fastened  by a  rope,  and jagging  and snarring  like  a boat  at its
moorings; now she was loose and adrift.
     The sunshine  gave way to chill; the  daffodils were in shadow, dipping
silently. So they would dip through the  day  and  the long  cold night.  So
strong in their frailty!
     She rose, a  little  stiff, took  a  few  daffodils, and went down. She
hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one  or  two to go with her.
She would  have  to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she  hated  it,
especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this
wind.
     When she got home Clifford asked her:
     `Where did you go?'
     `Right across the wood! Look,  aren't the little daffodils adorable? To
think they should come out of the earth!'
     `Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.
     `But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction,
that surprised her a little.
     The  next afternoon she went to the wood  again. She followed the broad
riding that  swerved round  and  up through the larches to a  spring  called
John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower  in the darkness
of larches.  But the icy little spring softly  pressed upwards from its tiny
well-bed  of  pure,  reddish-white  pebbles.  How  icy  and  clear  it  was!
Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles.  She heard  the
faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even
above  the  hissing  boom  of  the  larchwood,  that  spread its  bristling,
leafless, wolfish darkness  on the down-slope, she heard  the  tinkle as  of
tiny water-bells.
     This  place was a little sinister, cold, damp.  Yet  the well must have
been  a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no  more. Its tiny cleared
space was lush and cold and dismal.
     She rose and  went slowly towards home. As  she went  she heard a faint
tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a
woodpecker? It was surely hammering.
     She  walked on, listening. And then  she noticed a narrow track between
young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But  she  felt  it had
been used.  She turned  down it adventurously, between the thick young firs,
which  gave way soon to  the old oak wood. She  followed the track, and  the
hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the  windy  wood, for trees make  a
silence even in their noise of wind.
     She saw  a secret  little clearing,  and  a secret little hot  made  of
rustic poles. And she had  never been here before!  She realized  it was the
quiet  place where  the growing  pheasants were reared; the  keeper  in  his
shirt-sleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with a short,
sharp bark, and  the keeper lifted his face  suddenly  and saw her. He had a
startled look in his eyes.
     He  straightened himself and  saluted, watching  her in silence, as she
came forward with  weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion; he  cherished
his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.
     `I  wondered  what the  hammering  was,' she  said,  feeling  weak  and
breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at her.
     `Ah'm gettin' th' coops ready for th' young  bods,'  he said,  in broad
vernacular.
     She did not know what to say, and she felt weak. `I  should like to sit
down a bit,' she said.
     `Come  and sit 'ere i' th'  'ut,' he said, going in front of her to the
hut,  pushing aside  some  timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic chair,
made of hazel sticks.
     `Am Ah t' light yer a little fire?' he asked,  with the curious naÏvetÉ
of the dialect.
     `Oh, don't bother,' she replied.
     But he looked  at  her hands; they were rather blue. So he quickly took
some larch  twigs  to the  little brick fire-place in the corner, and  in  a
moment the yellow flame was  running up the  chimney. He made a place by the
brick hearth.
     `Sit 'ere then a bit, and warm yer,' he said.
     She obeyed him. He  had that  curious kind of protective  authority she
obeyed  at once.  So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze,  and dropped
logs on the fire, whilst outside he  was hammering again. She did not really
want to sit,  poked in  a corner by the  fire; she would rather have watched
from the door, but she was being looked after, so she had to submit.
     The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little
rustic table and stool beside her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then a big
box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet,
traps,  things in  sacks,  his coat.  It had  no  window, the light  came in
through the  open  door. It was a jumble, but  also it was a sort  of little
sanctuary.
     She listened  to  the tapping of the man's hammer; it was not so happy.
He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous one! A
woman! He had  reached the point where all  he  wanted on  earth  was  to be
alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a hired man,
and these people were his masters.
     Especially  he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He
feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not
be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he  would  die. His recoil away
from the outer  world  was  complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide
himself there!
     Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew
hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work.
He  seemed  not  to  notice her,  but  he  knew. Yet  he  worked on,  as  if
absorbedly, and his brown  dog sat on  her tail near  him,  and surveyed the
untrustworthy world.
