Clifford began to get a new vision of his own village. He tended to think of it as unchanged and unchangeable. But he knew in his bones it was not so. There was a new ferment working, a new danger. The malcontent ferment, that peculiar germ, was working actively, especially in the women. It brought with it a certain excitement, like raw whiskey. And an infinite danger. He could feel, even through Mrs Bolton’s skilful paraphrase, the hostility to himself, to Wragby, to the Chatterley name, to all colliery owners, all managers, even all minor bosses. There it was, not loud-voiced yet, but potent as a ferment.
And it stimulated him. The sense of hostility against himself and his class stimulated him into action. He suddenly wanted to go out again, to go down to the mines. The colliers were hostile, were they? Then he would face them. He had thought they looked on him only in commiseration, with pity. But not so. They also hated him. Very well! Then he would show them what he was good for.
The pits were doing badly. The colliers looked forward with grim satisfaction to the time when they would have to close down, and they, the miners, would have to go on the dole! But then the master’s pay would stop too. So at least it cut both ways. Wragby was dilapidated already. But soon it would have to tumble down, for lack of money to hold it up. If the pits stopped. For money held everything up.
Clifford ordered a motor-car. So far, Wragby had managed with just a dog-cart. But Clifford wanted to go down to the mines. So he ordered a car. And he discussed with Mrs Bolton a man to drive it and to help him, Clifford, in and out. It was Mrs Bolton who thought of Field.
Quite a new look had come into Clifford’s face. While he had thought he had only to sympathise with his miners, he had been inert and apathetic. But now, Mrs Bolton had subtly injected into his veins the stimulus of a fight. The colliers were waiting to see Wragby wiped out, were they? They were anxious to see the Chatterley name obliterated in Tevershall? Good! Let them wait!
A queer, subtle hatred of the lower classes had taken hold of Sir Clifford. He was still a sort of Conservative-anarchist in his expressed views. But in his veins was a new excitement, a new stimulus, a new virus. And it was the virus of hate. Nothing loud-mouthed and fascist. But a keen, tingling, subtle hate of those who were really nearest to him, his own colliers. His father, Sir Geoffrey, had always said ‘our colliers’, Clifford had been brought up to that: ‘our colliers’. And now, with a sudden flare of elation, he found he hated them. He kept the fact secret, even from himself. He even pretended he wanted to save the situation for them. But the stimulus, over and above the desire to restore his diminished fortunes, which roused him to a new, keen interest in the mines, was his vivid, secret hatred for the colliers, the lower classes, who wanted to drag him down to their level. Yes, they wanted to drag him down. Mrs Bolton had very subtly and unconsciously made that clear to him. They wanted to wipe their feet on him at last. Good! Then he would see.
The moment he hated them, he could face them.
Connie felt relieved, seeing him rouse to new activity. He was moving, with meteor-like rapidity, away from all contact with her. In a few months they had become, he and she, almost startling strangers to one another. She was interested and excited in his new activities, his new struggle with the mines. Clifford was clever and keen. He could do something still. He would do something, too. But it would be something to which she was almost uncannily alien.
In spite of the new excitement, she felt again a gathering sense of doom. And again came over her her hatred of those doomed, dreadful Midlands, with all their clang of iron and their smoke of coal. But the doom was taking on a new, bristling sort of terror. In the peculiar stagnancy of the depressed conditions a strange poisonous gas seemed to be distilling. Dimly she could feel some new sort of disaster accumulating: accumulating slowly, with awful, serpentine slowness, but with peculiar cold dread. It was something she dreaded coldly and fatally, the working-out of this new, unconscious, cold, reptilian sort of hate that was rising between the colliers of the under-earth, the iron workers of the great furnaces, and the educated, owning class to which she belonged, by the accident of destiny. She did not want to see it. She did not want to live through the results of English class hatred, that is so deep and still unacknowledged. If society was insane, as Winterslow had said, surely this class hate was the most dangerous manifestation of the insanity! It was a hate that would go so deep, so deep. It would go to the very bottom of the human soul. And it would be so awful!
Yet for herself, she felt she did not belong to it. She did not feel any class hate. She would have liked to be at one with the colliers. She did not want to live under their conditions, but she felt she would even have done that, rather than have this awful hatred upon her. She would even rather be a collier’s wife and live in a collier’s dwelling, rather than be swept like a straw on the livid, destructive wave of hate. Touch! Ah yes, Tommy Dukes was right. It was touch that one needed: some sort of touch between her class and the under class.
It was so frightening, men divided off into two spectral halves, each spectral to the other. In the old days, the gentry were the heroes on the stage, and the people were the audience. It was so. The gentry played to the audience, as all heroes must, and the audience, the people, identified themselves with the heroes, as all audiences do.
But now! Now the lights were out. The gentry were still masquerading on the stage, but all the illumination was spent, and in the grey, monotonous daylight of reality the actors were no longer heroic, they were futile. The glamour was gone, the artificial illumination had collapsed, and the actors were revealed as paltry human beings, looking more paltry even than the audience, because raised to greater conspicuousness. Yet still they held the stage. And the audience was beginning to howl at the deception.
