LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER_LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT (Page 13 of 17)

'And the people who see you?'

'I'll wear goggles and a veil.'

He pondered for some time.

'Well,' he said. 'You please yourself as usual.'

'But wouldn't it please you?'

'Oh yes! It'd please me all right,' he said a little grimly. 'I might as well smite while the iron's hot.'

'Do you know what I thought?' she said suddenly. 'It suddenly came to me. You are the ''Knight of the Burning Pestle''!'

'Ay! And you? Are you the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar?'

'Yes!' she said. 'Yes! You're Sir Pestle and I'm Lady Mortar.'

'All right, then I'm knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady Jane.'

'Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I'm my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must have flowers too. Yes!'

She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis.

'There!' she said. 'Charming! Charming! Sir John!'

And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast.

'And you won't forget me there, will you?' She kissed him on the breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple, kissing him again.

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

'This is John Thomas marryin' Lady Jane,' he said. 'An' we mun let Constance an' Oliver go their ways. Maybe—'

He spread out his hand with a gesture, and then he sneezed, sneezing away the flowers from his nose and his navel. He sneezed again.

'Maybe what?' she said, waiting for him to go on.

He looked at her a little bewildered.

'Eh?' he said.

'Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,' she insisted.

'Ay, what was I going to say?'

He had forgotten. And it was one of the disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

A yellow ray of sun shone over the trees.

'Don't say those things!' she said. 'You only say them to hurt me.'

He dropped his head. Then he said, in dialect:

'Ay, maybe I do, maybe I do! Well then, I'll say nowt, an' ha' done wi't. But tha mun dress thysen, all' go back to thy stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand. Time's up! Time's up for Sir John, an' for little Lady Jane! Put thy shimmy on, Lady Chatterley! Tha might be anybody, standin' there be-out even a shimmy, an' a few rags o' flowers. There then, there then, I'll undress thee, tha bob-tailed young throstle.' And he took the leaves from her hair, kissing her damp hair, and the flowers from her breasts, and kissed her breasts, and kissed her navel, and kissed her maiden-hair, where he left the flowers threaded. 'They mun stop while they will,' he said. 'So! There tha'rt bare again, nowt but a barearsed lass an' a bit of a Lady Jane! Now put thy shimmy on, for tha mun go, or else Lady Chatterley's goin' to be late for dinner, an' where 'ave yer been to my pretty maid!'

She never knew how to answer him when he was in this condition of the vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little igno-miniously home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously home.

He would accompany her to the broad riding. His young pheasants were all right under the shelter.

When he and she came out on to the riding, there was Mrs. Bolton faltering palely towards them.

CHAPTER 16

Connie arrived home to an ordeal of cross-questioning. Clifford had been out at tea-time, had come in just before the storm, and where was her ladyship? Nobody knew, only Mrs. Bolton suggested she had gone for a walk into the wood. Into the wood, in such a storm! Clifford for once let himself get into a state of nervous frenzy. He started at every flash of lightning, and blenched at every roll of thunder. He looked at the icy thunder-rain as if it dare the end of the world. He got more and more worked up.

Mrs. Bolton tried to soothe him.

‘She’ll be sheltering in the hut, till it’s over. Don’t worry, her Ladyship is all right.’

‘I don’t like her being in the wood in a storm like this! I don’t like her being in the wood at all! She’s been gone now more than two hours. When did she go out?’

‘A little while before you came in.’

‘I didn’t see her in the park. God knows where she is and what has happened to her.’

‘Oh, nothing’s happened to her. You’ll see, she’ll be home directly after the rain stops. It’s just the rain that’s keeping her.’

But her ladyship did not come home directly the rain stopped. In fact time went by, the sun came out for his last yellow glimpse, and there still was no sign of her. The sun was set, it was growing dark, and the first dinner-gong had rung.

‘How foolish of Clifford to make a fuss!’ said Connie at length, angrily, really speaking to herself.

