xulted. But
who was he? Who was he? Perhaps Mrs Flint would provide a clue.
     Connie would  not  take her bath this evening. The sense  of his  flesh
touching her, his very stickiness upon her, was dear to  her, and in a sense
holy.
     Clifford was very uneasy. He would not let her go after dinner, and she
had  wanted  so much to  be  alone. She  looked  at  him, but  was curiously
submissive.
     `Shall we play a game, or shall I read to you, or what shall it be?' he
asked uneasily.
     `You read to me,' said Connie.
     `What shall I read---verse or prose? Or drama?'
     `Read Racine,' she said.
     It had been one of his  stunts in the past, to  read Racine in the real
French grand manner, but he  was rusty  now, and a little self-conscious; he
really  preferred  the  loudspeaker. But Connie  was sewing, sewing a little
frock silk of primrose silk, cut out of one of her dresses, for Mrs  Flint's
baby. Between coming home and dinner she had cut it out,  and she sat in the
soft quiescent  rapture of  herself sewing, while the  noise  of the reading
went on.
     Inside  herself  she  could  feel the  humming  of  passion,  like  the
after-humming of deep bells.
     Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She  caught  the sense
after the words had gone.
     `Yes! Yes!' she said, looking up at him. `It is splendid.'
     Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of  her eyes, and of her
soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and still.
She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him.
So  he went  on  helplessly with his  reading, and the throaty sound of  the
French was like the wind in the chimneys to her. Of the Racine she heard not
one syllable.
     She  was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing  with the
dim, glad moan of  spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same world
with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful  feet, beautiful  in
the phallic mystery.  And in herself in all  her veins, she felt him and his
child. His child was in all her veins, like a twilight.
     `For  hands she hath none, nor eyes,  nor  feet, nor golden Treasure of
hair...'
     She was like  a  forest,  like  the  dark  interlacing of the  oakwood,
humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds.  Meanwhile the birds of desire
were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.
     But  Clifford's  voice went  on,  clapping  and  gurgling with  unusual
sounds. How  extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there over
the book,  queer  and rapacious and civilized, with broad shoulders  and  no
real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold inflexible  will of
some bird,  and no warmth, no  warmth at all! One of those  creatures of the
afterwards,  that  have no soul, but  an extra-alert  will,  cold  will. She
shuddered a little, afraid of him. But then, the soft warm flame of life was
stronger than he, and the real things were hidden from him.
     The reading  finished. She  was startled.  She looked up, and was  more
startled still  to see Clifford  watching her with pale, uncanny eyes,  like
hate.
     `Thank you so much! You do read Racine beautifully!' she said softly.
     `Almost  as beautifully as you  listen  to him,' he said cruelly. `What
are you making?' he asked.
     `I'm making a child's dress, for Mrs Flint's baby.'
     He turned away. A child! A child! That was all her obsession.
     `After all,'  he said in a  declamatory voice, `one gets all one  wants
out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape  are more important
than disorderly emotions.
     She watched  him  with  wide, vague,  veiled eyes. `Yes, I'm sure  they
are,' she said.
     `The modern world has only vulgarized emotion by letting it loose. What
we need is classic control.'
     `Yes,' she said slowly,  thinking of him listening with vacant  face to
the  emotional idiocy of  the radio. `People  pretend to have emotions,  and
they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic.'
     `Exactly!' he said.
     As a matter of fact, he was tired. This evening had tired him. He would
rather  have  been  with  his  technical  books,  or  his  pit-manager,   or
listening-in to the radio.
     Mrs Bolton came in with two glasses  of malted  milk: for Clifford,  to
make him  sleep, and for  Connie,  to  fatten her  again.  It was  a regular
night-cap she had introduced.
     Connie  was  glad to go, when she had drunk her glass, and thankful she
needn't  help Clifford to bed. She took  his glass and  put it on  the tray,
then took the tray, to leave it outside.
     `Goodnight Clifford!  Do sleep well!  The  Racine gets into one like  a
dream. Goodnight!'
     She had  drifted  to the  door.  She  was  going  without  kissing  him
goodnight.  He watched her with sharp, cold  eyes. So! She did not even kiss
him goodnight, after he had spent an evening  reading to her. Such depths of
callousness in  her! Even if the kiss  was but a  formality, it  was on such
formalities that life  depends. She  was a Bolshevik, really. Her  instincts
were Bolshevistic!  He gazed  coldly and angrily at the door  whence she had
gone. Anger!
     And again the  dread  of the  night came  on him.  He was a  network of
nerves,  anden he was not braced up  to work, and so full of energy: or when
he  was  not  listening-in,  and so utterly  neuter:  then he was haunted by
anxiety and a  sense of dangerous impending void. He was  afraid. And Connie
could keep the fear off him, if she would.  But it was obvious she wouldn't,
she wouldn't. She was  callous, cold and callous to all that he did for her.
He gave up his life for her, and she was callous to him. She only wanted her
own way. `The lady loves her will.'
     Now  it was  a baby she was obsessed by. Just so that it should be  her
own, all her own, and not his!
     Clifford was so healthy, considering. He looked  so well  and ruddy  in
the face, his shoulders were broad and strong, his chest deep, he had put on
flesh. And yet, at the same time,  he was afraid of death. A terrible hollow
seemed to menace him somewhere,  somehow,  a  void, and into  this void  his
energy would  collapse. Energyless, he felt at times  he  was  dead,  really
dead.
     So his rather prominent pale eyes had  a queer look, furtive, and yet a
little cruel, so cold: and at  the same time, almost impudent. It was a very
odd look,  this  look  of impudence:  as if he were  triumphing over life in
spite of life. `Who  knoweth the mysteries of  the will---for it can triumph
even against the angels---'
     But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful
indeed,  when annihilation  pressed in  on him  on every side.  Then it  was
ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.
     But now he could ring for Mrs Bolton. And  she would always come.  That
was a great comfort. She would come in her dressing gown, with her hair in a
plait down her back, curiously girlish and  dim, though the brown  plait was
streaked with grey. And she would make  him coffee or camomile tea,  and she
would play chess  or  piquet with him. She  had a  woman's  queer faculty of
playing even chess well enough, when she was three parts asleep, well enough
to make her worth beating.  So, in  the silent  intimacy of  the night, they
sat, or she sat and he lay on the  bed, with  the reading-lamp shedding  its
solitary light on  them, she almost gone in sleep, he almost gone in a  sort
of fear, and they  played, played together---then they  had a  cup of coffee
and a biscuit  together, hardly speaking, in the silence of night, but being
a reassurance to one another.
     And this night she  was wondering who Lady Chatterley's  lover was. And
she was thinking of her own Ted, so long dead, yet for her never quite dead.
And when she thought of him, the old, old grudge against the world  rose up,
but especially against the masters, that  they had killed him. They had  not
really killed him. Yet, to her, emotionally, they had. And somewhere deep in
herself because of it, she was a nihilist, and really anarchic.
     In   her  half-sleep,  thoughts  of   her  Ted  and  thoughts  of  Lady
Chatterley's unknown lover commingled, and then she felt she shared with the
other woman a great grudge against Sir Clifford and all he stood for. At the
same time she was playing piquet with him, and they were gambling sixpences.
And it was a source of satisfaction to be playing piquet with a baronet, and
even losing sixpences to him.
     When  they  played  cards, they  always  gambled.  It  made  him forget
himself. And  he usually won. Tonight too he was winning. So he would not go
to sleep till the first dawn  appeared. Luckily it began  to appear  at half
past four or thereabouts.
     Connie was in bed, and fast asleep all this time.  But the keeper, too,
could not rest. He had closed the coops and made his round of the wood, then
gone home and eaten supper. But he did not go to bed. Instead he sat by  the
fire and thought.
     He thought of his boyhood in  Tevershall, and of his five or six  years
of married life. He thought of his wife, and always bitterly. She had seemed
so brutal. But  he had not seen  her now since  1915, in the spring  when he
joined  up. Yet there she was,  not three miles away, and more  brutal  than
ever. He hoped never to see her again while he lived.
     He thought of his life abroad, as  a soldier. India, Egypt, then  India
again:  the blind, thoughtless  life  with the  horses: the colonel who  had
loved him and  whom  he had loved:  the several  years that he had  been  an
officer, a lieutenant with  a very fair chance of  being a captain. Then the
death of the colonel  from pneumonia,  and his own narrow escape from death:
his damaged  health: his deep restlessness: his leaving the  army and coming
back to England to be a working man again.
     He was temporizing with life. He had thought he would be safe, at least
for a  time, in this wood. There was no shooting as yet: he had  to rear the
pheasants. He would have no guns to serve. He would be alone, and apart from
life, which was all he wanted. He had to have some sort of a background. And
this was  his native place. There was even  his mother, though she had never
meant  very much to him. And he could  go on in life,  existing from day  to
day, without connexion and without hope. For he did not know what to do with
himself.
     He did not know what to do  with himself. Since he had been  an officer
for some  years, and had  mixed among the other officers and civil servants,
with their wives and families, he  had lost  all ambition to `get on'. There
was a toughness, a curious rubbernecked toughness and unlivingness about the
middle and  upper classes, as he had known them, which just left him feeling
cold and different from them.
     So,  he  had come  back  to his own class.  To find  there, what he had
forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and a vulgarity of manner
extremely distasteful. He admitted now at last, how important manner was. He
admitted, also, how important it was  even to  pretend not to care about the
halfpence  and the  small things of life. But among the  common people there
was no  pretence. A penny more or less on the bacon was  worse than a change
in the Gospel. He could not stand it.
     And again, there  was the wage-squabble. Having lived among  the owning
classes,  he  knew the  utter  futility  of expecting  any  solution of  the
wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not
to care, not to care about the wages.
     Yet, if  you were poor and wretched you  had to  care. Anyhow,  it  was
becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a
great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care
about money.
     And  what  then? What did  life offer apart  from the  care  of  money?
Nothing.
