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Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He
turned his full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure
detachment. He was estimating her, and the extent of the
impression he had made. With the English nothing could save him
from being the eternal outsider, not even love. Yet women
sometimes fell for him ... Englishwomen too.
He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs
which would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled
instead, perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared
before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee
Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do.
It was a fine November day ... fine for Wragby. He looked over the
melancholy park. My God! What a place!
He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady
Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came,
would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the
central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground
floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady
Chatterley's own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant ... he
never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her
room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions
of Renoir and Cézanne.
"It's very pleasant up here," he said, with his queer smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. "You are wise to get to the
top."
"Yes, I think so," she said.
Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot
in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had
never seen it, and she asked very few people up.
Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked.
She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers ...
other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when
her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling.
Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without
affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul,
then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success.
"But why are you such a lonely bird?" Connie asked him; and again
he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
"Some birds are that way," he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony; "but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of
being a lonely bird yourself?" Connie, a little startled, thought about
it for a few moments, and then she said: "Only in a way! Not
altogether, like you!"
"Am I altogether a lonely bird?" he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so
perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or
afraid.
"Why?" she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. "You are,
aren't you?"
She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her
almost lose her balance.
"Oh, you're quite right!" he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race
that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made
Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.
He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the
night was crying out of his breast to her in a way that affected her
very womb.
"It's awfully nice of you to think of me," he said laconically.
"Why shouldn't I think of you?" she exclaimed with hardly breath to
utter it.
He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
"Oh, in that way!... May I hold your hand for a minute?" he asked
suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and
sending out an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and
kneeled beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands,
and buried his face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was
perfectly dim and dazed, looking down in a sort of amazement at the
rather tender nape of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs.
In all her burning dismay, she could not help putting her hand, with
tenderness and compassion, on the defenceless nape of his neck,
and he trembled with a deep shudder.
Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing
eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast
flowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give
him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman,
trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware,
aware of every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him. And at
length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still.
Then, with dim, compassionate fingers, she stroked his head, that
lay on her breast.
When he rose, he kissed both her hands, then both her feet, in their
suède slippers and in silence went away to the end of the room,
where he stood with his back to her. There was silence for some
minutes. Then he turned and came to her again as she sat in her old
place by the fire.
"And now, I suppose you'll hate me!" he said in a quiet, inevitable
way. She looked up at him quickly.
"Why should I?" she asked.
"They mostly do," he said; then he caught himself up. "I mean ... a
woman is supposed to."
"This is the last moment when I ought to hate you," she said
resentfully.
"I know! I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...."
he cried miserably.
She wondered why he should be miserable. "Won't you sit down
again?" she said. He glanced at the door.
"Sir Clifford!" he said. "Won't he ... won't he be...?" She paused a
moment to consider. "Perhaps!" she said. And she looked up at him.
"I don't want Clifford to know ... not even to suspect. It would hurt
him so much. But I don't think it's wrong, do you?"
"Wrong! Good God, no! You're only too infinitely good to me ... I can
hardly bear it."
He turned aside, and she saw that in another moment he would be
sobbing.
"But we needn't let Clifford know, need we?" she pleaded. "It would
hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts
nobody."
"Me!" he said, almost fiercely; "he'll know nothing from me! You see
if he does. Me give myself away! Ha! Ha!" He laughed hollowly,
cynically at such an idea. She watched him in wonder. He said to
her: "May I kiss your hand and go? I'll run into Sheffield I think, and
lunch there if I may, and be back to tea. May I do anything for you?
May I be sure you don't hate me?—and that you won't?"—he ended
with a desperate note of cynicism.
"No, I don't hate you," she said. "I think you're nice."
"Ah!" he said to her fiercely, "I'd rather you said that to me than said
you love me! It means such a lot more.... Till afternoon then. I've
plenty to think about till then." He kissed her hands humbly and was
gone.
"I don't think I can stand that young man," said Clifford at lunch.
"Why?" asked Connie.
"He's such a bounder underneath his veneer ... just waiting to
bounce us."