‘Oh, you know what men are! They like working themselves up. But he’ll be all right as soon as he sees your Ladyship.’

Connie was very angry that Mrs. Bolton knew her secret: for certainly she knew it.

Suddenly Constance stood still on the path.

‘It’s monstrous that I should have to be followed!’ she said, her eyes flashing.

‘Oh! your Ladyship, don’t say that! He’d certainly have sent the two men, and they’d have come straight to the hut. I didn’t know where it was, really.’

Connie flushed darker with rage, at the suggestion. Yet, while her passion was on her, she could not lie. She could not even pretend there was nothing between herself and the keeper. She looked at the other woman, who stood so sly, with her head dropped: yet somehow, in her femaleness, an ally.

‘Oh well!’ she said. ‘If it is so it is so. I don’t mind!’

‘Why, you’re all right, my Lady! You’ve only been sheltering in the hut. It’s absolutely nothing.’

He looked at her suspiciously.

And look at your hair!’ he said; ‘look at yourself!’

‘Yes!’ she replied calmly. ‘I ran out in the rain with no clothes on.’

He stared at her speechless.

‘You must be mad!’ he said.

‘Why? To like a shower bath from the rain?’

‘And how did you dry yourself?’

‘On an old towel and at the fire.’

He still stared at her in a dumbfounded way.

‘And supposing anybody came,’ he said.

‘Who would come?’

‘Who? Why, anybody! And Mellors. Does he come? He must come in the evenings.’

‘Yes, he came later, when it had cleared up, to feed the pheasants with corn.’

She spoke with amazing nonchalance. Mrs. Bolton, who was listening in the next room, heard in sheer admiration. To think a woman could carry it off so naturally!

‘What do you think of this, by the way?’ he said, reaching for his book. ‘You’d have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain, if only we have a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah, here it is!—’’The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending.’’’

Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.

‘And if it spiritually ascends,’ she said, ‘what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Take the man for what he means. ascending is the opposite of his wasting, I presume.’

‘Spiritually blown out, so to speak!’

‘No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is anything in it?’

She looked at him again.

‘Physically wasting?’ she said. ‘I see you getting fatter, and I’m not wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He’s not to me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered Eve wasn’t really much bigger, if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?’

‘I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak,’ said Clifford. ‘Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending.’

‘Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below.’

‘Do you like your physique?’ he asked.

‘I love it!’ And through her mind went the words: It’s the nicest, nicest woman’s arse as is!

‘But that is really rather extraordinary, because there’s no denying it’s an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn’t take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind.’

‘Supreme pleasure?’ she said, looking up at him. ‘Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.’

He looked at her in wonder.

‘The life of the body,’ he said, ‘is just the life of the animals.’

‘Oh, don’t trouble! You almost communicate a thrill to me. I almost feel that it is I who am going off.’

‘Well, why don’t you come?’

‘We’ve gone over all that. And as a matter of fact, I suppose your greatest thrill comes from being able to say a temporary farewell to all this. Nothing so thrilling, for the moment, as Good-bye-to-all!—But every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.’

‘I’m not going to enter any new bondages.’

‘Don’t boast, while the gods are listening,’ he said.

She pulled up short.

‘No! I won’t boast!’ she said.

But she was thrilled, none the less, to be going off: to feel bonds snap. She couldn’t help it.

Clifford, who couldn’t sleep, gambled all night with Mrs. Bolton, till she was too sleepy almost to live.

And the day came round for Hilda to arrive. Connie had arranged with Mellors that if everything promised well for their night together, she would hang a green shawl out of the window. If there were frustration, a red one.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But he always knew what I was after, I must say that. But he generally gave in to me.’

‘He was never the lord and master thing?’

‘No! At least there’d be a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew I’d got to give in. But usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and master. But neither was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.’

‘And what if you had held out against him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I never did. Even when he was in the wrong, if he was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted to break what was between us. And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he’s really determined; whether you’re in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something. But I must say, Ted ‘ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on a thing, and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.’