     Slender, quiet and  quick,  the  man finished  the coop he was  making,
turned it over, tried  the sliding door,  then set it aside.  Then he  rose,
went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he was  working.
Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke  in his hands; he began to draw the
nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and  he gave absolutely
no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.
     So Connie watched him fixedly. And  the same solitary aloneness she had
seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an
animal that  works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that  recoils away,
away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from
her even now. It was the stillness, and the  timeless sort of patience, in a
man impatient and passionate,  that touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his
bent head,  the  quick quiet hands, the crouching of  his slender, sensitive
loins; something patient and withdrawn.  She felt  his  experience  had been
deeper and wider  than her  own; much  deeper  and wider, and  perhaps  more
deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.
     So she  sat in the doorway of  the hut  in  a dream, utterly unaware of
time and of particular  circumstances.  She  was  so drifted  away  that  he
glanced up at her  quickly,  and saw the utterly still, waiting look  on her
face.  To him it was a  look of waiting. And a  little thin  tongue  of fire
suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and  he groaned in
spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human
contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and  leave him to his
own  privacy. He dreaded her  will,  her female will,  and her modern female
insistency. And  above all  he dreaded  her  cool,  upper-class impudence of
having her own way.  For after  all he was only  a hired  man. He  hated her
presence there.
     Connie came to herself  with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon
was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the man,
who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes  watching
her.
     `It is so nice  here, so restful,' she  said.  `I have never been  here
before.'
     `No?'
     `I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.
     `Yes?'
     `Do you lock the hut when you're not here?'
     `Yes, your Ladyship.'
     `Do  you  think  I  could have  a key too,  so that  I  could  sit here
sometimes? Are there two keys?'
     `Not as Ah know on, ther' isna.'
     He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated;  he was putting up
an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?
     `Couldn't  we  get another  key?'  she  asked in  her  soft voice, that
underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.
     `Another!' he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with
derision.
     `Yes, a duplicate,' she said, flushing.
     `'Appen Sir Clifford 'ud know,' he said, putting her off.
     `Yes!' she said,  `he might have another. Otherwise we  could  have one
made from the one you have. It  would only take a  day or so, I suppose. You
could spare your key for so long.'
     `Ah canna tell yer, m'Lady! Ah know nob'dy as ma'es keys round 'ere.'
     Connie suddenly flushed with anger.
     `Very well!' she said. `I'll see to it.'
     `All right, your Ladyship.'
     Their eyes met.  His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and
indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.
     But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he  disliked her, when she went
against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.
     `Good afternoon!'
     `Afternoon,  my Lady!' He  saluted  and turned  abruptly  away. She had
wakened the sleeping  dogs  of old voracious anger in him, anger against the
self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!
     And she was angry  against the self-willed  male. A  servant  too!  She
walked sullenly home.
     She found Mrs Bolton  under the  great beech-tree on the knoll, looking
for her.
     `I just wondered if you'd be coming, my Lady,' the woman said brightly.
     `Am I late?' asked Connie.
     `Oh only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.'
     `Why didn't you make it then?'
     `Oh, I  don't think  it's hardly my  place. I don't  think Sir Clifford
would like it at all, my Lady.'
     `I don't see why not,' said Connie.
     She  went indoors to Clifford's study, where  the  old brass kettle was
simmering on the tray.
     `Am I  late, Clifford?'  she  said, putting  down  the few  flowers and
taking up the  tea-caddy, as she stood before the tray in her hat and scarf.
`I'm sorry! Why didn't you let Mrs Bolton make the tea?'
     `I didn't think  of  it,' he  said ironically. `I don't  quite  see her
presiding at the tea-table.'
     `Oh, there's nothing sacrosanct about a silver tea-pot,' said Connie.
     He glanced up at her curiously.
     `What did you do all afternoon?' he said.
     `Walked and sat  in  a sheltered place.  Do  you  know  there are still
berries on the big holly-tree?'
     She took off her scarf, but  not her hat, and sat down to make tea. The
toast  would certainly be  leathery. She put the  tea-cosy over the tea-pot,
and rose  to get a little glass for her violets. The poor flowers hung over,
limp on their stalks.
     `They'll revive again!'  she said,  putting  them before him  in  their
glass for him to smell.
     `Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,' he quoted.