     Yet he  could live  alone, in the wan satisfaction  of being alone, and
raise pheasants to  be shot ultimately  by fat  men after  breakfast. It was
futility, futility to the nth power.
     But why  care, why  bother? And he had not cared nor bothered till now,
when this woman had come into  his  life. He was nearly ten years older than
she. And he  was a thousand years older in  experience,  starting  from  the
bottom. The  connexion between them was growing closer. He could see the day
when it would clinch up and they would  have to make  a life together.  `For
the bonds of love are ill to loose!'
     And what then? What then? Must he start  again,  with nothing  to start
on? Must  he entangle  this woman? Must he have the horrible  broil with her
lame husband? And also some sort of horrible broil with his own brutal wife,
who hated him? Misery! Lots of misery! And he was no longer young and merely
buoyant. Neither  was he the  insouciant  sort.  Every  bitterness and every
ugliness would hurt him: and the woman!
     But even if they got clear of Sir Clifford and of his own wife, even if
they got clear, what were they going  to do? What was he,  himself  going to
do?  What was  he going to  do with his  life?  For he must do something. He
couldn't be a mere hanger-on, on her money and his own very small pension.
     It was the insoluble. He could only think of going to America, to try a
new air. He disbelieved in the dollar utterly. But  perhaps,  perhaps  there
was something else.
     He could not rest  nor even go  to bed. After  sitting in  a stupor  of
bitter thoughts until midnight, he got  suddenly from his chair and  reached
for his coat and gun.
     `Come on, lass,' he said to the dog. `We're best outside.'
     It  was a starry night, but  moonless.  He went on a  slow, scrupulous,
soft-stepping and stealthy round. The only thing  he had to contend with was
the  colliers  setting  snares for  rabbits,  particularly  the Stacks  Gate
colliers, on the Marehay side. But it was breeding season, and even colliers
respected it  a little. Nevertheless the stealthy  beating  of the round  in
search of poachers soothed his nerves and took his mind off his thoughts.
     But  when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds---it was
nearly a five-mile walk---he was  tired. He went to the top of the knoll and
looked out.  There was no  sound  save the noise, the faint shuffling  noise
from Stacks Gate  colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly
any  lights, save the  brilliant electric rows at the works. The  world  lay
darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half past  two. But even in its  sleep it
was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great
lorry  on the road, and flashing with  some  rosy  lightning flash  from the
furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke
of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed
stirring in its sleep.
     It was cold, and he was coughing. A  fine cold  draught  blew over  the
knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he  would have given all  he had or ever
might  have  to hold her warm in his  arms,  both  of  them  wrapped  in one
blanket, and  sleep. All hopes of eternity and  all gain  from the  past  he
would have  given  to have her there, to  be wrapped  warm with  him  in one
blanket, and  sleep, only sleep. It  seemed the sleep with  the woman in his
arms was the only necessity.
     He went  to the hut, and wrapped himself in  the blanket and lay on the
floor to sleep. But he  could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly
his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness
cruelly. He wanted  her, to touch her, to hold her fast  against  him in one
moment of completeness and sleep.
     He got up again and went out, towards  the park gates  this  time: then
slowly along the path towards the  house. It  was nearly four o'clock, still
clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was used  to the dark,  he could see
well.
     Slowly, slowly the great house drew him,  as a  magnet. He wanted to be
near her. It was not desire, not that. It  was the cruel sense of unfinished
aloneness, that needed  a silent woman folded in his arms.  Perhaps he could
find her. Perhaps  he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to
her. For the need was imperious.
     He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round
the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand
sweep  round a lozenge of grass in front of the  entrance.  He could already
see the  two magnificent beeches  which stood in  this big level lozenge  in
front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.
     There was  the house,  low and long and obscure, with one light burning
downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the woman who
held the other end of  the frail  thread which drew him so mercilessly, that
he did not know.
     He  went  a little nearer,  gun in hand, and  stood  motionless  on the
drive, watching the  house. Perhaps even now he  could find her, come at her
in  some  way. The house was not  impregnable: he was as clever  as burglars
are. Why not come to her?
     He stood motionless, waiting, while  the dawn faintly and imperceptibly
paled  behind him. He saw the light in the  house go out. But he did not see
Mrs Bolton come to  the window and draw back  the  old curtain  of dark-blue
silk, and stand  herself in the dark room, looking out on  the  half-dark of
the approaching day, looking for the longed-for  dawn, waiting, waiting  for
Clifford to be really reassured that it was daybreak.  For when  he was sure
of daybreak, he would sleep almost at once.
     She stood  blind with sleep  at the window, waiting.  And as she stood,
she started,  and almost cried out. For there  was  a man  out there  on the
drive, a black figure in the twilight.  She woke up greyly, and watched, but
without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford.
     The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed
to go  smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and  baggy
jacket---it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. `Yes, for there was the dog
nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him'!
     And what did the man want? Did  he want to rouse the house? What was he
standing there for, transfixed,  looking  up  at the house like  a love-sick
male dog outside the house where the bitch is?
     Goodness! The knowledge  went through Mrs Bolton like  a  shot.  He was
Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!
     To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a  tiny bit in love
with  him herself.  When  he  was  a  lad  of  sixteen  and  she a  woman of
twenty-six. It was  when  she was studying, and he had helped her a lot with
the  anatomy  and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever boy, had a
scholarship for Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French and things: and
then after all had become  an overhead blacksmith shoeing horses, because he
was fond of horses, he said: but really because he was  frightened to go out
and face the world, only he'd never admit it.
     But he'd been a  nice lad, a nice lad, had  helped her a lot, so clever
at making things clear to you. He was quite as  clever as  Sir Clifford: and
always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.
     Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts,  as if to spite himself.
Some  people do  marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed  of
something. And no wonder it had been a failure.---For years he was gone, all
the time of  the war: and a lieutenant  and all: quite the gentleman, really
quite  the  gentleman!---Then  to  come  back  to Tevershall  and  go  as  a
game-keeper! Really, some people  can't take  their chances when they've got
them! And  talking  broad Derbyshire  again like the  worst,  when she,  Ivy
Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, really.
     Well,  well! So  her  ladyship had fallen for  him! Well  her  ladyship
wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad
born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap
back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys!
     But he,  the keeper, as the day grew,  had realized: it's no good! It's
no good trying  to get rid of your  own aloneness. You've got to stick to it
all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times!
But you  have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness  and stick to
it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when
they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
     With a  sudden snap the  bleeding  desire that  had drawn him after her
broke. He had broken it, because  it  must be so.  There  must  be a  coming
together on  both sides.  And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track
her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came.
     He turned slowly,  ponderingly, accepting again the isolation.  He knew
it was  better so. She must come to him: it was  no  use his  trailing after
her. No use!
     Mrs Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him.
     `Well, well!' she said. `He's  the one man I never thought of; and  the
one man I might  have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after
I lost Ted. Well, well! Whatever would he say if he knew!'
     And she  glanced triumphantly  at the already sleeping Clifford, as she
stepped softly from the room.

        Chapter 11

     Connie  was sorting out  one  of  the Wragby  lumber rooms.  There were
several:  the  house was a warren, and the family  never sold anything.  Sir
Geoffery's father had  liked pictures and Sir  Geoffery's  mother  had liked
cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffery himself had liked old carved oak chests,
vestry chests. So  it  went on through the  generations.  Clifford collected
very modern pictures, at very moderate prices.
     So  in the lumber room there were bad Sir  Edwin Landseers and pathetic
William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten
the daughter of an R.A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear
it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.
     Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the old
family  cradle, of  rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to  look at it. It had a
certain charm: she looked at it a longtime.
     `It's thousand pities it  won't be  called for,' sighed Mrs Bolton, who
was helping. `Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'
     `It might be called for. I might  have a child,'  said Connie casually,
as if saying she might have a new hat.
     `You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs Bolton.
     `No! I  mean  as things  are.  It's  only  muscular  paralysis with Sir
Clifford---it  doesn't  affect  him,'  said  Connie, lying  as  naturally as
breathing.
     Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had  said: `Of course I may
have a  child yet. I'm not  really mutilated  at all. The potency may easily
come back, even if the muscles of the hips and  legs are paralysed. And then
the seed may be transferred.'
     He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard at
the  question of the mines,  as if his sexual potency were returning. Connie
had looked at him in  terror. But she was  quite  quick-witted enough to use
his suggestion for her own preservation.  For she would have a child if  she
could: but not his.
     Mrs Bolton was for a moment  breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't
believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things nowadays.
They might sort of graft seed.
     `Well,  my Lady, I  only hope and pray you may. It  would be lovely for
you: and  for everybody. My  word, a child in Wragby,  what a difference  it
would make!'
     `Wouldn't it!' said Connie.
     And she chose three R. A.  pictures of sixty years ago,  to send to the
Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was called
`the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to send things for
her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed R. A.s. She might even
call, on the strength of them. How furious Clifford was when she called!
     But oh  my dear!  Mrs  Bolton  was  thinking  to herself. Is it  Oliver
Mellors'  child  you're preparing  us  for?  Oh  my  dear, that  would  be a
Tevershall baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it, neither!
     Among   other  monstrosities   in  this  lumber  room  was   a  largish
blackjapanned  box, excellently and  ingeniously made some sixty  or seventy
years  ago,  and  fitted  with  every  imaginable  object.  On   top  was  a
concentrated toilet set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three
beautiful little razors in  safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and all. Underneath
came  a sort  of  escritoire  outfit:  blotters, pens,  ink-bottles,  paper,
envelopes,  memorandum books: and then a  perfect sewing-outfit,  with three
different sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg,
all of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little
medicine  store,  with bottles  labelled  Laudanum, Tincture  of Myrrh, Ess.
Cloves and so  on: but empty.  Everything was perfectly new, and  the  whole
thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And inside,
it  fitted together  like a  puzzle. The  bottles  could  not  possibly have
spilled: there wasn't room.
     The thing  was wonderfully  made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship
of the  Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some  Chatterley must
even  have  felt it,  for the thing  had never  been used. It had a peculiar
soullessness.
