She wondered a little grimly what kind of medicinal dog-biscuit the old knight had thrown to Clifford. Clifford evidently had swallowed it, he was looking so green. Perhaps it would act as a purge! How extraordinary if it did! She vaguely wondered, and indifferently waited.
CHAPTER III
In the late autumn, however, came a few very beautiful sunny days. Constance, in spite of herself, kept thinking of the Cap Martin, the brilliant sea, the hills behind Mentone. What would she not give, to be on the dry hills in the sun above the Mediterranean, smelling the thymey herbage as she climbed on the pale rock high into the wilderness! There, the lid was off. In England, the lid was down on one for ever. One was in one’s coffin already.
Clifford roused himself to go out in his motor-chair, and Constance walked at his side. The soft, warm woolliness of the uncanny November day seemed utterly unreal to her, in its thick, soft-gold sunlight and thick gossamer atmosphere. The park, with its oak-trees and sere grass, sheep feeding in silence on the slope, and the near distance bluey, an opalescent haze showing through it the last yellow and brown of oak-leaves, seemed real, a vision from the past. It was a ghost-day returned from the late eighteenth century, a day such as lingers in the old English aquatints. The English landscape had revealed itself then, in its real soft beauty. And sometimes the revelation stealthily disclosed itself again, like a ghost, a revenant.
Clifford’s chair puffed slowly along the path that wound towards the gate in the wood, between the tussocky grass of the park. It was a path of very fine gravel, of a bright pink colour. The gravel came out of a burnt pit-hill. It was the burnt rock and shale from the mine, the refuse, burnt pink and sifted fine. Constance liked the colour so much, the path had been newly gravelled, and Clifford’s chair could puff comfortably along it, without danger of slipping or sticking in the clayey places.
Constance opened the wood gate, and the chair puffed slowly through into the wide riding between the hazel thicket. All the leaves were fallen from the hazels, the ground was brown, and. strange bright mushrooms had sprung up in the uncanny late warmth. The chair slowly lurched on up the incline, over the pale leaves of the chestnut trees, to the more open oak-wood, part of the old forest. The oaks still clung to their brown leaves. Everything was motionless, in motionless, syrupy afternoon sunlight, that soon would die. It was a purely ghostly day.
Clifford stopped his chair at the top of the slope. To the left, the wood was thick with hazels and trees. But to the right, up to the knoll, it was bare save for a few stalky, ricketty-looking oak saplings. All the timber had been cut by Sir Geoffrey, for the war. Naked and forlorn the big hill looked, with debris of cut timber, and an odd tree here and there, and tree-stumps still showing bare. The hill had been forest, probably, since England was England. Probably, when the weedy oak-saplings that leaned and straggled here and there in so ricketty a fashion had had time to grow up again, it would be forest again, when other, different Englishmen would walk under the leaves.
Clifford gazed round him with melancholy intentness. This devastation in the wood always affected him. He could not help gazing fixedly up to the knoll of the hill-top, that he remembered tree-covered and secret, which was now bald and exposed. Still one could see blackened places where the woodmen of the war had burned up the twiggy heaps, in places where the brown rock came through.
Constance, however, was looking down-hill, down the broad sweep of the grassy riding. At the bottom of the slope it swept to the right, between a dense larch-wood. But on the opposite hill-side a narrower riding went up between the oaks, a riding overgrown with deep grass and burdock.
The sun fell on the chair, and on Clifford’s expressionless face. The stillness was a stillness of innumerable ghosts.
‘Shall we stay a moment?’ he said to her. ‘Would you like to sit down a bit? See, sit on this stump.’
A tree had been cut from the bank on the upper side of the riding. Clifford had stopped his chair just by its roots. Constance sat down, smelling the dying odour of leaves and sun and wood-land.
