He was solitary, fighting for his own solitude. He was a man though even he was limited by some of the weird, mineral elementality of the colliers.
The future! The far future! Out of the orgy of ugliness and of dismalness and of dreariness, would there, could there ever unfold a flower, a life with beauty in it? — as a pure antithesis to what they had now. Could the descendants of these colliers ever make life a new and rather gorgeous thing? Could they? In the far future? After all this that existed at present was smashed and abandoned, repudiated for ever — could the children of miners make a new world, with mystery and sumptuousness in it? Her own children’s children, if she had a child to Parkin? She shuddered a little, at the awful necessity for transition.
As she went home in the car, it began raining again, the cold rain of spring. ‘A cold wet May is good for corn and hay.’ How insignificant corn and hay seemed, in this countryside! And coal is not susceptible to the changes in the weather.
She was thinking of Parkin, whom she had not seen for some time. And she found a tenderness for him springing up in her again. He was uncouth and passionate, yet at the same time, she realised, tender, and fragile, as all really lonely living things are. A certain compassion mingled in with her desire for him. Yet, of course, she still saw him outside her own life. For the passionate contact with him, she had to go outside her own sphere. It was an excursion. And the desire for the excursion was coming over her again.
Thinking of him, a certain tenderness came over her, for this disfigured countryside, and the disfigured, strange, almost wraithlike populace. To her, there was something grey and spectral about them: and something so inflexibly ugly. Ugliness incarnate, they seemed. And yet alive! But with an uncanny, underworld sort of life.
What would become of them? They had appeared in their thousands, out of nowhere, when the coal was opened in the bowels of the earth. And when the coal was exhausted, was gone, would they go too, disappear off the face of the earth? Were they merely the strange human fauna of the coal-seams, destined to vanish like other fauna, when their special habitat and means of subsistence was exhausted? Or were they capable of undergoing change, and bringing a new sort to light?
She shuddered again at the thought of them: and even her Parkin was one of them. Creatures of another element, they did not really live, they only subserved the coal, as the steel-workers subserved the steel, the workers in the potteries, the clay. Men not men, but merely the animae of coal and steel, iron and clay. Strange fauna of the mineral elements, of carbon and iron and silicon!
If ever they did emerge, it would be with weird luxuriance, Something in heavy contrast to what they were now. From ugliness incarnate, they would bring forth, perhaps, a luxuriant, uncanny beauty, some of the beauty that must have been in the great ferns and giant mosses of which the coal was made: some of the beauty of the weight and the resistance of iron, and the blueness of steel, and the iridescence of glass. When at last they had risen from subservience to the mineral elements, and were really animate, when they really used the iron, for the flowering of their own bodies and anima, instead of, as now, being used by it. Now the iron and the coal used them, not they the iron, and the coal.
She told Clifford she had had tea in Uthwaite.
‘Oh really! In Miss Bentley’s tea-shop? And how was the assiduous Miss Bentley?’
‘Just the same.’
Miss Bentley was a sallow old maid, dark-skinned, with al rather large nose, who served teas with careful intensity, as if she were administering an oft-repeated sacrament.
‘It must be rather splendid,’ said Clifford, ‘to be able to make tea for strangers, and put so much soul into the tea-pot, along with the astringent Ceylon tea. She really should have better tea, if she is the vestal and the virgin ministrant of that tea-temple of hers. Did she ask after me?’
‘Oh yes!’ Constance imitated Miss Bentley’s hushed murmur:
‘May I ask how Sir Clifford is, my lady?’
Clifford laughed.
‘And I suppose you said I was blooming.?’
‘Yes! I said you were wonderfully well; and if she came to Tevershall she was to come up to Wragby to see you.’
‘You did! Why good Heavens, what an idea! A pretty fool I should look, with Miss Bentley kissing my hand; as I know she would if she dared. Did she, say she would?’
‘She blushed: quite prettily! and lowered her eyes for a moment; and looked quite a pretty little thing. She must have been really good-looking. — And she said she didn’t think she would dare to presume.’
‘Dare to presume!’ he laughed. ‘She is an absurd old thing. — Do you think she has a special feeling about me?’
‘I’m sure she has. You are her roman de la rose.’
‘Her romance of the rose! Come Con, don’t be too far-fetched.’
‘I think you are. It’s quite easy for you—’
She laughed, and went upstairs to take her bath, and change. At least this part of her life, the material and comfortable part, ran with a regularity and a smoothness which was like a sleep, and which she loved: so long as there was also an escape, an excursion into the outside. She did not want to be outside the comfortable routine of her days. But she wanted sometimes to make a sally, a sortie, and have a strange tussle with different life.
She had managed, in a great measure, to detach from Clifford that part of herself which no longer belonged to him. For the rest, as an occasional companion, and as a presence in her life that was always there, but not pressing upon her, she accepted him.
‘We are a queer couple, you and I, Connie,’ he said that evening. ‘In a sense, we belong to one another, don’t you think?’