     Yet Mrs Bolton was thrilled.
     `Look what  beautiful  brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes,
three  perfect ones! No!  and those  scissors! They're  the best that  money
could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'
     `Do you?' said Connie. `Then you have it.'
     `Oh no, my Lady!'
     `Of course! It  will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have it,
I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't deserve
so much. Do have it!'
     `Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'
     `You needn't try,' laughed Connie.
     And Mrs Bolton sailed  down with  the huge and very black  box  in  her
arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.
     Mr Betts drove her in the trap  to her house in the village,  with  the
box.  And she had to have a few friends in, to show it: the school-mistress,
the chemist's wife, Mrs  Weedon the  undercashier's  wife.  They thought  it
marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child.
     `Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs Weedon.
     But  Mrs  Bolton  was  convinced,  if it  did  come,  it would  be  Sir
Clifford's child. So there!
     Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:
     `And may we really hope for an  heir to Wragby? Ah, that  would  be the
hand of God in mercy, indeed!'
     `Well! We may hope,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the same
time, a  certain conviction.  He had begun to believe  it really possible it
might even be his child.
     Then  one afternoon came  Leslie  Winter, Squire  Winter, as  everybody
called  him: lean, immaculate, and seventy:  and every  inch a gentleman, as
Mrs  Bolton  said  to  Mrs  Betts. Every  millimetre indeed!  And  with  his
old-fashioned, rather haw-haw!  manner of speaking, he seemed  more  out  of
date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers.
     They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even
the poor sort, could  be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at
great  heat if  fed  with certain  damp, acidulated  air at a fairly  strong
pressure. It had long been  observed that in a particularly strong, wet wind
the pit-bank burned  very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes, and left  a fine
powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.
     `But where  will you  find the  proper engines for burning your  fuel?'
asked Winter.
     `I'll  make  them myself.  And I'll use my fuel  myself.  And I'll sell
electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'
     `If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid!
If I can be  of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little out
of  date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm gone, there
may be men like you.  Splendid! It  will employ  all the  men again, and you
won't  have  to sell your  coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid idea,  and I
hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt they would have
up-to-date  ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the  way, dear boy, is there any
foundation to the rumour that we may entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?'
     `Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.
     `Well, my dear  boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me,  that's  all I
can say about a rumour.  Of course  I wouldn't repeat  it for the world,  if
there were no foundation.'
     `Well,  Sir,'  said Clifford  uneasily, but  with strange bright  eyes.
`There is a hope. There is a hope.'
     Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.
     `My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear
that!  And to hear you are working in the hopes  of a son: and  that you may
again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy!  to  keep up the level  of
the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to work!---'
     The old man was really moved.
     Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.
     `Connie,' said Clifford, `did you know there  was a rumour that you are
going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'
     Connie felt dim with terror, yet she  stood quite  still, touching  the
flowers.
     `No!' she said. `Is it a joke? Or malice?'
     He paused before he answered:
     `Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'
     Connie went on with her flowers.
     `I  had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. `He wants to know
if I  am aware he has accepted Sir  Alexander Cooper's Invitation for me for
July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'
     `July and August?' said Clifford.
     `Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'
     `I won't travel abroad,' said  Clifford promptly. She took  her flowers
to the window.
     `Do  you mind if I  go?'  she said. You know it was promised,  for this
summer.
     `For how long would you go?'
     `Perhaps three weeks.'
     There was silence for a time.
     `Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. `I suppose I could
stand  it  for  three weeks: if  I were absolutely sure you'd  want  to come
back.'
     `I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet  simplicity, heavy
with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.
     Clifford felt  her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed
it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.
     `In that case,' he said,
     `I think it would be all right, don't you?'
     `I think so,' she said.
     `You'd enjoy the change?' She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.
     `I should like to see  Venice again,' she said, `and to bathe from  one
of  the shingle islands across the  lagoon. But you know I  loathe the Lido!
And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and  Lady Cooper. But if
Hilda is there,  and  we have a gondola of our own:  yes, it  will be rather
lovely. I do wish you'd come.'
     She said  it sincerely. She would so love  to make him happy, in  these
ways.
     `Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'
     `But why not? I see  other men carried in litter-chairs, who have  been
wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'
     `We should need to take two men.'
     `Oh  no! We'd manage  with Field. There  would  always  be  another man
there.'
     But Clifford shook his head.
     `Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'
     She went away gloomily.  Next year! What  would next  year  bring?  She
herself did not really  want to  go  to Venice:  not now, now  there was the
other man. But she was going  as a sort of discipline:  and also because, if
she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.
     It  was already May, and in June they  were supposed  to  start. Always
these arrangements! Always  one's life arranged for one! Wheels that  worked
one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!
     It was May, but  cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for  corn and
hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie  had to go into Uthwaite,
which  was  their  little  town,  where  the  Chatterleys  were   still  the
Chatterleys. She went alone, Field driving her.
     In  spite of May and a new  greenness, the country  was  dismal. It was
rather chilly, and there  was smoke on  the  rain,  and  a certain  sense of
exhaust vapour in  the air. One just had  to live from one's resistance.  No
wonder these people were ugly and tough.
     The   car  ploughed  uphill  through   the  long  squalid  straggle  of
Tevershall, the  blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening
their sharp  edges,  the  mud  black  with coal-dust, the  pavements wet and
black. It was  as if dismalness had soaked through  and through  everything.
The utter negation of natural beauty,  the utter negation of the gladness of
life, the utter absence of the instinct for  shapely beauty which every bird
and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling.
The stacks  of soap in the  grocers'  shops, the rhubarb and lemons  in  the
greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly,
followed by  the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with  its wet picture
announcements,  `A  Woman's  Love!',  and  the  new  big  Primitive  chapel,
primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes  of greenish and raspberry
glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick
and  stood  behind  iron railings and blackened shrubs.  The  Congregational
chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and
had a steeple, but  not  a very  high one. Just beyond  were the  new school
buildings, expensivink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings,
all very  imposing, and  fixing the suggestion  of  a  chapel and  a prison.
Standard  Five  girls  were  having a  singing lesson,  just  finishing  the
la-me-doh-la  exercises and beginning  a  `sweet  children's song'. Anything
more  unlike  song, spontaneous  song, would  be impossible  to  imagine:  a
strange bawling  yell that followed the outlines of a tune.  It was not like
savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like  animals: animals mean
something when  they  yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it  was called
singing.  Connie sat and listened with her heart in  her boots, as Field was
filling petrol.  What could possibly become  of such  a people, a people  in
whom  the  living  intuitive faculty  was  dead  as  nails,  and only  queer
mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?
     A  coal-cart  was coming downhill, clanking in  the rain. Field started
upwards,  past the big  but weary-looking  drapers and clothing  shops,  the
post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where Sam  Black
was peering out of the door of the Sun,  that  called itself an  inn, not  a
pub, and where  the commercial  travellers stayed,  and was  bowing  to Lady
Chatterley's car.
     The church was away  to  the left among  black trees.  The car  slid on
downhill,  past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed  the Wellington, the
Nelson,  the Three Tuns,  and the Sun, now it passed the Miners'  Arms, then
the  Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare and  so,
past a few new `villas', out into the blackened road between dark hedges and
dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.
     Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England!
No, but the England of today,  as Connie had realized since she  had come to
live in  it. It was  producing a new race of  mankind, over-conscious in the
money  and social and  political  side,  on the  spontaneous, intuitive side
dead,  but dead.  Half-corpses, all of  them: but with a terrible  insistent
consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground
about  it all. It was  an under-world. And quite  incalculable. How shall we
understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw  the great lorries
full  of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like
men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah
God,  what has man done  to man?  What have the leaders of men been doing to
their fellow men?  They have reduced  them to less  than humanness;  and now
there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.
     She felt again in a wave of terror the grey,  gritty hopelessness of it
all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as
she knew them, there was no  hope, no hope any  more. Yet  she was wanting a
baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.
     Yet Mellors had come out  of all this!---Yes, but he  was as apart from
it all as she was.  Even in him there was  no fellowship  left. It was dead.
The fellowship  was dead. There was only  apartness and hopelessness, as far
as all  this was concerned. And this was England, the vast  bulk of England:
as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it.
     The  car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off,  and
in the air came a queer  pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled  away  in
long  undulations,  south  towards  the  Peak, east  towards  Mansfield  and
Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.
     As  she rose on to the high country, she could  see  on her  left, on a
height above the rolling land, the  shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop Castle,
dark grey,  with below  it  the  reddish plastering  of  miners'  dwellings,
newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke  and white  steam from  the
great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum  into the pockets
of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old castle was a  ruin,
yet it  hung its bulk  on the low  sky-line, over  the black  plumes and the
white that waved on the damp air below.
     A turn, and they ran on the high level  to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate, as
seen  from  the  highroad, was  just  a  huge and  gorgeous  new  hotel, the
Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in  barbarous  isolation off
the road. But  if you looked, you saw on  the left rows of handsome `modern'
dwellings,  set down like a  game of  dominoes, with spaces  and gardens,  a
queer  game  of dominoes  that  some  weird  `masters' were  playing on  the
surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings, at the back, rose all
the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern  mine,
chemical works and long  galleries, enormous, and of shapes not before known
to man.  The head-stock and  pit-bank of the  mine itself were insignificant
among the huge new installations. And in front of this, the game of dominoes
stood forever in a sort of surprise, waiting to be played.
     This was  Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war. But
as a matter  of fact, though even  Connie did not know it, downhill  half  a
mile below the `hotel' was  old Stacks Gate, with a little  old colliery and
blackish old  brick dwellings,  and a chapel or two and a shop or  two and a
little pub or two.
     But that didn't count any more. The vast  plumes of  smoke  and  vapour
rose from the new works up above, and this was now  Stacks Gate: no chapels,
no pubs, even no shops. Only the great  works', which are the modern Olympia
with  temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings: then the hotel. The
hotel  in  actuality  was  nothing  but  a  miners'  pub  though  it  looked
first-classy.
     Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place  had arisen on the
face  of  the  earth,  and the  model dwellings  had  filled  with riff-raff
drifting  in  from  anywhere,  to  poach   Clifford's  rabbits  among  other
occupations.
     The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread out.
The county! It  had once  been a proud and lordly  county. In front, looming
again  and hanging on the brow  of the  sky-line, was the  huge and splendid
bulk of  Chadwick Hall,  more  window than  wall, one  of  the  most  famous
Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood  alone  above  a  great park,  but out of
date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a  show place. `Look how our
ancestors lorded it!'
     That was the  past. The present  lay below.  God  alone knows where the
future lies.  The car  was already  turning, between  little  old  blackened
miners' cottages, to  descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day,  was
sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam,  to whatever gods  there
be. Uthwaite down  in the valley, with all the steel threads of the railways
to  Sheffield  drawn through  it,  and  the coal-mines and  the  steel-works
sending  up  smoke and  glare  from  long  tubes,  and the  pathetic  little
corkscrew spire  of the church, that is going to tumble down, still pricking
the  fumes,  always affected  Connie strangely. It  was  an old market-town,
centre of the dales. One of the  chief inns was the Chatterley Arms.  There,
in  Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby, as if  it were a  whole place, not
just a house, as it  was to outsiders: Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby,
a `seat'.
     The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with that
intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years old. They
lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you sank, you forgot
instantly the open, rolling  country  where the castles and big houses still
dominated,  but  like ghosts. Now  you were  just above the tangle of  naked
railway-lines, and foundries and other `works' rose  about  you, so big  you
were only aware of walls. And iron  clanked with a huge reverberating clank,
and huge lorries shook the earth, and whistles screamed.
     Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked
heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two centuries
ago, in the crooked  streets where the Chatterley  Arms stood,  and the  old
pharmacy,  streets which  used to  lead Out to  the  wild  open world of the
castles and stately couchant houses.
     But  at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded
with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the lorries
were past could he salute her ladyship.
     So  it was.  Upon  the old crooked  burgess  streets  hordes  of oldish
blackened miners' dwellings crowded, lining  the  roads out. And immediately
after these  came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering
the valley: the homes of  more modern workmen. And beyond that again, in the
wide  rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved  against steam, and  patch
after  patch  of raw  reddish  brick  showed  the  newer mining settlements,
sometimes in the  hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along  the  sky-line of
the slopes.  And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of  the old
coaching  and  cottage England, even the  England of Robin  Hood,  where the
miners prowled with  the dismalness  of suppressed sporting  instincts, when
they were not at work.
     England,  my England! But which is my  England? The  stately  homes  of
England  make good photographs, and create  the illusion of a connexion with
the Elizabethans.  The handsome old  halls are there,  from the days of Good
Queen  Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on  the  drab  stucco,
that has long ceased to be golden. And one by  one,  like the stately homes,
they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for  the cottages of
England---there  they  are---great  plasterings  of  brick dwellings  on the
hopeless countryside.
     `Now they  are pulling down  the stately homes,  the Georgian halls are
going.  Fritchley, a perfect old  Georgian mansion, was even now,  as Connie
passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect  repair: till the war
the  Weatherleys  had  lived in  style  there.  But now it was  too big, too
expensive,  and the country had  become  too  uncongenial. The  gentry  were
departing to pleasanter places, where they could  spend  their money without
having to see how it was made.'
     This is history.  One England blots out another. The mines had made the
halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already  blotted
out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.
One meaning blots out  another.  The new England  blots out the old England.
And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.
     Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of
the old  England. It  had  taken  her years  to  realize that  it was really
blotted  out  by this terrifying new  and  gruesome  England,  and  that the
blotting out would  go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood
was gone, Shipley was going: Squire Winter's beloved Shipley.
     Connie called for a  moment  at Shipley. The park gates,  at  the back,
opened  just near the level  crossing of the colliery  railway; the  Shipley
colliery itself stood just beyond the trees.  The gates stood  open, because
through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used. They hung around
the park.
     The car passed the ornamental ponds,  in which the colliers threw their
newspapers,  and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside,
a very pleasant stucco building from  the  middle of the eighteenth century.
It had a beautiful  alley of yew trees, that had approached an  older house,
and  the hall stood serenely spread out, winking  its Georgian panes  as  if
cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.
     Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter,
more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled  with creamy painted
panelling, the  ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was  kept in
exquisite  order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of  expense.
Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of
life.
     But Leslie Winter  was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was
bordered by three of his own collieries.  He had been  a generous man in his
ideas.  He had almost  welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not
made him rich! So, when  he saw  the gangs of unshapely men  lounging by his
ornamental  waters---not in the private part of the  park,  no,  he drew the
line  there---he would say:  `the miners are perhaps  not so  ornamental  as
deer, but they are far more profitable.'
     But   that  was  in  the  golden---monetarily---latter  half  of  Queen
Victoria's reign. Miners were then `good working men'.
     Winter had made  this speech, half apologetic,  to his  guest, the then
Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:
     `You are quite right.  If there were  coal under  Sandringham,  I would
open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I
am quite willing to exchange roe-deer  for  colliers, at the price. Your men
are good men too, I hear.'
     But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the  beauty  of
money, and the blessings of industrialism.
     However,  the  Prince had been a King,  and the King had  died, and now
there  was  another  King,  whose  chief  function  seemed  to  be  to  open
soup-kitchens.
     And the good  working men  were somehow hemming Shipley in. New  mining
villages  crowded  on  the  park,  and  the  squire  felt  somehow  that the
population was  alien. He used  to feel, in a good-natured but  quite  grand
way,  lord  of his own  domain  and  of his own  colliers. Now, by a  subtle
pervasion of the new  spirit, he had somehow been pushed out.  It was he who
did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry,
had a will  of its own, and this will  was  against the gentleman-owner. All
the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard  to  live up against it.
It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.
     Squire Winter,  a soldier, had stood it out. But  he no longer cared to
walk in the  park after  dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked,
bare-headed, and  in  his  patent-leather  shoes and purple silk socks, with
Connie down to the gate,  talking to  her in  his  well-bred rather  haw-haw
fashion. But when it came to passing  the little gangs of colliers who stood
and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean,
well-bred  old  man  winced,  winced as  an elegant antelope  stag in a cage
winces from the vulgar stare. The  colliers were not personally hostile: not
at all. But their spirit was cold,  and  shoving  him out.  And,  deep down,
there  was a  profound grudge. They `worked for him'. And in their ugliness,
they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. `Who's he!' It
was the difference they resented.
     And somewhere, in  his secret English heart, being  a  good  deal  of a
soldier,  he  believed they  were right  to  resent the  difference. He felt
himself a  little in the wrong, for  having all the advantages. Nevertheless
he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.
     Except by death. Which came on him  soon after Connie's call, suddenly.
And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.
     The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It
cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it  was broken up. The
avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided
into  lots.  It was  near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of
this still-one-more no-man's-land, new little streets of semi-detacheds were
run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!
     Within  a year of Connie's  last  call, it  had  happened.  There stood
Shipley Hall  Estate,  an  array of red-brick semi-detached `villas' in  new
streets.  No one would  have dreamed that  the  stucco hall had  stood there
twelve months before.
     But this is a later  stage of King  Edward's  landscape gardening,  the
sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.
     One  England blots out another. The  England  of the Squire Winters and
the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.
     What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the
new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the
collieries,  the new  girls in their silk  stockings,  the new  collier lads
lounging into the Pally or the  Welfare. The younger generation were utterly
unconscious  of  the  old  England. There  was a  gap  in  the continuity of
consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?
     Connie always felt there was no  next. She wanted  to  hide her head in
the sand: or, at least, in the bosom of a living man.
     The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The  common people
were so many, and  really  so terrible. So she bought as she was going home,
and  saw  the  colliers trailing  from the pits,  grey-black, distorted, one
shoulder  higher  than  the  other,  slurring their  heavy  ironshod  boots.
Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks  cringing from the pit
roof, shoulders Out of shape. Men!  Men! Alas, in some ways patient and good
men. In  other ways,  non-existent. Something that men  should have was bred
and killed out of  them.  Yet they were men. They begot children. One  might
bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly.
But they were  only half, Only the grey half  of a human being. As yet, they
were `good'. But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the
dead in them ever rose up! But no, it  was too terrible to  think of. Connie
was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her.
A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always `in the pit'.
     Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!
     Yet  Mellors had come from such a father.  Not  quite. Forty  years had
made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal
had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
     Incarnate ugliness, and  yet  alive!  What  would become of  them  all?
Perhaps with  the passing  of  the coal they would disappear  again, off the
face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when
the coal  had  called for them.  Perhaps  they were only weird fauna of  the
coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were  elementals, serving the
elements  of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element
of iron.  Men not men,  but animas of coal and iron  and  clay. Fauna of the
elements, carbon, iron,  silicon: elementals. They had perhaps  some of  the
weird,  inhuman  beauty of minerals,  the  lustre of coal,  the  weight  and
blueness  and resistance  of  iron,  the  transparency of  glass.  Elemental
creatures, weird and distorted,  of the  mineral world! They belonged to the
coal,  the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood.
The anima of mineral disintegration!
     Connie was glad  to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad
even  to babble to Clifford. For  her fear of the  mining and iron  Midlands
affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
     `Of course I had to have tea in Miss Bentley's shop,' she said.
     `Really! Winter would have given you tea.'
     `Oh  yes, but I  daren't disappoint  Miss Bentley.'  Miss Bentley was a
shallow  old  maid with a  rather large nose  and romantic  disposition  who
served tea with a careful intensity worthy of a sacrament.
     `Did she ask after me?' said Clifford.
     `Of  course!---.  May  I  ask  your  Ladyship how Sir Clifford  is!---I
believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!'
     `And I suppose you said I was blooming.'
     `Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to
you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.'
     `Me! Whatever for! See me!'