‘Who’ll come here after us, Connie?’ said Clifford. ‘When you think of the men in green with their bows and arrows, that used to go down this riding — and the Chatterley dames and damsels that have gone on palfreys — then my father and that gang of woodmen in the war, war-working — and now you and me: one wonders what will come after. I suppose it will be the British bolshevists, and the colliers of Tevershall will turn the place into a sort of Hampstead Heath, with nothing quiet even for a bird to nest in.’ He spoke with dry, abstract hardness.
Constance looked round vaguely. The wood seemed as yet to hold some of the old inviolate mystery of Britain, even Druid Britain.
‘Perhaps it won’t be so,’ she said. ‘It is never the obvious which happens, is it? Perhaps something quite different will come,’ She felt she didn’t care about what he said, nor about his vision of the future.
‘While I live, of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll have nobody in the wood, except whom I may invite. But with a population increasing in millions every year, how is one to prevent the final devastation? They’ll burst through every barrier, by mere weight of numbers, and it will be a swamp of common people, profane vulgarity. Thank God, I don’t think I shall live to see the worst of it. I wish we had enough strong men to form a small aristocracy, and put the rest back into slavery; where they belong.’
But she didn’t want to listen. All this dry, material vision of the future irritated her. Somehow in the wood she felt another influence, something mysteriously alive. And with his talk, he wouldn’t let her feel it.
‘I suppose the world will come to an end in its own way,’ she said. ‘It’s no good our wishing anything.’
‘I suppose not! Give me your hand, will you?’
It seemed as if he were determined to make her aware of him, to pull her into his dry, jarring mood. He reached over the side of the chair and took her warm, soft hand in his nervous grasp. But as he gripped her hand, she felt the life die out of her, ebb away, away from him, back to her heart, to die there. Her blood seemed to recoil in slow, cold heavy waves.
But the soft, live warmth of her hand started a new train of thought in him.
‘You’re lonely, Connie, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see more people?’
This was a new line of attack: or so she felt it: a new dodge to make her aware of him.
‘Not here! Not in Wragby, no!’ she said slowly. He had not succeeded in dragging her out of her remoteness, not yet. But she was becoming irritated.
‘Would you like to go away for a while?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you ought to.’
She was silent for a time. If she could go right away, for ever, and forget Wragby utterly and for ever, have done with it beyond recall — yes! But as it was, it was a doom that had closed on her. She would have to get to the end of it. A heavy insistence on getting to the end of her doom burdened her heart. Before she could go away, something would have to change in her.
‘I’m not keen on going away — not this winter,’ she said.
‘But hadn’t you better?’ he insisted: always insisting.
‘Why?’
‘For your health — for your nerves — for your spirits. I’m afraid you may get too depressed.’
She frowned under the repeated little strokes of his insistence. He was forcing her attention.
‘I don’t get depressed,’ she said, knowing now that he would never leave her alone, and answering crudely. ‘What would be the good of going away? I should always think of you. My thoughts wouldn’t really go away. You know you would always keep your mind on me, I should have to think, of you all the time. You would keep me with your will, no matter how far I went. It wouldn’t really be going away.’ She spoke with impatience and almost with bitterness. But this seemed to stimulate him. He roused in his chair, quite cheerfully.
‘I should think of you — of course,’ he said. ‘But I should hope you were having a good time, s
o that perhaps you’d want to come back. Is that what you mean, by my keeping you with my will?’
She was silent. Her hand lay dead in his, her heart lay dead inside her. She didn’t want to answer him. She didn’t want to listen to his fair-spokenness, just now.
‘You don’t think I’d try to prevent you from living and having a good time? — no matter how superficial the enjoyment might be, nor how you were deceiving yourself, thinking you enjoyed it. You don’t think I’d try to prevent you, if you wanted it, do you?’ he persisted. So many words. Oh God, so many glib words! And she had been sensing another mystery, in the wood.
‘I think you would,’ she said dully, attending with the outer half of her consciousness.
‘How? Why?’ he asked, in bright interest.