"I think people have been so unkind to him," said Connie.
"Do you wonder? And do you think he employs his shining hours
doing deeds of kindness?"
"I think he has a certain sort of generosity."
"Towards whom?"
"I don't quite know."
"Naturally you don't. I'm afraid you mistake unscrupulousness for
generosity."
Connie paused. Did she? It was just possible. Yet the
unscrupulousness of Michaelis had a certain fascination for her. He
went whole lengths where Clifford only crept a few timid paces. In
his way he had conquered the world, which was what Clifford
wanted to do. Ways and means...? Were those of Michaelis more
despicable than those of Clifford? Was the way the poor outsider had
shoved and bounced himself forward in person, and by the back
doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into
prominence? The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands
of gasping dogs with lolling tongues. The one that got her first was
the real dog among dogs, if you go by success! So Michaelis could
keep his tail up.
The queer thing was, he didn't. He came back towards teatime with
a large handful of violets and lilies, and the same hang-dog
expression. Connie wondered sometimes if it were a sort of mask to
disarm opposition, because it was almost too fixed. Was he really
such a sad dog?
His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening,
though through it Clifford felt the inner effrontery. Connie didn't feel
it, perhaps because it was not directed against women; only against
men, and their presumptions and assumptions. That indestructible,
inward effrontery in the meagre fellow was what made men so down
on Michaelis. His very presence was an affront to a man of society,
cloak it as he might in an assumed good manner.
Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her
embroidery and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As for
Michaelis, he was perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive,
aloof young fellow of the previous evening, millions of degrees
remote from his hosts, but laconically playing up to them to the
required amount, and never coming forth to them for a moment.
Connie felt he must have forgotten the morning. He had not
forgotten. But he knew where he was ... in the same old place
outside, where the born outsiders are. He didn't take the love-
making altogether personally. He knew it would not change him from
an ownerless dog, whom everybody begrudges its golden collar, into
a comfortable society dog.
The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an
outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no
matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a
necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in
with the smart people was also a necessity.
But occasional love, as a comfort and soothing, was also a good
thing, and he was not ungrateful. On the contrary, he was burningly,
poignantly grateful for a piece of natural, spontaneous kindness;
almost to tears. Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his
child's soul was sobbing with gratitude to the woman, and burning
to come to her again; just as his outcast soul was knowing he would
keep really clear of her.
He found an opportunity to say to her, as they were lighting the
candles in the hall:
"May I come?"
"I'll come to you," she said.
"Oh good!"
He waited for her a long time ... but she came.
He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came,
and was finished. There was something curiously childlike and
defenceless about his naked body: as children are naked. His
defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of
cunning, and when these were in abeyance he seemed doubly naked
and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling
helplessly.
He roused in the woman a wild sort of compassion and yearning,
and a wild, craving physical desire. The physical desire he did not
satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then
shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his
effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost.
But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her
when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously
potent; he stayed firm inside her, given to her, while she was active
... wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he
felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from
his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and
satisfaction.
"Ah, how good!" she whispered tremulously, and she became quite
still, clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but
somehow proud.
He stayed that time only the three days, and to Clifford was exactly
the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no
breaking down his external man.
He wrote to Connie with the same plaintive melancholy note as ever,
sometimes witty, and touched with a queer, sexless affection. A kind
of hopeless affection he seemed to feel for her, and the essential
remoteness remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of
him, and he wanted to be hopeless. He rather hated hope. "Une
immense espérance a traversé la terre" he read somewhere, and his
comment was: "—and it's darned-well drowned everything worth
having."
Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him.
And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She
couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless,
couldn't ever quite love at all.
So they went on for quite a time, writing, and meeting occasionally
in London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get
with him by her own activity, his little orgasm being over. And he still
wanted to give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.
And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something
blind and a little arrogant. It was an almost mechanical confidence in
her own powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
She was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used all her aroused
cheerfulness and satisfaction to stimulate Clifford, so that he wrote
his best at this time, and was almost happy in his strange blind way.