     `Why  yes, Clifford. You can't  be so adored without making some slight
return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.'
     `And do you think she'll come?'
     `Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor  thing!
Why don't men marry the women who would really adore them?'
     `The women start adoring too late. But did she say she'd come?'
     `Oh!' Connie imitated the  breathless  Miss Bentley, `your Ladyship, if
ever I should dare to presume!'
     `Dare to presume!  how absurd! But I hope to God she won't turn up. And
how was her tea?'
     `Oh, Lipton's and very strong. But Clifford, do you realize you are the
Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?'
     `I'm not flattered, even then.'
     `They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers,
and probably pray for you every night. It's rather wonderful.'
     She went upstairs to change.
     That evening he said to her:
     `You do think, don't you, that there is something eternal in marriage?'
     She looked at him.
     `But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain
that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.'
     He looked at her, annoyed.
     `What I mean,'  he said, `is that if you  go to Venice, you won't go in
the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sÉrieux, will you?'
     `A love affair in Venice au  grand sÉrieux? No. I assure  you!  No, I'd
never take a love affair in Venice more than au trÈs petit sÉrieux.'
     She spoke with  a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking
at her.
     Coming downstairs in the  morning, she found the keeper's  dog  Flossie
sitting  in  the  corridor  outside  Clifford's  room,  and whimpering  very
faintly.
     `Why, Flossie!' she said softly. `What are you doing here?'
     And she quietly opened Clifford's door. Clifford was sitting up in bed,
with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and  the keeper was standing
at attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of
head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.
     `Oh,  good morning, Clifford!'  Connie said.  `I didn't know  you  were
busy.' Then  she looked  at  the keeper,  saying  good  morning  to him.  He
murmured his reply, looking  at  her as if vaguely. But she felt a  whiff of
passion touch her, from his mere presence.
     `Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I'm sorry.'
     `No, it's nothing of any importance.'
     She slipped out of the room  again,  and  up to the blue boudoir on the
first floor. She  sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his
curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction,
an  aloof  pride, and also a  certain  look  of frailty.  A hireling! One of
Clifford's  hirelings! `The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our  stars, but in
ourselves, that we are underlings.'
     Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?
     It  was  a  sunny  day, and Connie was working  in the garden, and  Mrs
Bolton was helping her. For some reason,  the two women had drawn  together,
in one  of  the unaccountable flows  and ebbs of sympathy that exist between
people. They  were pegging down  carnations, and putting in small plants for
the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in
putting  the soft roots  of  young plants into  a  soft  black  puddle,  and
cradling  them down. On this spring morning  she felt  a quiver in  her womb
too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.
     `It is many years since you lost your  husband?' she said to Mrs Bolton
as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.
     `Twenty-three!' said Mrs  Bolton, as  she carefully separated the young
columbines  into single plants.  `Twenty-three  years since they brought him
home.'
     Connie's heart gave a lurch, at  the terrible finality of it.  `Brought
him home!'
     `Why did he get killed, do you think?'  she asked.  `He was happy  with
you?'
     It was a woman's question  to a woman. Mrs Bolton put aside a strand of
hair from her face, with the back of her hand.
     `I  don't  know,  my Lady! He sort of wouldn't  give in to  things:  he
wouldn't  really go  with the rest.  And  then he hated ducking his head for
anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that  gets itself killed. You see he
didn't really care.  I lay it down  to the pit.  He ought never to have been
down pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you're over
twenty, it's not very easy to come out.'
     `Did he say he hated it?'
     `Oh no! Never! He never said he hated  anything. He  just made a  funny
face. He was one of those  who  wouldn't  take care: like some of  the first
lads as went off so blithe to the  war and  got killed right away. He wasn't
really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn't care. I used to say to him: "You care
for nought nor nobody!"  But he did! The way he sat  when my first  baby was
born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me  with,  when it
was over! I had a bad time, but I  had to comfort him. "It's all right, lad,
it's all right!" I said to him. And he gave me a  look, and that funny  sort
of  smile. He never  said anything. But  I  don't  believe he had any  right
pleasure with me  at nights  after; he'd never really let himself go. I used
to say to  him: Oh, let thysen go, lad!---I'd talk  broad to  him sometimes.
And he said nothing. But  he  wouldn't let himself go,  or he  couldn't.  He
didn't want me to have  any more children. I always blamed  his mother,  for
letting him in th' room. He'd  no right t'ave been there. Men  makes so much
more of things than they should, once they start brooding.'
     `Did he mind so much?' said Connie in wonder.
     `Yes, he sort of couldn't take it  for natural, all that  pain.  And it
spoilt his pleasure in his  bit of married love. I  said to him:  If I don't
care,  why should you? It's my look-out!---But  all he'd  ever say was: It's
not right!'
     `Perhaps he was too sensitive,' said Connie.
     `That's  it!  When  you come  to  know  men, that's how  they  are: too
sensitive in the wrong place. And I believe, unbeknown to himself  he  hated
the pit, just hated it. He looked so quiet when he  was dead, as if he'd got
free. He was such  a nice-looking lad. It just broke my heart to see him, so
still and  pure looking, as if  he'd  wanted to die. Oh, it  broke my heart,
that did. But it was the pit.'
     She wept a few bitter tears, and Connie wept more. It was a warm spring
day, with a perfume of earth and  of yellow flowers,  many things rising  to
bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine.
     `It must have been terrible for you!' said Connie.
     `Oh, my  Lady! I never  realized at first. I could only say: Oh my lad,
what did you want to leave me for!---That was all my cry. But somehow I felt
he'd come back.'
     `But he didn't want to leave you,' said Connie.
     `Oh no,  my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And  I kept expecting him
back. Especially  at nights. I  kept waking up thinking: Why he's not in bed
with me!---It was as if  my feelings wouldn't believe he'd gone. I just felt
he'd have to come back and lie against me, so I could feel him with me. That
was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm. And it took me a thousand
shocks before I knew he wouldn't come back, it took me years.'
     `The touch of him,' said Connie.
     `That's it, my Lady, the  touch of him! I've never got over  it to this
day, and  never shall.  And if there's a heaven above,  he'll be  there, and
will lie up against me so I can sleep.'
     Connie  glanced  at  the  handsome,  brooding  face  in  fear.  Another
passionate one  out of Tevershall! The touch of  him! For the bonds of  love
are ill to loose!
     `It's terrible, once you've got  a man into your blood!' she said. `Oh,
my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks wanted him
killed.  You feel  the pit fair wanted to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn't
been for the pit, an' them as runs the pit, there'd have been no leaving me.
But they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they're together.'
     `If they're physically together,' said Connie.
     `That's  right, my Lady! There's  a  lot  of hard-hearted folks  in the
world. And every morning when he got  up and went to  th' pit, I felt it was
wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?'
     A queer hate flared in the woman.
     `But can a touch last so long?'  Connie asked suddenly. `That you could
feel him so long?'
     `Oh my Lady, what else is there  to last? Children grows away from you.
But  the man,  well! But  even  that they'd  like to kill in you,  the  very
thought of the touch of him. Even your  own children! Ah well! We might have
drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling's something different. It's 'appen
better never  to care.  But there,  when I look at  women who's never really
been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor doolowls after all,
no matter how they may dress up and  gad. No, I'll abide by my own. I've not
much respect for people.'

        Chapter 12

     Connie went  to the wood  directly after lunch. It was  really a lovely
day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel
thicket  was  a   lace-work,  of  half-open  leaves,  and   the  last  dusty
perpendicular  of  the catkins. Yellow celandines now were  in  crowds, flat
open, pressed  back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was
the yellow, the powerful yellow of early  summer. And primroses were  broad,
and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy. The lush,
dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in
the  riding  the  forget-me-nots  were  fluffing  up,  and  columbines  were
unfolding their  ink-purple  ruches,  and  there were  bits of  blue  bird's
eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!
     The  keeper  was not at the hut.  Everything was serene, brown chickens
running lustily. Connie walked on towards the cottage, because she wanted to
find him.
     The cottage stood in the sun, off the wood's edge. In the little garden
the  double daffodils rose in tufts, near the wide-open door, and red double
daisies made a border to the path. There was  the bark of a dog, and Flossie
came running.
     The wide-open door! so he was at home.  And the sunlight falling on the
red-brick  floor!  As she went up the path, she saw him  through the window,
sitting  at the table in his shirt-sleeves, eating.  The dog  wuffed softly,
slowly wagging her tail.
     He rose, and came to the door, wiping his mouth with a red handkerchief
still chewing.
     `May I come in?' she said.
     `Come in!'
     The sun shone into the bare room, which still smelled of a mutton chop,
done in  a dutch oven before the fire, because the dutch oven still stood on
the fender, with the black potato-saucepan on a piece of paper, beside it on
the white hearth. The  fire was red, rather low, the bar dropped, the kettle
singing.
     On the table  was his plate, with potatoes and the remains of the chop;
also bread in  a basket, salt, and a blue mug with beer. The table-cloth was
white oil-cloth, he stood in the shade.
     `You are very late,' she said. `Do go on eating!'
     She sat down on a wooden chair, in the sunlight by the door.
     `I had  to go to  Uthwaite,' he said, sitting down at the table but not
eating.
     `Do eat,' she said. But he did not touch the food.
     `Shall y'ave something?' he  asked  her.  `Shall y'ave a cup of tea? t'
kettle's on t' boil'---he half rose again from his chair.
     `If you'll let me make it myself,' she said, rising. He seemed sad, and
she felt she was bothering him.
     `Well,  tea-pot's  in there'---he  pointed  to  a  little,  drab corner
cupboard; 'an' cups. An' tea's on t' mantel ower yer 'ead,'
     She got  the black  tea-pot, and the tin of tea  from the mantel-shelf.
She rinsed the tea-pot with hot water, and stood a moment wondering where to
empty it.
     `Throw it out,' he said, aware of her. `It's clean.'
