She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to administer to him. And she said very humbly: “Shall I do this now, Sir Clifford? Shall I do that?”
“No, leave it for a time, I’ll have it done later.”
“Very well, Sir Clifford.”
“Come in again in half-an-hour.”
“Very well, Sir Clifford.”
“And just take those old papers out, will you?”
“Very well, Sir Clifford.”
She went softly, and in half-an-hour she came softly again. She was bullied, but she didn’t mind. She was experiencing the upper classes. She neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley, and after all it’s the mistress of the house matters most.
Mrs. Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She also helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even shaving him, in her soft, tentative woman’s way. She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn’t so very different from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin, and softly rubbed the bristles. The stand-offishness and the lack of frankness didn’t bother her, she was having a new experience.
Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and her. But Connie didn’t mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing, to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.
Now she had more time to herself she could softly play the piano, up in her room, and sing: “Touch not the nettle… for the bonds of love are ill to loose.” She had not realized till lately how ill to loose they were, these bonds of love. But thank Heaven she had loosened them! She was so glad to be alone, not always to have to talk to him. When he was alone he tapped-tapped-tapped on a typewriter, to infinity. But when he was not “working,’’ and she was there, he talked, always talked; infinite small analysis of people and motives, and results, characters and personalities, till now she had had enough. For years she had loved it, until she had enough, and then suddenly it was too much. She was thankful to be alone.
It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear. But the bonds of such love are more ill to loose even than most bonds; though Mrs. Bolton’s coming had been a great help.
But he still wanted the old intimate evenings of talk with Connie: talk or reading aloud. But now she could arrange that Mrs. Bolton should come at ten to disturb them. At ten o’clock Connie could go upstairs and be alone. Clifford was in good hands with Mrs. Bolton.
Mrs. Bolton ate with Mrs. Betts in the housekeeper’s room, since they were all agreeable. And it was curious how much closer the servants’ quarters seemed to have come; right up to the doors of Clifford’s study, when before they were so remote. For Mrs. Betts would sometimes sit in Mrs. Bolton’s room, and Connie heard their lowered voices, and felt somehow the strong, outer vibration of the working people almost invading the sitting-rooms, when she and Clifford were alone. So changed was Wragby merely by Mrs. Bolton’s coming.
And Connie felt herself released, in another world; she felt she breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her roots, perhaps mortal ones, were tangled with Clifford’s. Yet still, she breathed freer, a new phase was going to begin in her life.
Chapter Eight
Mrs. Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie, feeling she must extend to her her female and professional protection. She was always urging her ladyship to walk out, to drive to Uthwaite, to be in the air. For Connie had got into the habit of sitting still by the fire, pretending to read, or to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.
It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs. Bolton said: “Now, why don’t you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the daffs behind the keeper’s cottage? They’re the prettiest sight you’d see in a day’s march. And you could put some in your room, wild daffs are always so cheerful-looking, aren’t they?”
Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils! After all, one should not stew in one’s own juice. The spring came back.… “Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn.”
And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression. But now something roused… “Pale beyond porch and portal”… the thing to do was to pass the porches and the portals.
She was stronger, she could walk better, and in the wood the wind would not be so tiring as it was across the park, flattening against her. She wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful carrion-bodied people. “Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrection of the body! Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it shall by no means bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun!” In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.
Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandines at the wood’s edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. “The world has grown pale with thy breath.” But it was the breath of Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses, too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves.
The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the color flew in her cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking a few primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold, sweet and cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.
Till she came to the clearing, at the far end of the wood, and saw the green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy, like the flesh underneath a mushroom, its stone warmed in a burst of sun. And there was a sparkle of yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no sound; no smoke from the chimney; no dog barking.
She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an excuse, to see the daffodils.
And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as they turned them away from the wind.
They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.
Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic and powerful, rising up. The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun! And she watched the daffodils turn golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap. Even she caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers. And then, being so still and alone, she seemed to get into the current of her own proper destiny. She had been fastened by a rope, and jagging and snarring like a boat at its moorings; now she was loose and adrift.
The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold nig
ht. So strong in their frailty!
She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with her. She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she hated it, especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this wind.
When she got home Clifford asked her:
“Where did you go?”
“Right across the wood! Look, aren’t the little daffodils adorable? To think they should come out of the earth!”
“Just as much out of the air and sunshine,” he said.
“But modelled in the earth,” she retorted, with a prompt contradiction, that surprised her a little.