He really reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of
Michaelis' male passivity erect inside her. But of course he never
knew it, and if he had, he wouldn't have said thank you!
Yet when those days of her grand joyful cheerfulness and stimulus
were gone, quite gone, and she was depressed and irritable, how
Clifford longed for them again! Perhaps if he'd known he might have
wished to get her and Michaelis together again.

CHAPTER IV

Connie always had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair

with Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean
nothing to her. She was attached to Clifford. He wanted a good deal
of her life and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from
the life of a man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not. There
were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But, as she knew by
foreboding, that would come to an end, Mick couldn't keep anything
up. It was part of his very being that he must break off any
connection, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It was
his major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me
down!
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow
down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good
fish in the sea ... maybe ... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel
or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are
likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
Clifford was making strides into fame, and even money. People came
to see him. Connie nearly always had somebody at Wragby. But if
they weren't mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish,
or conger-eel.
There were a few regular men, constants; men who had been at
Cambridge with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had
remained in the army, and was a Brigadier-General. "The army
leaves me time to think, and saves me from having to face the battle
of life," he said.
There was Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about
stars. There was Hammond, another writer. All were about the same
age as Clifford; the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed
in the life of the mind. What you did apart from that was your
private affair, and didn't much matter. No one thinks of enquiring of
another person at what hour he retires to the privy. It isn't
interesting to anyone but the person concerned.
And so with most of the matters of ordinary life ... how you make
your money, or whether you love your wife, or if you have "affairs."
All these matters concern only the person concerned, and, like going
to the privy, have no interest for anyone else.
"The whole point about the sexual problem," said Hammond, who
was a tall thin fellow with a wife and two children, but much more
closely connected with a typewriter, "is that there is no point to it.
Strictly there is no problem. We don't want to follow a man into the
W. C., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman?
And therein lies the problem. If we took no more notice of the one
thing than the other, there'd be no problem. It's all utterly senseless
and pointless; a matter of misplaced curiosity."
"Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia,
you begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling
point."... Julia was Hammond's wife.
"Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of
my drawing-room. There's a place for all these things."
"You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some
discreet alcove?"
Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little with
Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
"Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and
Julia; and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in."
"As a matter of fact," said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: "As
a matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and
a strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been
in the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now
I see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and
success is in men. It is enormously over-developed. All our
individuality has run that way. And of course men like you think
you'll get through better with a woman's backing. That's why you're
so jealous. That's what sex is to you ... a vital little dynamo between
you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful
you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people
like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is
labelled Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond ... just like a trunk on the railway
that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold. B.
Hammond, C/o Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond. Oh, you're quite right,
you're quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house
and decent cooking. You're quite right. It even needs posterity. But it
all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all
things turn."
Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity
of his mind, and of his not being a timeserver. None the less, he did
want success.
"It's quite true, you can't live without cash," said May. "You've got to
have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along ... even
to be free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or
your stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the
labels off sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be
free to make love to any woman who inclines us that way?"
"There speaks the lascivious Celt," said Clifford.
"Lascivious! well, why not? I can't see I do a woman any more harm
by sleeping with her than by dancing with her ... or even talking to
her about the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead
of ideas, so why not?"
"Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!" said Hammond.
"Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?"
"But we're not rabbits, even so," said Hammond.
"Precisely! I have my mind: I have certain calculations to make in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life
or death. Sometimes indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would
interfere with me disastrously. In the same way starved sex
interferes with me. What then?"
"I should have thought sexual indigestion from surfeit would have
interfered with you more seriously," said Hammond satirically.
"Not it! I don't over-eat myself, and I don't over-fuck myself. One
has a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve
me."
"Not at all! You can marry."
"How do you know I can? It may not suit the process of my mind.
Marriage might ... and would ... stultify my mental processes. I'm
not properly pivoted that way ... and so must I be chained in a
kennel like a monk? All rot and funk, my boy. I must live and do my
calculations. I need women sometimes. I refuse to make a mountain
of it, and I refuse anybody's moral condemnation or prohibition. I'd
be ashamed to see a woman walking round with my name-label on
her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk."