‘And that’s how you are with all your patients?’ asked Connie.

Still! the human existence is a good deal controlled by the machine of external circumstance. She was in the power of this machine. She couldn’t extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn’t even want to.

Hilda arrived in good time on Thursday morning, in a nimble two-seater car, with her suit-case strapped firmly behind. She looked as demure and maidenly as ever, but she had the same will of her own. She had the very hell of a will of her own, as her husband had found out. But the husband was now divorcing her.

Yes, she even made it easy for him to do that, though she had no lover. For the time being, she was ‘off’ men. She was very well content to be quite her own mistress: and mistress of her two children, whom she was going to bring up ‘properly’, whatever that may mean.

Connie was only allowed a suit-case, also. But she had sent on a trunk to her father, who was going by train. No use taking a car to Venice. And Italy much too hot to motor in, in July. He was going comfortably by train. He had just come down from Scotland.

So, like a demure arcadian field-marshal, Hilda arranged the material part of the journey. She and Connie sat in the upstairs room, chatting.

‘But Hilda!’ said Connie, a little frightened. ‘I want to stay near here to-night. Not here: near here!’

Hilda, like a ruddy, rich-coloured Athena, bowed her head and pondered. She was really violently angry. But she dared not show it, because Connie, taking after her father, would straight away become obstreperous and unmanageable.

It was true, Hilda did not like Clifford: his cool assurance that he was somebody! She thought he made use of Connie shamefully and impudently. She had hoped her sister would leave him. But, being solid Scotch middle class, she loathed any ‘lowering’ of oneself or the family. She looked up at last.

‘You’ll regret it,’ she said,

‘I shan’t,’ cried Connie, flushed red. ‘He’s quite the exception. I really love him. He’s lovely as a lover.’

Hilda still pondered.

‘You’ll get over him quite soon,’ she said, ‘and live to be ashamed of yourself because of him.’

‘I shan’t! I hope I’m going to have a child of his.’

‘Connie!’ said Hilda, hard as a hammer-stroke, and pale with anger.

Hilda became more angry at every reply, angry as her mother used to be, in a kind of paroxysm. But still she hid it.

‘I would give up tonight’s escapade if I were you,’ she advised calmly.

‘I can’t! I must stay with him tonight, or I can’t go to Venice at all. I just can’t.’

Hilda heard her father over again, and she gave way, out of mere diplomacy. And she consented to drive to Mansfield, both of them, to dinner, to bring Connie back to the lane-end after dark, and to fetch her from the lane-end the next morning, herself sleeping in Mansfield, only half an hour away, good going.

But she was furious. She stored it up against her sister, this balk in her plans.

Connie flung an emerald-green shawl over her window-sill.

On the strength of her anger, Hilda warmed toward Clifford.

After all, he had a mind. And if he had no sex, functionally, all the better: so much the less to quarrel about! Hilda wanted no more of that sex business, where men became nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had less to put up with than many women if she did but know it.

‘Very good, your Ladyship, I will. And have a good time, and come back and cheer us up.’

Everybody waved. The car went off Connie looked back and saw Clifford, sitting at the top of the steps in his house-chair. After all, he was her husband: Wragby was her home: circumstance had done it.

Mrs. Chambers held the gate and wished her ladyship a happy holiday. The car slipped out of the dark spinney that masked the park, on to the highroad where the colliers were trailing home. Hilda turned to the Crosshill Road, that was not a main road, but ran to Mansfield. Connie put on goggles. They ran beside the railway, which was in a cutting be-low them. Then they crossed the cutting on a bridge.

‘That’s the lane to the cottage!’ said Connie.

Hilda glanced at it impatiently.

‘It’s a frightful pity we can’t go straight off!’ she said. We could have been in Pall Mall by nine o’clock.’

‘I’m sorry for your sake,’ said Connie, from behind her goggles.