     She went to the  door and threw the drop  of  water down  the path. How
lovely it  was here, so still, so really woodland. The oaks were putting out
ochre  yellow leaves: in  the garden  the red daisies were  like  red  plush
buttons. She glanced at the big, hollow sandstone slab of the threshold, now
crossed by so few feet.
     `But  it's  lovely  here,'  she  said.  `Such  a  beautiful  stillness,
everything alive and still.'
     He was eating again, rather slowly and unwillingly, and she  could feel
he was discouraged. She made the tea in  silence, and set the tea-pot on the
hob, as she knew the people did.  He pushed his  plate aside and went to the
back place; she heard a  latch click, then he came back  with  cheese  on  a
plate, and butter.
     She set the two cups on the table;  there were only two. `Will you have
a cup of tea?' she said.
     `If you like. Sugar's  in th' cupboard, an' there's a little cream jug.
Milk's in a jug in th' pantry.'
     `Shall I take your plate away?' she asked him. He looked up at her with
a faint ironical smile.
     `Why...if you like,' he said, slowly eating bread and cheese.  She went
to  the back, into the pent-house scullery, where the pump was.  On the left
was a door, no doubt the pantry door. She unlatched it, and almost smiled at
the place he called a pantry; a long narrow white-washed slip of a cupboard.
But it managed to  contain a little barrel of beer, as  well as a few dishes
and bits of food. She took a little milk from the yellow jug.
     `How  do you get your milk?' she asked him, when  she came  back to the
table.
     `Flints! They leave me  a bottle at the  warren  end. You know, where I
met you!'
     But he was discouraged. She poured out the tea, poising the cream-jug.
     `No milk,' he said;  then  he seemed to hear a noise, and looked keenly
through the doorway.
     `'Appen we'd better shut,' he said.
     `It seems a pity,' she replied. `Nobody will come, will they?'
     `Not unless it's one time in a thousand, but you never know.'
     `And even then it's no matter,' she said. `It's only a cup of tea.'
     `Where are the spoons?'
     He reached over, and pulled open  the table  drawer.  Connie sat at the
table in the sunshine of the doorway.
     `Flossie!'  he said to the dog,  who was  lying on a little mat  at the
stair foot. `Go an' hark, hark!'
     He lifted his finger, and his  `hark!' was very vivid. The  dog trotted
out to reconnoitre.
     `Are you sad today?' she asked him.
     He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.
     `Sad! no, bored!  I  had to  go getting summonses  for  two poachers  I
caught, and, oh well, I don't like people.'
     He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger  in his voice. `Do you
hate being a game-keeper?' she asked.
     `Being a game-keeper, no! So long as I'm left alone. But when I have to
go  messing  around at the  police-station,  and  various other places,  and
waiting  for a lot of  fools to attend to me...oh well, I get mad...' and he
smiled, with a certain faint humour.
     `Couldn't you be really independent?' she asked.
     `Me? I suppose I  could, if you mean manage  to  exist on my pension. I
could!  But I've  got  to  work, or I should  die. That is, I've got to have
something that  keeps  me occupied.  And I'm not in a  good enough temper to
work for myself. It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should
throw it up in a month,  out of bad temper. So altogether I'm very  well off
here, especially lately...'
     He laughed at her again, with mocking humour.
     `But why are you in a  bad  temper?'  she asked. `Do you mean  you  are
always in a bad temper?'
     `Pretty well,' he said, laughing. `I don't quite digest my bile.'
     `But what bile?' she said.
     `Bile!'  he said. `Don't  you know what that is?' She  was silent,  and
disappointed. He was taking no notice of her.
     `I'm going away for a while next month,' she said.
     `You are! Where to?'
     `Venice! With Sir Clifford? For how long?'
     `For a month or so,' she replied. `Clifford won't go.'
     `He'll stay here?' he asked.
     `Yes! He hates to travel as he is.'
     `Ay, poor devil!' he said, with sympathy. There was a pause.
     `You  won't  forget me  when I'm gone,  will you?' she  asked. Again he
lifted his eyes and looked full at her.
     `Forget?'  he  said. `You know nobody forgets.  It's not a question  of
memory;'
     She wanted to say: `When then?' but  she didn't. Instead, she said in a
mute kind of voice: `I told Clifford I might have a child.'
     Now he really looked at her, intense and searching.
     `You did?' he said at last. `And what did he say?'
     `Oh, he wouldn't mind. He'd be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be
his.' She dared not look up at him.
     He was silent a long time, then he gazed again on her face.
     `No mention of me, of course?' he said.
     `No. No mention of you,' she said.
     `No, he'd hardly swallow me as a substitute breeder. Then where are you
supposed to be getting the child?'
     `I might have a love-affair in Venice,' she said.
     `You might,' he replied slowly. `So that's why you're going?'
     `Not to have the love-affair,' she said, looking up at him, pleading.
     `Just the appearance of one,' he said.
     There was  silence. He sat  staring out the  window, with a faint grin,
half mockery, half bitterness, on his face. She hated his grin.
     `You've  not  taken any  precautions against having  a  child then?' he
asked her suddenly. `Because I haven't.'
     `No,' she said faintly. `I should hate that.'
     He looked at  her, then again with the peculiar subtle grin out of  the
window. There was a tense silence.
     At last he turned his head and said satirically:
     `That was why you wanted me, then, to get a child?'
     She hung her head.
     `No.  Not  really,'  she  said.  `What then, really?'  he  asked rather
bitingly.
     She looked up at him reproachfully, saying: `I don't know.'
     He broke into a laugh.
     `Then I'm damned if I do,' he said.
     There was a long pause of silence, a cold silence.
     `Well,' he said at  last. `It's  as your Ladyship likes. If you get the
baby, Sir Clifford's  welcome to  it.  I shan't have  lost  anything. On the
contrary,  I've had  a  very nice  experience, very  nice indeed!'---and  he
stretched in a half-suppressed sort of  yawn. `If you've made use of me,' he
said, `it's not the first  time I've  been made use of; and I don't  suppose
it's ever  been as pleasant as this  time; though  of  course one can't feel
tremendously  dignified  about  it.'---He  stretched  again, curiously,  his
muscles quivering, and his jaw oddly set.
     `But I didn't make use of you,' she said, pleading.
     `At your Ladyship's service,' he replied.
     `No,' she said. `I liked your body.'
     `Did  you?' he  replied, and  he laughed.  `Well,  then,  we're  quits,
because I liked yours.'
     He looked at her with queer darkened eyes.
     `Would you like to go upstairs  now?' he asked her, in a strangled sort
of voice.
     `No, not here. Not  now!' she  said heavily, though  if he had used any
power over her, she would have gone, for she had no strength against him.
     He turned his face  away  again, and seemed to  forget  her. `I want to
touch you  like you touch  me,' she said.  `I've  never  really touched your
body.'
     He looked at  her, and smiled again. `Now?' he said. `No! No! Not here!
At the hut. Would you mind?'
     `How do I touch you?' he asked.
     `When you feel me.'
     He looked at her, and met her heavy, anxious eyes.
     `And do you like it when I feel you?' he asked, laughing at her still.
     `Yes, do you?' she said.
     `Oh, me!' Then he  changed  his tone. `Yes,' he said. `You know without
asking.' Which was true.
     She rose and picked up her hat. `I must go,' she said.
     `Will you go?' he replied politely.
     She  wanted  him to touch her,  to say  something to  her, but he  said
nothing, only waited politely.
     `Thank you for the tea,' she said.
     `I  haven't thanked your  Ladyship for  doing  me  the  honours  of  my
tea-pot,' he said.
     She went down the path, and he stood in the doorway, faintly  grinning.
Flossie came running with  her tail  lifted.  And  Connie had to plod dumbly
across into the wood, knowing  he was standing there watching her, with that
incomprehensible grin on his face.
     She walked home very much downcast and  annoyed. She didn't at all like
his saying he had been made use of because, in a sense, it was  true. But he
oughtn't to  have  said it. Therefore,  again, she was divided  between  two
feelings: resentment against him, and a desire to make it up with him.
     She passed a very uneasy and irritated tea-time, and at once went up to
her room. But when she was there it was no  good; she could neither sit  nor
stand. She would have to do something about it. She would have to go back to
the hut; if he was not there, well and good.
     She slipped out  of the side door, and took her way direct and a little
sullen. When she came to the  clearing she was terribly uneasy. But there he
was  again, in  his  shirt-sleeves, stooping,  letting  the  hens out of the
coops, among the chicks that were now growing a little gawky, but were  much
more trim than hen-chickens.
     She went straight across to him. `You see I've come!' she said.
     `Ay, I  see it!' he  said, straightening his  back, and looking at  her
with a faint amusement.
     `Do you let the hens out now?' she asked.
     `Yes, they've  sat  themselves to skin  and  bone,' he said.  `An'  now
they're not all  that  anxious to  come out an' feed. There's  no self in  a
sitting hen; she's all in the eggs or the chicks.'
     The  poor mother-hens; such blind devotion! even to eggs not their own!
Connie looked at them in compassion. A helpless silence fell between the man
and the woman.
     `Shall us go i' th' 'ut?' he asked.
     `Do you want me?' she asked, in a sort of mistrust.
     `Ay, if you want to come.'
     She was silent.
     `Come then!' he said.
     And  she went with him to  the hut. It was quite dark when he had  shut
the door, so he made a small light in the lantern, as before.
     `Have you left your underthings off?' he asked her.
     `Yes!'
     `Ay, well, then I'll take my things off too.'
     He  spread the  blankets,  putting one at the side for a coverlet.  She
took off her hat, and shook her hair. He sat down,  taking off his shoes and
gaiters, and undoing his cord breeches.
     `Lie down  then!' he said,  when he stood in his shirt.  She obeyed  in
silence, and he lay beside her, and pulled the blanket over them both.
     `There!' he said.
     And he lifted her dress right  back,  till he came even to her breasts.
He kissed them softly, taking the nipples in his lips in tiny caresses.
     `Eh, but tha'rt nice,  tha'rt nice!' he said, suddenly rubbing his face
with a snuggling movement against her warm belly.