She spoke again in a sort of dull brutality, like a prisoner.
‘You’d never let me go out of your will. You’d keep me with your will. So what would be the good of going?’
He listened, alert. And he said:
‘I don’t understand this keeping you with my will. How do I do it?’ It seemed to please him, all the same.
She was very unwilling to answer. But she said at length:
‘You do do it. You’ve got your will wrapped round me, like a hundred arms. And no matter where I went, they’d still be round me. I should never get away, actually, not even for an hour.’ It came out with all the dull apathy of despair.
‘It sounds very mysterious: as if my will were a sort of octopus. But do you want to get away from me?’ he asked, bright and keen.
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘No, but think, and tell me! Would you like me to let you go away, and forget you? — It’s quite true, I never do altogether forget you, sleeping nor waking. I can’t! If that is having my will wrapped round you, like a hundred arms — well, I suppose it is wrapped round you like one arm, at least. But would you like it altered? Would you like me to take that arm from around you? Would you like to be free of me? Tell me! — Of course it would leave me with my arms waving in space, like a lunatic. But say what you’d rather. Would you rather be free of me, and the arm of my will not round you?’
She pondered heavily, in silence. To her, it was mostly words. I He would never do it, whatever he said. He would never let her go, out of his will. That fatal, or beautiful — she still didn’t know which — arm of his will, he would keep round her always, like an octopus tentacle — or like a god.
‘And don’t you have an arm round me, too?’ he said. ‘Do you ever let me go out of your consciousness and your will? Aren’t you always aware of me? Wouldn’t you be aware of me, and keep the arm of your will round me even if I died, and were the other side of the grave?’
She looked at him, frightened. He had light-blue eyes, very keen and terrible. They still had a strange power over her, in their pale, uncanny concentration. She knew they had power over her. And she knew she enjoyed it, or got a strange, unearthly thrill out of it. — She forgot now the other silent feeling within the mood, that had been drawing her away from him.
‘I don’t know these things so plainly as you seem to,’ she said, equivocating.
‘Yes — when you choose!’ he said. Then he went on, in a voice like a conspirator: ‘But listen, Connie. You know your father accused me of not letting you live? And in a way — in a way, it’s true. In a way, I do prevent you from living’ the external, superficial life of your body. I realize it. I had thought the inner, essential life between us was everything. Now I realize that, though man does not live by bread alone, neither does he live entirely without bread. Especially woman doesn’t! Perhaps you need the more superficial life of your body. Probably you do —’
Even as he said it, she felt it was an insult to her. And so many words, so many words! Oh God! for a communication that was silent, unspoken!
‘Perhaps you need to enjoy yourself, like the women at the night dubs. Perhaps you need to jazz and flirt and have men make love to you: or some man. I can’t do it. To me it isn’t a necessity anyhow. But if it is a necessity to you — you are your father’s daughter — then do it.’
Constance listened in silence, attentive to every word. How strange and insulting it all seemed! What voice was this, from a bath chair? What creature was this?
‘Do what?’ she said. ‘Dance and flirt and have men make love to me?’
‘If you need it,’ he said. He seemed quite triumphant.
‘And you wouldn’t mind?’ she asked, ironically.
‘Of course! But it’s come to this. Your father accuses me of starving you of life, of not letting you live the natural life of a young woman. He prophesies all sorts of mysterious penalties, nervous derangements and internal maladies, if you don’t “live your life”, as they call it. There may be something in it. Man doth not live by bread alone, but without bread, and without cake even, no woman seems able to exist. I can’t give you the cake: that’s my misfortune. But if anybody else can, then take it, by all means.’
She had come at last to the bottom of his thought. So! This was what he wanted to say! And so utterly without a spark of tenderness or sorrow for her and him! Only his hard triviality.
‘You mean you don’t mind if I let a man fall in love with me?’ she said.