These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
"It's an amusing idea, Charlie," said Dukes, "that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I
suppose it's quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many
sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the
weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal, physical
conversation between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a
woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don't talk with
any interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or
sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But
if you had...."
"If you have the proper sort of emotion or sympathy with a woman,
you ought to sleep with her," said May. "It's the only decent thing, to
go to bed with her. Just as, when you are interested talking to
someone, the only decent thing is to have the talk out. You don't
prudishly put your tongue between your teeth and bite it. You just
say out your say. And the same the other way."
"No," said Hammond. "It's wrong. You, for example, May, you
squander half your force with women. You'll never really do what
you should do, with a fine mind such as yours. Too much of you
goes the other way."
"Maybe it does ... and too little of you goes that way, Hammond, my
boy, married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your
mind, but it's going damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as
fiddlesticks, from what I see of it. You're simply talking it down."
Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
"Go it you two minds!" he said. "Look at me.... I don't do any high
and pure mental work, nothing but jot down a few ideas. And yet I
neither marry, or run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he
wants to run after the women, he's quite free not to run too often.
But I wouldn't prohibit him from running. As for Hammond, he's got
a property instinct, so naturally the straight road and the narrow
gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an English Man of Letters
before he's done, A. B. C. from top to toe. Then there's me. I'm
nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford? Do you think
sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?"
Clifford rarely talked much at these times. He never held forth; his
ideas were really not vital enough for it, he was too confused and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
"Well!" he said, "being myself hors de combat, I don't see I've
anything to say on the matter."
"Not at all," said Dukes; "the top of you's by no means hors de
combat. You've got the life of the mind sound and intact. So let us
hear your ideas."
"Well," stammered Clifford, "even then I don't suppose I have much
idea ... I suppose marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty well
stand for what I think. Though of course between a man and
woman who care for one another, it is a great thing."
"What sort of great thing?" said Tommy.
"Oh ... it perfects the intimacy," said Clifford, uneasy as a woman in
such talk.
"Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's
natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season.
Unfortunately no woman makes any particular start with me, so I go
to bed by myself; and am none the worse for it.... I hope so anyway,
for how should I know? Anyhow I've no starry calculations to be
interfered with, and no immortal works to write. I'm merely a fellow
skulking in the army...."
Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put
another stitch in her sewing.... Yes, she sat there! She had to sit
mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the
immensely important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen.
But she had to be there. They didn't get on so well without her; their
ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much more edgy and
nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence, and the
talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired
by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so
selfish in a mental way. And Charles May, though she liked
something about him, seemed a little distasteful and messy, in spite
of his stars.
How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the
manifestations of these four men! these, and one or two others.
That they never seemed to get anywhere didn't trouble her deeply.
She liked to hear what they had to say, especially when Tommy was
there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and touching you with
their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was great fun! But
what cold minds!
And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for Michaelis,
on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a little
mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort.
Mongrel and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He
didn't merely walk round them with millions of words, in the parade
of the life of the mind.
Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of it.
But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there,
amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies,
as she called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused,
and proud too, that even their talking they could not do without her
silent presence. She had an immense respect for thought ... and
these men, at least, tried to think honestly. But somehow there was
a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike talked at something,
though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't say. It was
something that Mick didn't clear, either.
But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his
life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across
him. He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his
cronies had against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social;
they were more or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it,
to say the least.
There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the
conversation drifted again to love.

"Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in kindred something-or-other"—

said Tommy Dukes. "I'd like to know what the tie is.... The tie that
binds us just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from
that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say
spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned
intellectuals in the world. Damned everybodies, as far as that goes,
for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful things
we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a curious
thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite,
ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at
Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all,
just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits.... Protagoras, or
whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs
joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly
sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday
stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's
something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite
and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit."
"I don't think we're altogether so spiteful," protested Clifford.
"My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely
prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they
are poison; when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc,
etc, then poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say
spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to
you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done."
"Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another," said Hammond.
"I tell you we must ... we say such spiteful things to one another,
about one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst."