     And  she put her  arms round him under his  shirt, but  she was afraid,
afraid of his thin,  smooth, naked body, that seemed so powerful, afraid  of
the violent muscles. She shrank, afraid.
     And  when  he  said, with  a  sort of little  sigh: `Eh,  tha'rt nice!'
something  in  her  quivered,  and  something  in her  spirit  stiffened  in
resistance:  stiffened  from  the terribly physical  intimacy, and  from the
peculiar haste of his possession. And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own
passion  did not overcome  her; she lay with her ends inert on his  striving
body, and do what  she might, her spirit seemed to  look on from the  top of
her head, and  the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the
sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little  evacuating crisis seemed
farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of  the buttocks, and
the  wilting  of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis. This  was  the
divine love! After all, the  moderns were right when  they felt contempt for
the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some  poets
said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour,
creating him  a reasonable  being, yet  forcing him to  take this ridiculous
posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.
Even a Maupassant  found  it a  humiliating  anti-climax.  Men despised  the
intercourse act, and yet did it.
     Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart, and though she lay
perfectly still, her impulse was to  heave her loins, and throw the man out,
escape his  ugly grip,  and the butting over-riding  of his absurd haunches.
His body was a  foolish, impudent, imperfect thing,  a  little disgusting in
its unfinished clumsiness. For  surely a complete evolution  would eliminate
this performance, this `function'.
     And  yet  when  he had  finished,  soon over, and  lay very very still,
receding into silence, and a strange  motionless distance, far, farther than
the  horizon of her awareness, her heart began to  weep. She  could feel him
ebbing away, ebbing away, leaving her there like a  stone on a shore. He was
withdrawing, his spirit was leaving her. He knew.
     And in  real  grief,  tormented  by her  own  double  consciousness and
reaction, she  began  to weep. He  took no notice, or did not even know. The
storm of weeping swelled and shook her, and shook him.
     `Ay!'  he said. `It  was no good that time. You  wasn't there.'---So he
knew! Her sobs became violent.
     `But what's amiss?' he said. `It's once in a while that way.'
     `I...I  can't  love  you,'  she  sobbed,  suddenly  feeling  her  heart
breaking.
     `Canna ter? Well, dunna fret! There's no law says as tha's got to. Ta'e
it for what it is.'
     He still lay with his hand on her breast. But  she had  drawn  both her
hands from him.
     His words were small comfort. She sobbed aloud.
     `Nay, nay!'  he  said.  `Ta'e the thick wi' th' thin. This wor a bit o'
thin for once.'
     She  wept bitterly,  sobbing. `But I want to love you, and I  can't. It
only seems horrid.'
     He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused.
     `It isna horrid,' he  said,  `even if  tha thinks it is. An'  tha canna
ma'e it horrid. Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me. Tha'lt niver force thysen
to `t. There's sure to  be a bad nut in a  basketful. Tha mun ta'e th' rough
wi' th' smooth.'
     He took his  hand away from her breast,  not touching her.  And now she
was untouched she took an almost  perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the
dialect: the thee and the  tha  and the thysen. He could get up if he liked,
and stand there,  above her, buttoning down those  absurd corduroy breeches,
straight in front of her. After  all, Michaelis had had the decency to  turn
away. This  man was so assured in himself he didn't know  what a clown other
people found him, a half-bred fellow.
     Yet, as he  was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung
to him in terror.
     `Don't! Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't be cross with me! Hold me! Hold
me fast!' she whispered in blind frenzy, not even knowing what she said, and
clinging to  him with uncanny force. It was from  herself she wanted  to  be
saved, from her  own inward anger  and resistance. Yet how powerful was that
inward resistance that possessed her!
     He took  her  in  his arms again  and drew her to him, and suddenly she
became small in  his arms,  small and nestling. It was gone, the  resistance
was gone,  and  she began  to melt in a marvellous peace. And as she  melted
small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him, all
his blood-vessels seemed to scald with  intense yet tender desire, for  her,
for her  softness,  for  the penetrating beauty of her  in his arms, passing
into his blood.  And softly, with  that marvellous swoon-like caress of  his
hand  in pure soft desire, softly he  stroked  the silky slope of her loins,
down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming nearer  and nearer  to the
very quick of her. And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender,  and
she felt herself  melting in the flame. She  let  herself go.  She felt  his
penis  risen against her with silent amazing force and assertion and she let
herself go to  him She yielded with a  quiver  that was like death, she went
all open to him. And oh, if he were not  tender to  her now,  how cruel, for
she was all open to him and helpless!
     She  quivered  again  at the  potent inexorable  entry  inside her,  so
strange  and terrible. It  might come  with  the thrust of a  sword  in  her
softly-opened body, and that would be  death. She clung in a sudden  anguish
of terror. But it came with a strange  slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust
of peace and a ponderous, primordial  tenderness, such  as made the world in
the beginning. And her terror subsided in her breast, her breast dared to be
gone in peace, she held nothing. She dared to let go everything, all herself
and be gone in the flood.
     And  it seemed she was  like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and
heaving, heaving with a great swell, so  that slowly her  whole darkness was
in motion, and she was Ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh,  and far  down
inside her the  deeps parted and rolled asunder,  in  long,  fair-travelling
billows,  and  ever,  at  the quick  of her, the  depths  parted and  rolled
asunder, from the centre of  soft plunging,  as the plunger went deeper  and
deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and  deeper disclosed,
the  heavier  the billows of  her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her,
and closer and closer plunged the palpable  unknown, and further and further
rolled the waves of herself away from herself leaving her, till suddenly, in
a soft, shuddering convulsion, the  quick of all her plasm  was touched, she
knew herself touched, the consummation was  upon  her, and she was gone. She
was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.
     Ah,  too  lovely, too  lovely! In  the  ebbing  she  realized  all  the
loveliness. Now all her body  clung with tender love to the unknown man, and
blindly to  the  wilting  penis,  as it  so  tenderly, frailly,  unknowingly
withdrew,  after the fierce thrust  of its potency. As it drew out and  left
her body, the secret, sensitive thing, she gave  an unconscious cry of  pure
loss, and she tried to put it back. It had been so perfect! And she loved it
so!
     And  only  now  she became  aware of  the small, bud-like reticence and
tenderness  of the penis, and a little cry of wonder and  poignancy  escaped
her  again,  her woman's heart  crying  out over the tender  frailty of that
which had been the power.
     `It  was  so  lovely!' she  moaned. `It was  so  lovely!'  But he  said
nothing, only softly  kissed her, lying still above her. And she moaned with
a sort Of bliss, as a sacrifice, and a newborn thing.
     And now in her heart the queer wonder of him was awakened.
     A man! The  strange potency of manhood upon her! Her hands strayed over
him, still  a  little  afraid.  Afraid  of that strange,  hostile,  slightly
repulsive thing that he had been to her, a man. And now she touched him, and
it was the sons of god with the daughters of men. How beautiful he felt, how
pure in tissue! How lovely, how lovely, strong, and yet  pure  and delicate,
such  stillness of  the sensitive body! Such utter stillness of  potency and
delicate flesh. How beautiful! How beautiful! Her hands came timorously down
his back, to the soft, smallish globes of the buttocks. Beauty! What beauty!
a  sudden  little flame  of new awareness  went  through  her.  How  was  it
possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled? The
unspeakable  beauty  to  the touch  of the warm,  living buttocks!  The life
within life, the  sheer  warm, potent loveliness. And the  strange weight of
the balls  between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange  heavy weight of
mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in one's hand! The roots, root of all
that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty.
     She clung to him, with a hiss of wonder that was almost awe, terror. He
held her close, but he said nothing. He  would never say anything. She crept
nearer to him, nearer, only to be near to the sensual wonder of him. And out
of his utter, incomprehensible stillness, she felt again the slow momentous,
surging rise of the phallus again, the other power. And her heart melted out
with a kind of awe.
     And this time his being within  her was all soft and iridescent, purely
soft and iridescent, such as no consciousness  could  seize. Her whole  self
quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm. She could not  know what it was.
She could not remember what it had been. Only that it had  been  more lovely
than anything  ever could  be.  Only that. And afterwards  she  was  utterly
still, utterly unknowing, she was not aware for  how long. And he  was still
with her, in an unfathomable silence along with her. And of this, they would
never speak.
     When  awareness of the  outside began to  come back, she  clung to  his
breast, murmuring `My love!  My love!'  And he held  her silently.  And  she
curled on his breast, perfect.
     But his  silence  was  fathomless.  His hands held her like flowers, so
still aid strange. `Where are you?' she whispered to him.
     `Where are you? Speak to me! Say something to me!'
     He kissed her softly, murmuring: `Ay, my lass!'
     But she  did not know what he meant, she did not  know where he was. In
his silence he seemed lost to her.
     `You love me, don't you?' she murmured.
     `Ay, tha knows!' he said. `But tell me!' she pleaded.
     `Ay! Ay! 'asn't ter felt it?' he said dimly, but softly and surely. And
she clung close to him, closer. He was  so much  more  peaceful in love than
she was, and she wanted him to reassure her.
     `You do love me!' she whispered, assertive. And  his hands stroked  her
softly, as if  she were  a flower,  without  the  quiver of desire, but with
delicate nearness. And still there haunted her a restless necessity to get a
grip on love.
     `Say you'll always love me!' she pleaded.
     `Ay!' he  said, abstractedly. And she  felt her questions  driving  him
away from her.
     `Mustn't we get up?' he said at last.
     `No!' she said.
     But she could feel his  consciousness straying, listening to the noises
outside.
     `It'll  be nearly  dark,'  he  said.  And  she  heard  the  pressure of
circumstances in his voice. She kissed him, with a woman's grief at yielding
up her hour.
