‘Me! You can back your life, I s’ll tell nobody. I’ve had enough o’ what one woman’s said about me, wi’out ever startin’ any more talk. — No, if God knows, he’ll have to. But I’d not let even him know, if I could help it.’
They were both silent, and awkward.
At last he turned to her, with a quick, awkward movement.
‘That was what you wanted me for, was it? A baby?’ he said.
She was silent, so confused, she did not know.
‘I don’t know!’ she said, looking up at him with lost eyes. ‘I — I wanted — I don’t know what I wanted. I wanted — I wanted you, yes, I did, I do! — And, perhaps, a baby,’ she concluded, in Slow, dumb syllables.
‘You didn’t think much of me, like?’ he said slowly and ironically.
She looked up at him dumbly.
‘I liked your body!’ she said.
‘My body?’ he repeated, incredulous and amused. She looked up at him without speaking.
An’ do you like it now?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she murmured.
‘Then we’re quits! I like yours!’ he said. ‘I imagined it was no pleasure for you to touch me, as it is for me to touch you. — My wife, she had her bouts of liking the touch of me. But you’re different.’
‘I — I don’t think I am,’ she stammered. ‘I want to touch you.’
He looked at her a little mockingly.
‘Nay-nay!’ he said. He knew she wanted to keep really free of him.
‘It’s because I’m — afraid,’ she said.
‘An’ do you like it, when I feel of you?’ he said.
‘Yes, I love it,’ she admitted.
‘Eh well then — what’s amiss! — Have you left your underthings off for me?’ he asked rather brutally.
‘Yes!’
His eyes were now flashing, but his face had a hard look.
‘Let’s go inside then, and be private.’
He closed the door of the hut, and sitting down, pulled off his boots and leggings and trousers, and stood in his shirt.
‘Now you can feel of me if you’ve a mind to —’ he said, coming to her and lifting back her skirts, and coming to her naked body with the queer, constrained smile of passion. But she knew his heart was heavy. And she put her arms round him, under his shirt. But she was afraid, afraid of his smooth naked body, with its violent muscles. She shrank afraid, away.
And when he said, in the queer heart-sad croon of the voice of his passion: ‘Tha’rt nice; tha’rt nice!’ her body loved it, and was glad. But something in her spirit, and in her will, stiffened with resistance, from the intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession. And if the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her, if her spirit managed to keep aloof, then the butting of his hips would seem ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its conclusion would seem, almost farcical. And then it would occur to her that this was love, this ridiculous butting of haunches, and wilting of a poor little penis. And she would say to herself, as so many men, poets and all, have said, that surely the God that created man, created him a reasoning being, and yet forced to procreate himself in this humiliating ridiculous posture, created him surely out of savage irony and contempt for his own creation.
It was difficult for her mind and her critical spirit to submit to the throes of love. They wanted to dominate. They wanted to throw the man aside, escape his grip and his butting over-riding haunches. They found his body a foolish and pretentious, imperfect, perhaps disgusting thing.
But then again, caught unawares, passion overcame her, and the body of the man seemed silken and powerful and pure god-stuff, and the thrusting of the haunches the splendid, flamboyant, urgent god-rhythm, the same that made the stars swing round and the sea heave over, and all the leaves turn and the light stream out from heaven. And then inside her the thrill was wonderful, and the short, sharp cries that broke from her was in the wild language of the demi-gods. And then, the strange shrinking of the penis was something so tender, so beautiful, the sensitive frailty of what was so fierce a force, she could feel her heart cry out.
She was at the mercy of her two selves. But the self that mostly ruled, was the self of her own, critical spirit, that was fiercely independent, and resented his clutches, and his blindness, and even the soft, lapping intimacy of his voice, the thee and the thou of his dialect. When he was warm with passion, he was so unaware of the ridiculousness of things, and of himself: the ridiculousness of buttoning down those corduroy breeches, there in front of her. He was so pleased and so satisfied, and it irritated her so. Out of sheer perverseness, she made herself be irritated, she refused to let herself be carried away by the soft, vague, uncritical pleasure of passion.
‘Whether tha gets thee a childt, or whether tha doesna, we’n ’ad summat for us-selves,’ he said, with that darkening glow of afterwards. But there was a tension on his brow. And she felt his heart accused her.
And in spite of herself, in spite of her critical standing apart from him and jeering at him, she could not retort on him. He, or his mood, had a strange power over her. And the moment he came really near to her, it was as if something radiated out from the front of his body, that put her in a spell, made her submit to him and his desires, whether she wanted to or not.
‘An’ if Sir Clifford gets th’ childt, we’ve ‘ad this!’ he said, as he sat down fastening up his leggings. It sounded so fatal, as if they were parting for ever.