How horrible! How ghastly, now, is this division into upper and lower classes! How resolve them back into a oneness?
Constance shuddered. She felt she belonged neither to the actors nor to the audience. She wanted to come off the stage and be in touch with the people. But once the audience had started to howl, there was no being in touch with it. And the stage, the place of the upper classes, was becoming a place of pure humiliation. What was to be done? Merely wait for the fracas?
She felt she would surely die, in the interim. Her soul would have to have some relief, some hope, some touch. It was that she wanted. Not any revelation nor any new idea. A new touch. Just a touch.
She went to the wood at last, one evening immediately after tea. Spring was here. In the green light of an April evening, blackbirds were whistling with the old triumph of life. There was a fresh, cold wind, and the wind-flowers, passing over-wide and raggedy now, were shaking with spring life. Many primroses now showed their cold faces, which yet had a bright, wide-open fulness of life. The dark-green spears of the blue-bells were opening and spreading like velvet under the oaks, strong and unhesitating, so filled with dark green life. Birds whistled, whistled, whistled, and called aloud in the voice of life. The wood was like a sanctuary of life itself. Life itself! Life itself! That was all that one could have, all that one could yearn for. And yet the human will cuts off the human being from living. Alone of all created things, the human being cannot live.
Life is so soft and quiet, and cannot be seized. It will not be raped. Try to rape it, and it disappears. Try to seize it, and you have dust. Try to master it, and you see your own image grinning at you with the grin of an idiot.
Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and a fawn that was nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will, and life is gone. You must seek again. And softly, gently, with infinitely sensitive hands and feet, and a heart that is full and free from self-will, you must approach life again, and come at last into touch. Snatch even at a flower, and you have lost it for ever out of your life. Come with greed and the will-to-self towards another human being, and you clutch a thorny demon that will leave poisonous stings.
But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fulness of the deep, true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch. The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love: it is life itself, and in the touch, we are all alive.
It is no good trying to fight life. You can only lose. The will is a mysterious thing, but the golden apples it wins are apples of Sodom and bitter, insane dust. One can fight for life, fight against the grey unliving armies, the armies of greedy ones and bossy ones, and the myriad hosts of the clutching and the self-important. Fight one does and must, against the enemies of life. But when you come to life itself, you must come as the flower does, naked and defenceless and infinitely in touch.
Connie went on down the broad riding, and up the little way to the well. It bubbled the same always the same, so bright and so shinily cold, above its ruddy pebbles. She sat a moment looking down into it as it came up gaily out of nowhere. And she watched the unfurling of a bright-green frond of fern, harts-tongue that grew there so bright and without restlessness, by the well. It was unfurling even as she watched, though she could not see it.
A cock pheasant called, and she looked away into the bristling gloom of the larch-wood. But there was no movement. The silvery calling of blackbirds and thrushes seemed farther away here. It was chill and sad, at the well. So many ghosts, so much memory! So many men must have drunk the cold water, in the days of the free forest, when the broad riding was a green road that travelled across country. That was why the riding swerved down the hill, to touch the well.
But now, no one passed, and the bright water bubbled, but no one camped on the bank above, in the nook of the trees. Connie felt eerie. She rose to go home. And she went in the thrilling wonder of the first twilight of spring, while the birds still called wildly, and the yellow light of evening mingled among the tree-buds that were just for opening. What lovely, ghostly presences of life the wood was full of! Each tree had a presence of its own. And each hidden bird. Each squirrel, each stoat, each mole just under earth.
She turned at last down the path to the hut. She wanted to come merely into the presence of the keeper.
He was there, building a sort of little straw house, or roof on four posts, among the oak-trees, for the birds. Against the north was a screen of boughs and straw, and the roof was of real thatch. And he was pegging down the thatch. The dog gave a little wuff! and he turned, to see her approaching. He seemed at once startled and not surprised. He stopped his work and touched his forehead in the slight, hasty salute, watching her without speaking.
‘How nice, a little house for the birds!’ she said.
‘A bit of shelter, like!’
‘It’s so pretty!’
They both stood silent. She was aware of his deep, quiet breathing.
‘It is spring!’ she said. ‘Have the birds made their nests?’
‘Ay! There’s a jinny-wren’s just theer!’
‘Where? Oh show me!’
He took her across to a tree, where a wren had inserted his nest in a cunning fork of the boughs. It was a little round ball of moss and grey hair and down, with a little round hole of a door.
‘I wish I were a bird!’ she said, with infinite wistfulness.
‘Do yer! Such a little un as that?’
He was laughing at her quietly. He went back to his work.
‘You won’t see much longer,’ she said.
‘I shan’t, shall I!’ and he straightened the long wheat straw. She stood vague and motionless, watching him.
‘I got yer that key, if you want it,’ he said suddenly, in lowered, altered voice.
‘Did you? How kind!’ she said, a little startled.