"And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity. I
agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but
he did more than that," said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The
cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty.
It was all so ex cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.
Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
"That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,"
said Hammond.
"They aren't, of course," chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man,
who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
"I wasn't talking about knowledge.... I was talking about the mental
life," laughed Dukes. "Real knowledge comes out of the whole
corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as
much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and
rationalise. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and
all they can do is to criticise, and make a deadness. I say all they
can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticising
today ... criticising to death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and
glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's
like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic
whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the
apple. You've severed the connection between the apple and the
tree: the organic connection. And if you've got nothing in your life
but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple ... you've
fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful,
just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad."
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly
laughed to herself.
"Well then, we're all plucked apples," said Hammond, rather acidly
and petulantly.
"So let's make cider of ourselves," said Charlie.
"But what do you think of Bolshevism?" put in the brown Berry, as if
everything had led up to it.
"Bravo!" roared Charlie. "What do you think of Bolshevism?"
"Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!" said Dukes.
"I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question," said Hammond, shaking
his head seriously.
"Bolshevism, it seems to me," said Charlie, "is just a superlative
hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois
is, isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings
and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to
invent a man without them.
"Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so
he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the
greater thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is
bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a
unit, non-organic, composed of many different, yet equally essential
parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving
power of the machine, hate ... hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is
Bolshevism."
"Absolutely!" said Tommy, "But also, it seems to me a perfect
description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-
owner's ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the
driving power was hate. Hate it is, all the same: hate of life itself.
Just look at these Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up ... but it's all
part of the life of the mind, it's a logical development."
"I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the
premisses," said Hammond.
"My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure mind
... exclusively."
"At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom," said Charlie.
"Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will
have the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest
mechanical equipment."
"But this thing can't go on ... this hate business. There must be a
reaction...." said Hammond.
"Well, we've been waiting for years ... we wait longer. Hate's a
growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of
forcing ideas on to life, forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest
feelings we force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with
a formula, like a machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the
roost, and the roost turns into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only
we are hypocrites. The Russians are Bolshevists without hypocrisy."
"But there are many other ways," said Hammond, "than the Soviet
way. The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent."
"Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if you
want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-
witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted. So
I even consider our far-famed mental life half-witted. We're all as
cold as cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're all of us
Bolshevists, only we give it another name. We think we're gods ...
men like gods! It's just the same as Bolshevism. One has to be
human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being
either a god or a Bolshevist ... for they are the same thing: they're
both too good to be true."
Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
"You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?"
"You lovely lad!" said Tommy. "No, my cherub, nine times out of ten,
no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows
with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks,
like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-
property, make-a-success-of-it, my-husband-my-wife sort of love?
No, my fine fellow, I don't believe in it at all!"
"But you do believe in something?"
"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy
penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a
lady."
"Well, you've got them all," said Berry.
Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. "You angel boy! If only I had! If
only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops
and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say
'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt ... they are real ladies, mind
you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.' It would
be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the
parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and
says: How do you do?—to any really intelligent person. Renoir said
he painted his pictures with his penis ... he did too, lovely pictures! I
wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk!
Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it."
"There are nice women in the world," said Connie, lifting her head
up and speaking at last.
The men resented it ... she should have pretended to hear nothing.
They hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.

"My God!—'If they be not nice to me

What care I how nice they be?'—

"No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and
I'm not going to start forcing myself to it.... My God, no! I'll remain
as I am, and lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do.
I can be quite happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly
pure. Hopelessly pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?"
"It's much less complicated if one stays pure," said Berry.
"Yes, life is all too simple!"

CHAPTER V

On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie

went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed
in his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.
The hard air was still sulphureous, but they were both used to it.
Round the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and
smoke, and on the top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like
being inside an enclosure, always inside. Life always a dream or a
frenzy, inside an enclosure.
The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost
lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to
the woodgate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly
gravelled with sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and
refuse of the underworld had burned and given off its sulphur, it
turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured on dry days, darker, crab-
coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour, with a bluish-white
hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot of sifted,
bright pink. It's an ill-wind that brings nobody good.
Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the
hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the
wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a
black train, and went trailing off over the little sky.
Connie opened the woodgate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into
the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped
thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest
where Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old
thoroughfare coming across country. But now, of course, it was only
a riding through the private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved
round to the north.
In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the
ground keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly,
many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants.
They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left
unprotected, till now Clifford had got his gamekeeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees. He felt they
were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He
wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.
The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the
frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there
was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling
leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and
their grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the
woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish.
This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war
for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of
the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the
knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there
you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new
works at Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach
in the pure seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't
tell Clifford.
This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had
been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get
really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But
it made him hate Sir Geoffrey.
Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long
and very jolty downslope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of
the riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It
swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a
lovely easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
"I consider this is really the heart of England," said Clifford to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
"Do you?" she said, seating herself, in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.
"I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep it
intact."
"Oh yes!" said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-
o'clock hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the
sound to notice.
"I want this wood perfect ... untouched. I want nobody to trespass
in it," said Clifford.
There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery
of wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had
given it a blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly,
innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks
rising from the brown bracken! How safely the birds flitted among
them! And once there had been deer, and archers, and monks
padding along on asses. The place remembered, still remembered.
Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
"I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other
time," he said.
"But the wood is older than your family," said Connie gently.
"Quite!" said Clifford. "But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go ... it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!"
"Must one?" said Connie. "If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know."
"If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all," said Clifford. "And we who have this kind of property, and the
feeling for it, must preserve it."
There was a sad pause.
"Yes, for a little while," said Connie.
"For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the
place. One may go against convention, but one must keep up
tradition." Again there was a pause.
"What tradition?" asked Connie.
"The tradition of England! of this!"
"Yes," she said slowly.
"That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain," he
said.
Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was
thinking of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
"I'm sorry we can't have a son," she said.
He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
"It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man,"
he said. "If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to
the place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the
child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you
think it's worth considering?"
Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an "it"
to him. It ... it ... it!
"But what about the other man?" she asked.
"Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very
deeply?... You had that lover in Germany ... what is it now? Nothing
almost. It seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little
connections we make in our lives that matter so very much. They
pass away, and where are they? Where.... Where are the snows of
yesteryear?... It's what endures through one's life that matters; my
own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development.
But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional
sexual connections specially! If people don't exaggerate them
ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should.
What does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters.
It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together
once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us.
We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more
vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing
... that's what we live by ... not the occasional spasm of any sort.
Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison,
they vibrate so intricately to one another. That's the real secret of
marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I
are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able
to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since
fate has given us a checkmate physically there."
Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she
loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an
excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of
intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps
the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But
the point of an excursion is that you come home again.
"And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?" she asked.
"Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you."
She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the
wrong sort of fellow.
"But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong
sort of fellow," she said.
"No," he replied. "You cared for me. I don't believe you would ever
care for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm
wouldn't let you."
She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so
absolutely wrong.
"And should you expect me to tell you?" she asked, glancing up at
him almost furtively.
"Not at all. I'd better not know.... But you do agree with me, don't
you, that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life
lived together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex
thing to the necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what
we're driven to? After all, do these temporary excitements matter?
Isn't the whole problem of life the slow building up of an integral
personality, through the years? living an integrated life? There's no
point in a disintegrated life. If lack of sex is going to disintegrate
you, then go out and have a love affair. If lack of a child is going to
disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do
these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long
harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together ... don't you
think? ... if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and at the same
time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our steadily-
lived life. Don't you agree?"
Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was
right theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived
life with him she ... hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on
weaving herself into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?
Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with
him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower
of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next
year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years
and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be
pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away
and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the
straying of butterflies.
"I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all."
"But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?"
"Oh yes! I think I do, really."
She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path,
and was looking toward them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy
bark. A man with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing
their way as if about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted,
and was turning down hill. It was only the new gamekeeper, but he
had frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift
menace. That was how she had seen him, like the sudden rush of a
threat out of nowhere.