     `I  don't see  a bit  of connexion with the  actual violets,' she said.
`The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.'
     She poured him his tea.
     `Do  you  think there is a second  key to that little hut not far  from
John's Well, where the pheasants are reared?' she said.
     `There may be. Why?'
     `I happened to find it  today---and I'd never seen it before.  I  think
it's a darling place. I could sit there sometimes, couldn't I?'
     `Was Mellors there?'
     `Yes! That's how I found it: his hammering. He didn't seem  to like  my
intruding at all. In fact he was  almost  rude when I  asked about a  second
key.'
     `What did he say?'
     `Oh, nothing: just his manner; and he said he knew nothing about keys.'
     `There  may be one in Father's study. Betts knows them all, they're all
there. I'll get him to look.'
     `Oh do!' she said.
     `So Mellors was almost rude?'
     `Oh,  nothing, really!  But  I don't  think he  wanted  me  to have the
freedom of the castle, quite.'
     `I don't suppose he did.'
     `Still, I don't see  why he should mind. It's not his home, after  all!
It's not his private abode. I don't see  why I shouldn't sit there if I want
to.'
     `Quite!' said Clifford. `He thinks too much of himself, that man.'
     `Do you think he does?'
     `Oh, decidedly! He thinks he's something exceptional. You know he had a
wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to India, I
believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for a time; always
was  connected  with  horses, a clever  fellow that way.  Then  some  Indian
colonel took a  fancy to him, and he  was made a lieutenant. Yes,  they gave
him a commission. I believe  he  went back to India with his colonel, and up
to the north-west frontier. He was ill; he was a pension. He didn't come out
of the army till last  year,  I believe, and then, naturally, it  isn't easy
for a man  like that to get  back  to his own level. He's bound to flounder.
But he does his duty all right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having
any of the Lieutenant Mellors touch.'
     `How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'
     `He doesn't...except by fits  and starts. He can  speak perfectly well,
for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again, he'd
better speak as the ranks speak.'
     `Why didn't you tell me about him before?'
     `Oh, I've no  patience with these  romances. They're  the  ruin  of all
order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened.'
     Connie was  inclined to agree. What was the good of discontented people
who fitted in nowhere?
     In the spell of fine weather Clifford, too, decided to go to the  wood.
The wind was cold,  but  not so  tiresome, and  the  sunshine  was like life
itself, warm and full.
     `It's amazing,' said Connie, `how  different one feels  when there's  a
really  fresh  fine day. Usually one feels the very air is half dead. People
are killing the very air.'
     `Do you think people are doing it?' he asked.
     `I  do. The steam of so  much  boredom, and discontent and anger out of
all the people, just kills the vitality in the air. I'm sure of it.'
     `Perhaps some condition of the atmosphere  lowers the vitality  of  the
people?' he said.
     `No, it's man that poisons the universe,' she asserted.
     `Fouls his own nest,' remarked Clifford.
     The chair puffed on. In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold,
and in  sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming with
the  joy of life,  just as good as  in past days, when people could  exclaim
along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom. Connie  gathered a
few for Clifford.
     He took them and looked at them curiously.
     `Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' he quoted. `It seems to fit
flowers so much better than Greek vases.'
     `Ravished is  such  a  horrid word!' she  said. `It's only  people  who
ravish things.'
     `Oh, I don't know...snails and things,' he said.
     `Even snails only eat them, and bees don't ravish.'
     She was  angry  with him, turning  everything  into words. Violets were
Juno's  eyelids,  and windflowers were  on  ravished  brides. How  she hated
words,  always  coming  between  her  and life: they did  the ravishing,  if
anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out  of
living things.
     The walk with Clifford was not quite a success.  Between him and Connie
there was a tension that each  pretended  not to notice, but  there  it was.
Suddenly, with all the force of  her  female instinct, she  was  shoving him
off. She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his consciousness, his
words,  his  obsession  with himself,  his endless  treadmill obsession with
himself, and his own words.
     The weather came  rainy again. But after a  day or two she went  out in
the rain, and she went  to  the  wood. And  once there, she went towards the
hut. It was raining, but not so cold,  and  the  wood  felt  so  silent  and
remote, inaccessible in the dusk of rain.
     She came to the clearin