‘I mean; it’s no use my minding. If you’re going to go to pieces, or have a mysterious internal malady through not saving some man fall in love with you, then I pray to God some man may fall in love with you quickly, and you may make the best of the opportunity.’
So! He had said it! He had said it, and she had heard it! In one sense, at least, it set her free of him; it was a charter of liberty!
‘You wouldn’t mind even if there were a child?’ she asked, after a ruminating pause.
‘Mind? Why do you always talk about my minding? I accept the consequences of the laws of life — am I not an object-lesson, as I sit in this chair? May the Gods preserve me from going against the laws of life, if I can help it! — or from causing any-one else to go against them! — any more than I have already done. Whoever made the universe, made it stronger than I am. Whoever made woman, made her beyond my jurisdiction. Whoever made me myself, has taught me forever not to play with the laws of life and death. If you need to live to a certain extent according to your father’s prescription, then for God’s sake, do so. Anything rather than bring down these divine vengeances of ruined nerves or internal complaints and the rest of it.’
She listened, and heard it all in her own way. It filled her with a great sadness: it was the end of their marriage, in the inner sense. And that marriage had still been a rock of safety to her.
‘But if I had a child, what would you do?’ she said, her mind running on cunningly, to get the charter of liberty as full as possible, if the inner marriage were dissolved.
He sat motionless, gazing at her in irony. Had she already rushed so far, in imagination? My God, the pace of the woman!
‘I shouldn’t have to do anything, should I? It would be your affair’
He was a little at a loss, to follow her line of thought.
‘Yes! But unless you divorced me, it would be legally your child,’ she said, showing him where she was.
And again he sat in amazement at the speed at which she went ahead.
‘I suppose it would,’ he said. And still the thing wasn’t at all real to him.
‘Wouldn’t you mind that?’
He paused. If she had a child, and the child, in the eyes of the law, were his! Still he only vaguely visualized it.
‘Mind! Why of course I mind everything. But also, I’m willing to put up with everything, in order to make the best of things.’
He had not grasped the situation with full imagination. It was still mostly words to him.
‘You mean you don’t want me to leave you?’ she said, now hunting him down to a conclusion, as he had at first hunted her into listening to him.
‘I do mean that, among other things,’ he said. ‘I suppose that
’s what it comes to. I don’t want you to go away from me. But I don’t want to bring more calamities on my head by keeping you. Your father warned me. Well, I’ll take his warning. I’d far rather have you have love affairs with other men, and give yourself and me a family of children, if you like —, these words, however, made him pull up short. But it was only words, so he rushed on again: ‘Yes! if you like! rather than have anything else going wrong, more fatal accidents that I can’t cope with. I suppose I could cope with the other thing: the lovers and children. But I’m afraid of nervous derangements and diseases. —And — yes! — I suppose I’m afraid of losing you.’
Curiously, he was aware of one half of what he was saying: fear of the mysterious stroke of malady, and admission of the probable necessity for her to have ‘love affairs’. But that the ‘love affairs’ would mean other, real men, individuals: and that children, if any were born, would be individuals, again, who would grow up to manhood or womanhood: this his imagination failed to grasp. It was still all in the abstract to him, and he wouldn’t have it otherwise.
‘You don’t think you might lose me, to one of the men who were in love with me?’ she asked, a little maliciously, trying to force him to realize.
He frowned tensely, and answered with a certain impatience:
‘I suppose it’s one of the risks I must run. No! You wouldn’t necessarily want to go off with a lover — if I know lovers!’ He spoke with contempt of the breed. And he looked into her eyes with his irritated tense look, full of a certain cold fire and arrogance and power. When he was driven back into himself, he was so hard and clear, like a diamond. And he always made her feel he was stronger than she, with a strange cold arrogance and power that thrilled her in her remote soul. — And yet, she felt so plainly, now, that he was not quite real. He was too much in the abstract. He was entangling himself in his own net.
‘I’d try not to,’ she said softly. — Yes, he was entangling himself in his own net.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 3