The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called John’s Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the darkness of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it was! brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles. She heard the faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even above the hissing boom of the larch-wood, that spread its bristling, leafless, wolfish darkness on the down-slope, she heard the tinkle as of tiny water-bells.
This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny cleared space was lush and cold and dismal.
She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a woodpecker? It was surely hammering.
She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it had been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick young firs, which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the track, and the hammering drew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood, for trees make a silence even in their noise of wind.
She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hut made of rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was the quiet place where the growing pheasants were reared; the keeper in his shirtsleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with a short, sharp bark, and the keeper lifted his face suddenly and saw her. He had a startled look in his eyes.
He straightened himself and saluted, watching her in silence, as she came forward with weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion, he cherished his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.
“I wondered what the hammering was,” she said, feeling weak and breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at her.
“Ah’m gettin’ th’ coops ready for th’ young bods,” he said, in broad vernacular.
She did not know what to say, and she felt weak.
“I should like to sit down a bit,” she said.
“Come and sit ’ere i’ th’ ’ut,” he said, going in front of her to the hut, pushing aside more timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic chair, made of hazel sticks.
“Am Ah t’ light yer a little fire?” he asked, with the curious naïveté of the dialect.
“Oh, don’t bother,” she replied.
But she looked at her hands: they were rather blue. So he quickly took some larch twigs to the little brick fireplace in the corner, and in a moment the yellow flame was running up the chimney. He made a place by the brick hearth.
“Sit ’ere then a bit, and warm yer,” he said.
She obeyed him. He had that curious kind of protective authority she obeyed at once. So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze, and dropped logs on the fire, whilst outside he was hammering again. She did not really want to sit, poked in a corner by the fire; she would rather have watched from the door, but she was being looked after, so she had to submit.
The hut was quite cozy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little rustic table and stool besides her chair, and a carpenter’s bench, then a big box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet, traps, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the light came in through the open door. It was a jumble, but also it was a sort of little sanctuary.
She listened to the tapping of the man’s hammer; it was not so happy. He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous one! A woman! He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a hired man, and these people were his masters.
Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. His recoil away from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide himself there!
Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work. He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed the untrustworthy world.
Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making, turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he rose, went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping-log where he was working. Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he began to draw the nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and he gave absolutely no sign of awareness of the woman’s presence.
So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that recoils away, away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from her even now. It was the stillness, and the timeless sort of patience, in a man impatient and passionate, that touched Connie’s womb. She saw it in his bent head, the quick, quiet hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive loins; something patient and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been deeper and wider than her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.
So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on her face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of fire suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he groaned in spirit. He dreaded, with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and leave him to his own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female insistency. And above all he dreaded her cool, upper-class impudence of having her own way. For after all he was only a hired man. He hated her presence there.
Connie came to herself with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the man, who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes watching her.
“It is so nice here, so restful,” she said. “I have never been here before.”
“No?”
“I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.”
“Yes!”
“Do you lock the hut when you’re not here?”
“Yes, your Ladyship.”
“Do you think I could have a key too, so that I could sit here sometimes? Are there two keys?”
“Not as Ah know on, ther’ isna.”
He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated; he was putting up an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?
“Couldn’t we get another key?” she asked in her soft voice, that underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.
“Another!” he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with derision.
“Yes, a duplicate,” she said, flushi
ng.
“ ’Appen Sir Clifford ’ud know,” he said, putting her off.
“Yes!” she said, “he might have another. Otherwise we could have one made from the one you have. It would only take a day or so, I suppose. You could spare your key for so long.”
“Ah canna tell yer, m’lady! Ah know nob’dy as ma’es keys round ’ere.”
Connie suddenly flushed with anger.
“Very well!” she said. “I’ll see to it.”
“All right, your Ladyship.”
Their eyes met. His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.
But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he disliked her, when she went against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.
“Good afternoon!”
“Afternoon, my Lady?” He saluted and turned abruptly away. She had wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against the self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!
And she was angry against the self-willed male. A servant too! She walked sullenly home.
She found Mrs. Bolton under the great beech-tree on the knoll, looking for her.
“I just wondered if you’d be coming, my Lady,” the woman said brightly.
“Am I late?” asked Connie.
“Oh… only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.”
“Why didn’t you make it then?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s hardly my place. I don’t think Sir Clifford would like it at all, my Lady.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Connie.
She went indoors to Clifford’s study, where the old brass kettle was simmering on the tray.
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