‘I’ll get it.’ And he strode across to the hut, where he had left his coat. He was in his shirt-sleeves. — After a moment, he came back with the key.
‘Thank you so much! You’re sure you won’t mind if I come?’ she said.
He looked away into the wood.
‘If your ladyship doesn’t mind me, I — you’re very welcome to — I mean — you do as you please, it’s your own place.’
She was silent for a moment.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘But I didn’t want to interfere with you — or to seem to.’
‘You won’t be interferin’ wi’ me, my lady —’
‘Very well then,’ she said softly.
He stood for some moments motionless, staring away into the wood. Then automatically he reached for some straw from the heap, and began straightening it with his hands. The sun had set, and real shadow was coming among the tree-trunks, though there was still yellow light beyond the boughs.
‘It’s the end of the day,’ she said, unthinking.
‘Ay! Another!’ he replied.
And that ‘another!’ rang strangely in her soul.
‘Good-night, then!’ she said.
And as she went home she saw a new moon, bright as a splinter of crystal in the western sky.
After this, she went almost every day to the hut. She had her key, and when he wasn’t there, she entered and sat in the doorway. He had made one corner tidy. Across, there was a carpenter’s bench, and some tools hung on the wall. There were also traps hung up, and an old coat: and there was a truss of straw, and a couple of bags of corn for the pheasants, and on a shelf, a couple of old blankets, a lantern, an enamel mug and plate: a queer accumulation of things.
He had set only four hens. Constance would offer them a bit of corn in her hand, but the fierce mothers would rarely eat it. They would peck almost savagely at her hand, instead. But soon they got to know her, and pecked less savagely.
She felt curiously at home in the place, as if it were her real home. It did not matter whether Parkin was there or not. Like the hens, and like his dog Flossie, he had got used to her. He would go about at whatever he had to do, quietly and unconcernedly, without troubling her. Sometimes she talked to him for a little while, though never of anything that she could record. Mostly they were just silent.
Yet it was that she lived for: her hours in the wood. Some days she could not go at all. Sometimes she could only go after tea. But whenever she went, she found him there, or he was sure to come. And she could tell, by the quick, eager way he looked round when he emerged from the path, that he was looking for her.
They seemed to be drawing together. Though they never touched, they seemed to be coming strangely, closely into touch, a powerful touch that held them both. When she saw him coming, a queer fire would melt her limbs, and she would wait, wait. But always he would look at her with those inscrutable eyes of his, and salute, and move aside.
He always looked for her to be there, and wanted her to be there, and dreaded it. He wanted the contact with her, and dreaded it almost as much as he wanted it. His queer, round eyes watched her at moments with infinite desire, but he stayed at a distance. With his whole soul, he wanted not to start an intrigue with her, not to involve the two of them in the inevitable horrible later complications. With all his soul, he hated the humiliating complications of the human world.
Yet from his bowels, from his knees, from the middle of his breast he felt himself streaming towards her, and the flow gradually growing stronger, even while he was unaware of it. Gradually he was losing the sense of time and of consequence.
But still, the iron bar of reserve that held him back from her, something unconscious and absolute, never relented. He could not, and would not take the first step. He did not want to start the thing. Even now, he would be glad if he could escape this kind of doom, of taking her.
And therefore he would not think about her. He would not let his mind entertain her. The desire he had was in his body, and his mind tried not to acquiesce. Yet gradually a sort of sleep or hypnosis was coming over him, he was losing the sense of time and of consequence, it was melting away in an unkno
wn, but infinitely desirable flood of wholeness. What could a man do!
The young pheasants began to hatch out. The first little trio she saw pattering about on tiny feet, little alert drab things, under the straw shelter, she gave a queer startled cry of delight. It was true, they were born. And when they were under the hen, and poked their tiny cheeky heads through the yellow feathers of the old bird, suddenly poking out a beady little head from the midst of her, Constance wept with excitement. She was thankful the keeper wasn’t there to see her. And for the first time in her life she loved an old hen, the bright, fierce warm creature, with the chicks under her feathers so softly!
For two days Constance could not go to the wood. One of Clifford’s Aunts descended on them, with her husband, and it was a busy house. Even on the third day they did not leave after tea. But then she slipped away, breathless and bewildered, to see how many more little pheasants had hatched out.
It was a lovely warm evening, but the sun had set by the time she entered the wood. The chicks would be gone to sleep, under their mothers. She hurried on towards the hut, and arrived in the clearing flushed and breathless. He was there, in his shirtsleeves, just going to close up the coops and make them safe from any depredation. She went straight towards him.
‘How many more are hatched?’ she said.
‘Oh, they’re nearly all out,’ he replied.
She quivered, he stood so near to her. Then she crouched down before the coop he had not shut up.
‘Look!’ she said in a low voice. ‘Look! They are peeping out at me! Oh, I must touch them.’
Tiny heads were poking out inquisitively between the yellow foliage of the old hen’s feathers. Constance looked up at him to see if she might touch the little birds. He stood above her, his face queer and bright and expressionless. And he looked into her wide bright eyes as if he did not understand.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 13
