“But will you see him, father?”
Poor Sir Malcolm! he was by no means keen on it. And poor Mellors, he was still less keen. Yet the meeting took place: lunch in a private room at the club, the two men alone, looking one another up and down.
Sir Malcolm drank a fair amount of whiskey, Mellors also drank. And they talked all the while about India, on which the younger man was well informed.
This lasted during the meal. Only when coffee was served, and the waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily:
“Well, young man, and what about my daughter’?”
The grin flickered on Mellors’ face.
“Well, Sir, and what about her?”
“She’s to have a child of yours, I understand.”
“I have that honor!” grinned Mellors.
“Honor by God!” Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. “Honor! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?”
“Good!”
“I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!” he rolled his eyes to heaven. “But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it. Oh, she’s a nice girl, she’s a nice girl, and I knew she’d be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A gamekeeper, oh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now, look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking seriously, you know!”
Speaking seriously, they didn’t get very far. Mellors, though a little tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as intelligent as possible: which isn’t saying much.
“So you’re a gamekeeper! Oh, you’re quite right! That sort of game is worth a man’s while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she’s going to come up all right. Ha-ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
“As much as that! Well, you’ve another good twenty years, by the look of you. Oh, gamekeeper or not, you’re a good cock. I can see that with one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy. I’ll bet you’ve a good cod on you: oh, you’re a bantam, I can see that. You’re a fighter. Gamekeeper! ha-ha, by cricky, I wouldn’t trust my game to you! But look here, seriously, what are we going to do about it? The world’s full of blasted old women.”
Seriously, they didn’t do anything about it, except establish the old freemasonry of male sensuality between them.
“And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely on me. Gamekeeper? Christ, but it’s rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows the girl’s got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income: moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I’ll leave her what I’ve got. By God, I will. She deserves it, for showing spunk, in a world of old women. I’ve been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for seventy years, and haven’t managed it yet. But you’re the man, I can see that.”
“I’m glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion, that I’m the monkey.”
“Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all the old women.”
They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day.
The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda at some discreet place.
“It’s a very great pity it’s such an ugly situation all round,” said Hilda.
“I had a lot o’ fun out of it,” said he.
“I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children.”
“The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,” said he.
“I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.”
“But then, you don’t have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?” said he.
“If you’d been in her own class.”
“Or if I’d been in a cage at the Zoo.”
There was silence.
“I think,” said Hilda, “it will be best if she names quite another man as co-respondent, and you stay out of it altogether.”
“But I thought I’d put my foot right in.”
“I mean, in the divorce proceedings.”
He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him.
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co-respondent, so that your name need not appear,” said Hilda.
“You mean a man?”
“Of course!”
“But she’s got no other?”
He looked in wonder at Connie.
“No, no!” she said hastily. “Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love.”
“Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he’s had nothing out of you?”
“Some men are chivalrous and don’t only count what they get out of a woman,” said Hilda.
“One for me, eh? But who’s the johnny?”
“A friend whom we’ve known since we were children in Scotland, an artist.”
“Duncan Forbes!” he said at once, for Connie had talked of him. “And how would you shift the blame on to him?”
“They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment.”
“Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,” he said.
“What else do you suggest?” said Hilda. “If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with.”
“All that!” he said grimly.
There was a long silence.
“We could go right away,” he said.
“There is no right away for Connie,” said Hilda. “Clifford is too well known.”
Again the silence of pure frustration.
“The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?”
He was silent for a long time.
“How are you going about it for us?” he said.
“We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as corespondent: then we must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.”
“Sounds like a lunatic asylum.”
“Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.”
“What is worse?”
“Criminals, I suppose.”
“Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,” he said grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.
“Well!” he said at last. “I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”
He looked in humiliation, anger, wariness and misery at Connie.
“Ma lass!” he said. “The world’s goin’ to put salt on thy tail.”
“Not if we don’t let it,” she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent gamekeeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colors, ultra modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan
was almost insane on the point of his art; it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the gamekeeper would say. He knew already Connie’s and Hilda’s opinions.
“It is like a pure bit of murder,” said Mellors at last; a speech Duncan by no means expected from a gamekeeper. “And who is murdered?” asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.
“Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.”
A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of dislike in the other man’s voice, and the note of contempt. And he himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!
Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn-looking, gazing with flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the wing, at the pictures.
“Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,” sneered the artist.
“Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are stupid enough for anything and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of self-pity and an awful lot of nervous self-opinion, seems to me.”
In another wave of hate, the artist’s face looked yellow. But with a sort of silent hauteur he turned the pictures to the wall.
“I think we may go to the dining-room,” he said.
And they trailed off, dismally.
After coffee, Duncan said:
“I don’t at all mind posing as the father of Connie’s child. But only on the condition that she’ll come and pose as a model for me. I’ve wanted her for years, and she’s always refused.” He uttered it with the dark finality of an inquisitor announcing an auto da fé.
“Ah!” said Mellors. “You only do it on condition, then?”
“Quite! I only do it on that condition.” The artist tried to put the utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too much.
“Better have me as a model at the same time,” said Mellors. “Better do us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a blacksmith, before I was a gamekeeper.”
“Thank you,” said the artist. “I don’t think Vulcan has a figure that interests me.”
“Not even if it was tubified and tittivated up?”
There was no answer. The artist was too haughty for further words.
It was a dismal party, in which the artist henceforth steadily ignored the presence of the other man, and talked only briefly, as if the words were wrung out of the depths of his gloomy portentousness, to the women.