She was in an acquiescent mood.
‘Yes, I think so,’ she said.
‘There is even something eternal between us, don’t you think?’ That frightened her a little. She was so mistrustful of these eternities.
‘Yes, I think there is,’ she answered, to get it over.
‘There is a certain conjunction, so to speak, between our immortal selves,’ he went on.
But now she began to lose him.
‘You know I rather hate long-drawn-out immortality,’ she said, as if perplexed.
‘I know you say you do. But that is chiefly contrariness on your part.’
She pondered, or pretended to. But she was really only making sure of her own resistance.
‘I think it’s absolutely no good talking about immortality,’ she said. ‘It is something one has by not thinking about it. — I’m sure a striving after immortality is a sign that you’ve lost your natural immortality.’
He mused over what she said. And then, slowly, reluctantly, he veered to his real point.
‘Has your father settled where he is going, in June?’ he asked.
Near Biarritz — to the Villa Natividad.’
‘And you are going?’
‘Yes! Aren’t I?’
‘I know you’ve arranged to go.’
‘You don’t want me not to?’ she said, puzzled.
It had been a long settled thing, that she should spend a month or six weeks abroad, with her father and Hilda, in June and July.
‘Oh no! Oh no!’ he said. Then he added, rather awkwardly:
‘I only hope that you won’t make any serious — entanglement —while you are away. — I would like to make sure that you feel the same as I do — that whatever is between us — is eternal, whatever you may say.’
She looked up at him, conscious of a rising resistance in herself.
‘I think it’s eternal,’ she said. ‘But many things are eternal.’
He made a gesture of impatience.
‘Quite!’ he said. ‘But not mutually-exclusive things.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I will put it in words, then. — I know you have got this idea into, your head about having a child. And if you could bring it off without any further entanglements — well — I don’t think I should mind
altogether. For your sake, I should be glad if you could have children. And I’ve no doubt I should be very glad for my own sake, once the child was there. It would be something to plan for into the future, even if it were not my own. It would anyhow be yours. It’s the question of the other man — and the entanglement. — For God’s sake, be careful what sort of man you let be the father of your child.’
She looked up at him.
‘But there is no child,’ she said.
‘Quite! But, to use your own words, there might be. — Do you think you can promise not to get tangled up with somebody else over the business?’
‘In what way tangled up?’
‘Oh, you know what I mean — love affairs taken en gran sérieux — the mess of being in love — and wanting to be free bah, free!’
‘You mean free of my marriage with you?’ she asked.
‘Quite!’
She was silent for a time.
‘I don’t think I want to be free of that,’ she said slowly.
‘That’s just what I want to feel sure about,’ he said, with relief.
Again she waited before she replied:
‘I think you can be sure of it.’
There was a note of finality in her voice.
‘Then I needn’t worry,’ he said. ‘There is something eternal between us, and if I know you feel it, I don’t much care whether you admit it or not.’
But she herself only felt rather indifferent as to whether there was something eternal between them. Long-drawn-out eternalities bored her, and irritated her.
CHAPTER X
Coming downstairs in the morning, she found Parkin’s dog Flossie running anxiously round in the hall, making faint whimpers.
‘Hullo Flossie!’ said Constance softly. ‘What are you doing here?’
The dog ran towards the door of Clifford’s room, whimpering. Constance listened. That was the voice of Parkin, speaking to Clifford. Her heart stood still for a moment, with fear. Then she said to the dog:
‘You want your master? Come along then!’
In spite of herself, the dog’s pain and anxiety to go to the man moved her, and a new flush came into her blood. She opened the door of the room softly. The dog slid in, and she followed.
‘I had to let Flossie in,’ she said in her soft, breathless voice. ‘She was so distressed.’
The dog had lain down at the man’s feet, quivering. He was standing near the door. He looked down at the animal, and said harshly:
‘Why didn’t you stop outside!’
The dog on1y looked up at him.
‘I shut her out,’ he said apologetically to Clifford, not looking at Constance.
‘I suppose she slipped in through the kitchen,’ said Constance. ‘I found her in the hall, poor shut-out Flossie!’
He turned to her ladyship with a hasty salute.
‘She’ll find a road in somehow,’ he said, glancing at the, woman and away again, with perfect reserve.
Once she was physically near him, Constance was only aware of him. Clifford was a mere cypher. And something in her rejoiced. But she wanted to know what his business was.
‘Did I interrupt you?’ she said to Clifford. ‘I’m sorry! It was the dog, she was frantic.’
‘No, no!’ said Clifford. ‘There’s nothing very important —question of taking up two colliers from Stacks Gate for snaring rabbits down the warren hedge.’
She looked at Parkin. He had on his furtive, gamekeeper’s look, which she did not like. Yet his physical presence fascinated her.
‘When did you catch them?’ she asked.
‘Just at daybreak this morning — me an’ my nephew Joe. We was waitin’ for ’em, I’d seen ’em settin’ the snares night afore,’ he said rather hurriedly, being gamekeeper pure and simple.