Nor could she retort on him. Nor could she even prevent him, in his complication of mixed emotions, from using the dialect to her, the dialect that made her feel so curiously caught, netted. The very sounds of it cast a spell on her, spoken in the warm, physical, yet fatal voice he used when he was roused, and the physical man in him became defiant, in conflict with the other, personal man. Then she was merely woman, merely female to his male. And partly she loved it. The body of her loved it. But her spirit wanted to get away, to run, to get out of his presence.
‘Tha mun com’ ter th’ cottage for a naight, sholl ter?’ he said to her, his speech getting broader. ‘Tha mun com an’ slaip wi’ me, afore tha goos wi’ thy feyther. Shall ter? When sholl ter?’
Her mind flickered like a wavering candle, under the sound of the curiously-varied dialect, which sometimes said maun for must, and sometimes mun; then sholl or shall apparently indiscriminately. ‘We’n ’ad summat fr ’us-selves!’ he said, and all her skin turned, it was so unspeakably intimate and stuck together. And we he pronounced like a sharp wai, with italian vowels: really unwritable.
He seemed to slide through centuries, thousands of years of human culture, in this hour with her. When she came, he was an ordinary man, not very different from Tommy Dukes or Clifford. But when his eyes began to dilate and flash, he began to slide back through the centuries. His curious hiss of passion, sudden indrawn, when he touched her naked body, was far back almost as the snake itself. And that crooning voice: ‘Tha’rt th’art nice!’ — was something pre-human. And then he used the dialect as a sort of armour and a weapon, forcing her to physical compliance.
Now, in another breath, he had moved forwards again another thousand years.
‘Shall yer come one night ter th’ cottage? he repeated, quite changed and distant, in an almost ordinary voice. And now, instead of naight, sharp, it was ni-ight, with a long heavy i. — And now, also, he did not urge further. He left her to it. And even now, she had to say yes to him, for fear he should not ask her again. She wanted to go to the cottage: but he made her admit it.
‘Yes! Shall I! Do you think I dare?’ she said.
And back he went the thousand years again, but warmer, more assured.
‘Yi, yi! — tha durst! What’s goin’ ter stop thee? Tha oppens one o’ th’ doo-ers, an’ tha coms.’
She stood and wavered. He glimmered with a faint smile at her in the darkness. He was taunting her, daring her.
‘When sholl ter come?’ came the near, caressive, lapping voice.
‘Sunday?’ she said, faintly.
‘Ay ! Com o’ Sunday!’
He quickly opened the door of the hut.
‘Should I dust thee?’ he said, taking her gently by the arm.
And he gently dusted down her dress, his hand passing softly over the curves of her body, firmly, without any seeking any more, but with memory.
‘Tha’rt good cunt, aren’t ta?’ he said softly, using one of the indefinable sexual words of the dialect.
‘What is that?’ she said.
‘It’s what a man gets when ’e’s inside thee! — Yo’ wouldn’t know what cunt is, though,’ he added, a little mocking, taking a great stride suddenly, and landing in the twentieth century.
He was cold again, returned back to the man of her own day, but not of her own class: silent, with a restraint on him. Only when he was leaving her, he said:
‘Sunday then! What time?’
‘Why — some time after ten.’
‘All right! An’ I s’ll wait for yer here, at this gate. — If anything stops you though—?’
‘If I don’t come,’ she said, ‘you walk towards the house, and see if there’s a light in my bedroom. If there’s a light in my bedroom, after ten o’clock, it means I can’t come. — But I shall see you before then.’
‘All right. I know which is your bedroom.’
She left him, but in a kind of dreaminess. The world seemed like a dream. The trees seemed to be bulging and surging, at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope of the park was alive. She herself was a different creature, sensitive and alert, quietly slipping among the live presences of trees and hills and a far off star.
It was new and wonderful, but she was still uneasy. She knew she had got it from him. She had really touched him at last, like the woman who touched Jesus, and who found the world changed. Stars were coming out. Time was a full soft urge, with no minutes to it. And the universe ceased to be the vast clock-work of circling planets and pivotal suns, which she had known. The stars opened like eyes, with a consciousness in them, and the sky was filled with a soft, yearning stress of consolation. It was not mere atmosphere. It had its own feeling, its own anima. Everything had its own anima.
The quick of the universe is in our own bodies, deep in us. And as we see the universe, so it is. But also, it is much more than we ever see or can see. And as the soul changes in us, turns over with a new creative move, the whole aspect of all things changes. And again we see the universe as it is. But it is not as we saw it before. It is an utterly new reality. We are clothed with a new awareness, in a new world. The universe is all things that man knows or has known or ever will know. It is all there. We only need become aware.
Connie felt this change happening in herself. The man had caused her soul to turn, to become aware in a different way. She felt frightened and shrinking. She had got a new nakedness, an old, hard sheath was gone. And she was frightened, exposed, yet invisible, in her new nakedness.