“You didn’t like him, but he’s better than that, really. He’s really kind,” Connie explained as they left.
“He’s a little black pup with a corrugated distemper,” said Mellors.
“No, he wasn’t nice today.”
“And will you go and be a model to him?”
“Oh, I don’t really mind any more. He won’t touch me. And I don’t mind anything, if it paves the way to a life together for you and me.”
“But he’ll only shit on you on canvas.”
“I don’t care. He’ll only be painting his own feelings for me, and I don’t mind if he does that. I wouldn’t have him touch me, not for anything. But if he thinks he can do anything with his owlish arty staring, let him stare. He can make as many empty tubes and corrugations out of me as he likes. It’s his funeral. He hated you for what you said: that his tubified art is sentimental and self-important. But of course it’s true.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Dear Clifford, I am afraid what you foresaw has happened. I am really in love with another man, and I do hope you will divorce me. I am staying at present with Duncan in his flat. I told you he was at Venice with us. I’m awfully unhappy for your sake: but do try to take it quietly. You don’t really need me any more, and I can’t bear to come back to Wragby. I’m most awfully sorry. But do try to forgive me, and divorce me and find someone better. I’m not really the right person for you, I am too impatient and selfish, I suppose. But I can’t ever come back to live with you again. And I feel so frightfully sorry about it all, for your sake. But if you don’t let yourself get worked up, you’ll see you won’t mind so frightfully. You didn’t really care about me personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.”
Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
Clifford was like a hysterical child. He gave Mrs. Bolton a terrible shock, sitting up in bed ghastly and blank.
“Why, Sir Clifford, whatever’s the matter?”
No answer! She was terrified lest he had had a stroke. She hurried and felt his face, took his pulse.
“Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!”
No answer!
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Then I’ll telephone to Sheffield for Dr. Carrington, and Dr. Lecky may as well run round straight away.”
She was moving to the door, when he said in a hollow tone:
“No!”
She stopped and gazed at him. His face was yellow, blank, and like the face of an idiot.
“Do you mean you’d rather I didn’t fetch the doctor?”
“Yes! I don’t want him,” came the sepulchral voice.
“Oh, but, Sir Clifford, you’re ill, and I daren’t take the responsibility. I must send for the doctor, or I shall be blamed.”
A pause; then the hollow voice said:
“I’m not ill. My wife isn’t coming back.”—It was as if an image spoke.
“Not coming back? You mean her ladyship?” Mrs. Bolton moved a little nearer to the bed. “Oh, don’t you believe it. You can trust her ladyship to come back.”
The image in the bed did not change, but it pushed a letter over the counterpane.
“Read it!” said the sepulchral voice.
“Why, if it’s a letter from her ladyship, I’m sure her ladyship wouldn’t want me to read her letter to you, Sir Clifford. You can tell me what she says, if you wish.”
But the face with the fixed blue eyes sticking out did not change.
“Read it!” repeated the voice.
“Why, if I must, I do it to obey you, Sir Clifford,” she said.
And she read the letter.
“Well I am surprised at her ladyship,” she said. “She promised so faithfully she’d come back!”
The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs. Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: mate hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.
She was a little impatient of Sir Clifford. Any man in his senses must have known his wife was in love with somebody else, and was going to leave him. Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn’t admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared himself for it! or if he would have admitted it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it wasn’t so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had now brought on that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which is a form of insanity. “It comes,” she thought to herself, hating him a little, “because he always thinks of himself. He’s so wrapped up in his own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he’s like a mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!”
But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her
duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated.
The only thing was to release his self-pity. Like the lady in Tennyson, he must weep or he must die.
So Mrs. Bolton began to weep first. She covered her face with her hands and burst into little wild sobs. “I would never have believed it of her ladyship, I wouldn’t!” She wept, suddenly summoning up all her old grief and sense of woe, and weeping the tears of her own bitter chagrin. Once she started her weeping was genuine enough, for she had had something to weep for.
Clifford thought of the way he had been betrayed by the woman Connie, and in a contagion of grief, tears filled his eyes and began to run down his cheeks. He was weeping for himself. Mrs. Bolton, as soon as she saw the tears running over his blank face, hastily wiped her own wet cheeks on her little handkerchief, and leaned towards him.
“Now don’t you fret, Sir Clifford!” she said, in a luxury of emotion. “Now, don’t you fret; don’t, you’ll only do yourself an injury!”
His body shivered suddenly in an indrawn breath of silent sobbing, and the tears ran quicker down his face. She laid her hand on his arm, and her own tears fell again. Again the shiver went through him, like a convulsion, and she laid her arm round his shoulder. “There, there! There, there! Don’t you fret, then, don’t you! Don’t you fret!” she moaned to him, while her own tears fell. And she drew him to her, and held her arms round his great shoulders, while he laid his face on her bosom and sobbed, shaking and hulking his huge shoulders, whilst she softly stroked his dusky-blond hair and said: “There! There! There! There, then! There, then! Never you mind! Never you mind, then!”
And he put his arms round her and clung to her like a child, wetting the bib of her starched white apron, and the bosom of her pale-blue cotton dress, with his tears. He had let himself go altogether, at last.
So at length she kissed him, and rocked him on her bosom, and in her heart she said to herself: “Oh, Sir Clifford! Oh, high and mighty Chatterleys! Is this what you’ve come down to!” And finally he even went to sleep, like a child. And she felt worn out, and went to her own room, where she laughed and cried at once with a hysteria of her own. It was so ridiculous! It was so awful! such a come-down! So shameful! And it was so upsetting as well.
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