She turned to Clifford.
‘And will you prosecute them?’ she asked.
‘I think so! I think so! Eight snares, in the middle of breeding season! It’s a bit much! I think there’s nothing to do but to have them up.’
There was silence for a moment. She was thinking that Parkin would be making more bitter enemies.
‘The colliers hate it when you prosecute anybody,’ she said.
‘They do! But it’s Stacks Gate, not Tevershall. And after all, snaring at this time of the year—!’
‘They’d got three rabbits apiece on ’em,’ said Parkin, in a burst, like a witness; ’an’ two of ’em was does as would ha’ cast in a day or two.’
She felt Clifford stiffen at the coarseness of this, in her presence, and she smiled to herself.
‘It is awful, those snares!’ she said. ‘And when the rabbits cry! — They deserve to be prosecuted, for torturing the rabbits with those snares. Do prosecute them, Clifford, and stop them if you can at that. It’s so cruel.’
‘And it’s the only way to stop them,’ said Clifford.
‘Brutes !’ she said.
Parkin remained motionless, at attention, his face a game-keeper’s mask. She was rather piqued that her presence had no visible effect on him at all.
‘How are the little pheasants?’ she asked him, looking him in the eyes with her wide gaze.
He glanced at her swiftly, but remained stiff.
‘Getting on nicely, my lady,’ he said.
‘I shall come and see them soon,’ she said, looking again full up at him. And again their eyes met.
‘You’ll find ’em runnin’ round nice an’ independent,’ he said. But his eyes did not change in the least. He might never have known her save as Lady Chatterley, never have touched her in his life.
How clever of him, to play his part so well! It made her a little angry.
‘Nothing you’d like me to do for you, Clifford?’ she said, turning to her husband.
‘Not now, thanks, dear,’ he said.
And she left the room.
She went upstairs to her own room, and stood at the window till she saw Parkin going down the drive. The skirts of his big coat flapped as he strode with aggressive importance, his brown dog ran at his heels. He was going once more to take the world by the nose. And he looked ridiculous, his legs prancing out in their stride, his old hat worn with a certain defiance, his baggy coat flapping! Especially those prancing legs annoyed her! And so cool! Not even the judge of judges would ever have suspected that he had more than once made so free with my lady’s person, and walked with his arm round her in the dark. So cool, and so completely detached, as if he didn’t know her!
Yet she went that very evening to the hut, and found him there, apparently waiting for her.
‘You see I’ve come!’ she said.
His eyes smiled in a curious secret amusement, and he did not salute.
‘Ay, I see it,’ he said.
He was in his shirt-sleeves, working at something: a flannelette shirt with bone buttons at the wrists. Yet his wrists looked so full of life! — and under his clothing, did he have that beautiful white body she had seen? One day, she must see it, touch it, know him altogether! The flame of passion went over her.
He was looking at her with that curious look of amusement, and preparing himself to come and take her. Suddenly she said:
‘I told Sir Clifford I might have a child.’
He stopped as if he had been shot. Dumbfounded!
‘You told him that?’ he said, in complete astonishment and some dismay.
‘Yes! You see I might.’
He gazed at her with blank eyes. Then he took off his hat, and stroked his hair, bewildered, thinking hard.
‘You don’t do nothing to stop it, then?’ he said, in a secret voice.
‘What do you mean? To prevent me from having a child? No, how could I?’ she said.
‘Because I’ve not taken no precautions,’ he continued, as if he might be to blame.
‘I should hate it if you had,’ she said.
He put on his hat again, and thought it over.
‘You was reckonin’ on havin’ a childt, like?’
he said, cunningly.
‘Yes! I should be glad,’ she said.
The rather hostile look of amusement came into his eyes.
‘An’ Sir Clifford ’ud take it for his own, would he?’
‘He says so.’
He gazed away at the little pheasants, that were grown all of shape, but were very brisk. Then he looked very keenly her.
‘But there was no mention of me in it?’ he asked, ironically.
‘Oh no!’ she said.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘He’d have to think it was somebody’s childt.’
She was a little angry with him, so she said coldly:
‘I’m going abroad with my father and sister next month, he could think I had found somebody then.’
‘Are yer going abroad? For how long?’
‘Six weeks or so.’
‘Next month?’
‘Yes — about the middle of June.’
‘Not long yet,’
He gazed at her! So, he was going to lose her for a time! He was thinking fast.
‘Sir Clifford’ll think you’ve found somebody higher up, eh, to give you a baby? What would he say if he knowed it was me?’
She paused again, in anger at his mocking tone.
‘He’d hate it,’ she said off-hand. Then she looked up at him. ‘But you’d never want to tell him, would you? You’d never want to give me away?’
There seemed to him a certain dumb pain in her face. ‘Me! No! You may bet I should never want to tell him. He’d never be no wiser if he waited for my tellin’.’
‘Nor anybody? You wouldn’t tell anybody?’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 19