He was a man in dark-green velveteens and gaiters ... the old style,
with a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going
quickly down hill.
"Mellors!" called Clifford.
The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture,
a soldier!
"Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it
easier," said Clifford.
The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward
with the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping
invisible. He was moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not
look at Connie at all, only at the chair.
"Connie, this is the new gamekeeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?"
"No, Sir!" came the ready, neutral words.
The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair
hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made
her feel shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat
to his left hand and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he
said nothing at all. He remained for a moment still, with his hat in
his hand.
"But you've been here some time, haven't you?" Connie said to him.
"Eight months, Madam ... your Ladyship!" he corrected himself
calmly.
"And do you like it?"
She looked him in the eyes. His eyes narrowed a little, with irony,
perhaps with impudence.
"Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...." He gave
another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take hold of
the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy broad
drag of the dialect ... perhaps also in mockery, because there had
been no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman.
Anyhow, he was a curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of
himself.
Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark
hazel thicket.
"Is that all then, Sir Clifford?" asked the man.
"No, you'd better come along in case she sticks. The engine isn't
really strong enough for the uphill work." The man glanced round for
his dog ... a thoughtful glance. The spaniel looked at him and faintly
moved its tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came
into his eyes for a moment, then faded away, and his face was
expressionless. They went fairly quickly down the slope, the man
with his hand on the rail of the chair, steadying it. He looked like a
free soldier rather than a servant. And something about him
reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.
When they came to the hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran forward,
and opened the gate into the park. As she stood holding it, the two
men looked at her in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a
curious, cool wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked
like. And she saw in his blue, impersonal eyes a look of suffering and
detachment, yet a certain warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?
Clifford stopped the chair, once through the gate, and the man came
quickly, courteously, to close it.
"Why did you run to open?" asked Clifford in his quiet, calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. "Mellors would have done it."
"I thought you would go straight ahead," said Connie.
"And leave you to run after us?" said Clifford.
"Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!"
Mellors took the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise
of the knoll in the park, he breathed rather quickly, through parted
lips. He was rather frail really. Curiously full of vitality, but a little frail
and quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.
Connie fell back, let the chair go on. The day had greyed over: the
small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was
closed in again, the lid was down, there was a raw coldness. It was
going to snow. All grey, all grey! the world looked worn-out.
The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round
for Connie.
"Not tired, are you?" he asked.
"Oh no!" she said.
But she was. A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware
of. But the stranger knew. To Connie, everything in her world and
life seemed worn-out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the
hills.
They came to the house, and round to the back, where there were
no steps. Clifford managed to swing himself over on to the low,
wheeled house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms.
Then Connie lifted the burden of his dead legs after him.
The keeper, waiting at attention to be dismissed, watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing. He went pale, with a sort of fear, when he
saw Connie lifting the inert legs of the man in her arms, into the
other chair, Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
"Thanks, then, for the help, Mellors," said Clifford casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
"Nothing else, Sir?" came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
"Nothing, good morning!"
"Good morning, Sir."
"Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill.... I
hope it wasn't heavy for you," said Connie, looking back at the
keeper outside the door.
His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware
of her.
"Oh no, not heavy!" he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again
into the broad sound of the vernacular: "Good mornin' to your
Ladyship!"
"Who is your gamekeeper?" Connie asked at lunch.
"Mellors! You saw him," said Clifford.
"Yes, but where did he come from?"
"Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy ... son of a collier, I believe."
"And was he a collier himself?"
"Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was
keeper here for two years before the war ... before he joined up. My
father always had a good opinion of him, so when he came back,
and went to the pit for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here
as keeper. I was really very glad to get him ... it's almost impossible
to find a good man round here, for a gamekeeper ... and it needs a
man who knows the people."
"And isn't he married?"
"He was. But his wife went off with ... with various men ... but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still."
"So this man is alone?"
"More or less! He has a mother in the village ... and a child, I
believe."
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the
foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere,
haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So
when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar,
precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up
with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem
impersonal, almost to idiocy.