     He rose, and  turned up the lantern, then began to pull on his clothes,
quickly disappearing inside them. Then he  stood there, above her, fastening
his breeches and looking down at her with dark, wide-eyes, his face a little
flushed and his  hair ruffled, curiously warm and still and beautiful in the
dim  light  of the  lantern, so  beautiful,  she would  never  tell  him how
beautiful. It made her want to cling fast to him, to hold him, for there was
a warm, half-sleepy remoteness in his beauty  that made her want to  cry out
and clutch him,  to have him. She would never have him. So  she  lay  on the
blanket with curved, soft naked  haunches, and he had  no idea  what she was
thinking, but  to him too she was  beautiful, the soft,  marvellous thing he
could go into, beyond everything.
     `I love thee that I call go into thee,' he said.
     `Do you like me?' she said, her heart beating.
     `It heals it  all up, that I  can  go into thee. I  love thee  that tha
opened to me. I love thee that I came into thee like that.'
     He bent  down and  kissed  her soft flank, rubbed his cheek against it,
then covered it up.
     `And will you never leave me?' she said.
     `Dunna ask them things,' he said.
     `But you do believe I love you?' she said.
     `Tha loved  me just now, wider than iver tha  thout tha would.  But who
knows what'll 'appen, once tha starts thinkin' about it!'
     `No, don't say those things!---And you don't really think that I wanted
to make use of you, do you?'
     `How?'
     `To have a child---?'
     `Now anybody can 'ave any childt i' th' world,' he said, as he sat down
fastening on his leggings.
     `Ah no!' she cried. `You don't mean it?'
     `Eh well!' he said, looking at her under his brows. `This wor t' best.'
     She lay still. He  softly opened the door. The sky was dark  blue, with
crystalline,  turquoise rim. He  went  out, to  shut up  the  hens, speaking
softly to his dog. And she lay and wondered at  the  wonder of life,  and of
being.
     When he came back she was still  lying there, glowing like  a gipsy. He
sat on the stool by her.
     `Tha mun come one naight ter  th' cottage, afore tha goos; sholl  ter?'
he asked,  lifting  his eyebrows  as  he looked at her,  his hands  dangling
between his knees.
     `Sholl ter?' she echoed, teasing.
     He smiled. `Ay, sholl ter?' he repeated.
     `Ay!' she said, imitating the dialect sound.
     `Yi!' he said.
     `Yi!' she repeated.
     `An' slaip wi' me,' he said. `It needs that. When sholt come?'
     `When sholl I?' she said.
     `Nay,' he said, `tha canna do't. When sholt come then?'
     `'Appen Sunday,' she said.
     `'Appen a' Sunday! Ay!'
     He laughed at her quickly.
     `Nay, tha canna,' he protested.

        Chapter 13

     On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood. It was a lovely morning,
the pear-blossom and plum had  suddenly appeared in the world in a wonder of
white here and there.
     It  was cruel  for Clifford, while  the  world bloomed, to  have to  be
helped  from  chair to bath-chair.  But he had forgotten, and even seemed to
have a certain conceit of himself  in his lameness.  Connie still  suffered,
having to lift his inert legs into place. Mrs Bolton did it now, or Field.
     She waited for him at the  top of the drive, at the  edge of the screen
of beeches. His chair came puffing along  with a sort of valetudinarian slow
importance. As he joined his wife he said:
     `Sir Clifford on his roaming steed!'
     `Snorting, at least!' she laughed.
     He stopped and  looked round at the facade of the long,  low  old brown
house.
     `Wragby doesn't wink an eyelid!'  he said.  `But then why should it!  I
ride upon the achievements of the mind of man, and that beats a horse.'
     `I suppose  it does. And  the souls in Plato riding up  to heaven  in a
two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,' she said.
     `Or a Rolls-Royce: Plato was an aristocrat!'
     `Quite! No more black horse to thrash and maltreat. Plato never thought
we'd go one better  than his black  steed and his white  steed, and have  no
steeds at all, only an engine!'
     `Only an engine and gas!' said Clifford.
     `I hope I  can  have some repairs done to the  old  place next  year. I
think I shall  have about a thousand to spare for  that:  but work costs  so
much!' he added.
     `Oh, good!' said Connie. `If only there aren't more strikes!'
     `What  would  be the  use  of  their striking  again!  Merely  ruin the
industry, what's left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!'
     `Perhaps they don't mind ruining the industry,' said Connie.
     `Ah, don't talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if
it  can't keep their pockets quite so flush,' he said, using turns of speech
that oddly had a twang of Mrs Bolton.
     `But   didn't   you   say   the   other    day   that    you   were   a
conservative-anarchist,' she asked innocently.
     `And did you  understand  what I meant?' he  retorted. `All I meant is,
people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they  like,
strictly privately,  so long as they  keep  the form of life intact, and the
apparatus.'
     Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:
     `It sounds like saying an egg may go as  addled as it likes, so long as
it keeps its shell on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves.'
     `I don't think people are eggs,'  he  said. `Not even angels'  eggs, my
dear little evangelist.'
     He was  in  rather high feather  this  bright morning. The  larks  were
trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent
steam. It was  almost like  old  days,  before the war. Connie didn't really
want to  argue. But then  she  did not really want to  go  to  the wood with
Clifford either. So she walked beside his  chair in a  certain  obstinacy of
spirit.
     `No,' he  said. `There  will  be  no  more  strikes, it.  The  thing is
properly managed.'
     `Why not?'
     `Because strikes will be made as good as impossible.'
     `But will the men let you?' she asked.
     `We  shan't  ask  them. We shall do  it while they aren't  looking: for
their own good, to save the industry.'
     `For your own good too,' she said.
     `Naturally! For the  good  of everybody. But  for  their good even more
than mine. I can live without the pits. They can't. They'll starve if  there
are no pits. I've got other provision.'
     They looked  up the shallow valley at  the mine, and beyond it,  at the
black-lidded  houses  of Tevershall crawling like some serpent  up the hill.
From the old brown church the bells were ringing: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!
     `But will the men let you dictate terms?' she said. `My dear, they will
have to: if one does it gently.'
     `But mightn't there be a mutual understanding?'
     `Absolutely: when  they  realize that  the  industry  comes before  the
individual.'
     `But must you own the industry?' she said.
     `I don't.  But to the extent  I do  own  it, yes,  most decidedly.  The
ownership of  property has now become a religious  question: as  it has been
since Jesus and St Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to
the poor, but use all thou  hast to encourage the  industry and give work to
the poor.  It's the only  way to feed  all  the  mouths and clothe  all  the
bodies.  Giving  away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor
just  as much as  for us. And  universal  starvation  is no  high aim.  Even
general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly.'
     `But the disparity?'
     `That is  fate. Why is the star Jupiter bigger than  the star  Neptune?
You can't start altering the make-up of things!'
     `But when this envy and  jealousy and discontent has once started,' she
began.
     `Do, your best to stop it. Somebody's got to be boss of the show.'
     `But who is boss of the show?' she asked.
     `The men who own and run the industries.'
     There was a long silence.
     `It seems to me they're a bad boss,' she said.
     `Then you suggest what they should do.'
     `They don't take their boss-ship seriously enough,' she said.
     `They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,' he said.
     `That's thrust  upon me. I don't really want it,'  she  blurted out. He
stopped the chair and looked at her.
     `Who's shirking their responsibility now!' he said.  `Who  is trying to
get away now  from the  responsibility of  their  own boss-ship, as you call
it?'
     `But I don't want any boss-ship,' she protested.
     `Ah! But that is funk. You've got it: fated to it. And  you should live
up to it. Who has given the colliers  all they have that's worth having: all
their  political  liberty,  and  their  education,  such  as  it  is,  their
sanitation,  their health-conditions, their books,  their music, everything.
Who  has  given  it them? Have colliers  given  it to colliers? No! All  the
Wragbys  and  Shipleys  in  England  have  given their part, and must  go on
giving. There's your responsibility.'
     Connie listened, and flushed very red.
     `I'd  like  to  give  something,'  she  said.  `But  I'm  not  allowed.
Everything is to be sold  and paid  for now; and all the things you  mention
now, Wragby  and Shipley  sells  them  to the people,  at  a  good  prof it.
Everything  is sold. You don't  give one  heart-beat  of real sympathy.  And
besides, who has taken away  from the people their natural life and manhood,
and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?'
     `And what must I do?' he  asked,  green. `Ask them to come and  pillage
me?'
     `Why  is  Tevershall  so ugly,  so  hideous?  Why  are  their  lives so
hopeless?'
     `They  built  their  own  Tevershall, that's part of  their display  of
freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live  their
own pretty lives. I can't live their lives for them. Every  beetle must live
its own life.'
     `But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal-mine.'
     `Not at  all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to
work for me.
     `Their lives are  industrialized  and  hopeless, and  so are ours,' she
cried.
     `I don't think  they are. That's just  a romantic  figure  of speech, a
relic  of the swooning and die-away  romanticism.  You don't look  at all  a
hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.'
     Which  was true.  For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her  colour was
hot  in her  cheeks, she  looked full of a  rebellious passion far from  the
dejection  of  hopelessness.  She noticed,  ill the  tussocky  places of the
grass,  cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared  in their down. And
she wondered with rage, why it was  she felt Clifford was so wrong,  yet she
couldn't say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.
     `No wonder the men hate you,' she said.
     `They don't!' he replied. `And don't fall into errors: in your sense of
the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never
could. Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses  were always
the same, and will always be the  same. Nero's slaves were  extremely little
different  from our colliers or the Ford motor-car  workmen.  I mean  Nero's
mine  slaves  and  his  field  slaves.  It  is  the  masses:  they  are  the
unchangeable. An  individual  may emerge from the masses. But the  emergence
doesn't alter the  mass. The masses are  unalterable. It  is one of the most
momentous  facts of social science. Panem et circenses! Only today education
is  one of  the bad substitutes  for a circus.  What  is wrong today is that
we've  made a profound hash  of  the  circuses  part  of  the programme, and
poisoned our masses with a little education.'
     When Clifford became really  roused  in  his feelings about  the common
people,  Connie was frightened.  There  was something  devastatingly true in
what he said. But it was a truth that killed.
     Seeing her pale  and silent, Clifford started  the chair  again, and no
more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.
     `And what we need to take up now,' he sa