And now, she felt, with a dim inward knowledge, he had impregnated her body as well as her soul. Now she believed she would have a child.
He, walking in the wood when the night deepened to a magnificent night of May, felt a peculiar surging joy. In some way he had won a great victory, broken through into a world where he could live. The struggle was long, and like a tense dream. But with his loins he had won a victory. His life had been a long, tense dream of resistance and of pressure against some constraint. And now, for the moment, he had broken down the resistance and emerged loose and free in the night. The intense hour with the woman was only the culmination, and, for once, the triumph, of the life-long passion of his soul and loins, a passion for a new space in life. His whole life was a resistance and a fight. But this was one of his moments of emergence and of a new splendour.
Connie remained under the spell of him, her mind feeling dim and inert, but in her limbs, in her body, in her loins and her womb, a new strong awareness and aliveness. For some reasons she felt drawn to Mrs Bolton, as if she had something in common with her.
The two women were working together in the garden, pegging down carnations and putting in small plants of flowers for the summer. It was a lovely warm morning, and a work they both loved. Connie especially felt a delight in softly putting in the roots into the soft black earth of the borders. She felt her womb quiver with pleasure as if something were taking root there too, in some way.
‘It is many years since you lost your husband,’ she said softly to Mrs Bolton, as she dug a new little hole with the trowel, and carefully prepared it for the plant.
‘Twenty-three,’ said Mrs Bolton, waiting with the columbine plant ready. ‘Twenty-three years since they brought him home.’
Connie’s heart gave a lurch. If they brought home the body of one’s man, dead! It must not be.
‘Why should he have died, do you think?’ she asked, glancing up. ‘Why shouldn’t he have escaped, like the others?’
It was a woman’s question to a woman.
‘I don’t know. He was too obstinate, if you ask me. He hated ducking his head, for anything. He ought never to have been down pit, if it hadn’t been for his father, he never would have been. His mother always ‘said: “our Ted’s not the lad for down pit, he’s too much of a wezzle-brain —”’
‘What is a wezzle-brain?’ asked Connie.
‘Why, he wasn’t that either, exactly. It means careless, and never know where you’ve put things, forgetful. He wasn’t really wezzle-brained, it was that he wouldn’t care, he wouldn’t take care: there, that’s it! He wouldn’t take care. He was like some of those lads in the war, going off gay and lively. And they were always killed first. And that was how our Ted was: that fresh and happy-go-lucky, and wouldn’t be careful. It wasn’t that he-couldn’t. He could have. I knew that when my first baby was born, an’ I had such a bad time. But he stopped with me all through it, an’ held my hand, else I b’lieve I should ’ave died. An’ I never saw him, you know, like you don’t when you sufferin’ — not till after, not till I was through. An’ then I looked at him, an’ he was white as a sheet, an’ such a look in his eyes, oh! — angry, angry! I said to him: it’s all right, lad! — An’ he said, in such a funny way: A body ’ad better die than suffer. An’ that made me mad, as you can imagine. Well! I said. If you mean i’d have better have died, it’s a nice thing to say! — An’ he gave’ me such a look! But I was too weak to notice any more. Only I always remembered it. — Ay, an’ I remembered it when he lay dead. And I thought to myself: Ay, you’ve died without sufferin’, that you have done! — I believe ’appen it was the pit. He should never have been down pit. It wasn’t his nature, like. — Eh, I wished afterwards as I’d made him take a job on top! —But when a man’s married, he doesn’t like choppin’ an changin’.’
Connie had gone on bedding her plant, and watering it with her secret tears. But she managed to compose herself.
‘And you never forgot him?’ she said softly.
‘No! It seemed as if I couldn’t. It came as such a shock. An’ I’d been so happy with him. I was brought up with a stepmother as was none too good to me, an’ it was lovely havin’ Ted, as was just the opposite. I’d never had anybody be fond of me; my father was fond of me, but he never dared show it. I never had anybody to make a bit of fuss of me, like, and hold me in their arms. And then Ted was so good to me. Nobody knows! I did love him to hold me — an’ I’ve kissed every inch of his body. After my first baby was born, he didn’t want me to have any more children, an’ I had such work with him, to make him get over it. He was a thousand times more done by what I’d had to go through than I was. I said to him: Well, I’ve forgot it! An’ look at me, if I’m any the worse! Why I’m stronger than ever. But it ’ad made such an impression on him. — But in the end, he got over it, an’ we had us good times again. He said to me not long before he died, he said: 1 dunna reckon much a’ life, Ivy, ’xcept f’r thee! An’ I said to ‘im: I don’t know what you have to grumble about life for! — A
n’ ’e said, so funny an’ quiet: Ah’m non grumblin’! I’m sayin’ I dunna reckon much on’t. Tha’st a nicester woman than I am a man. — I don’t know, but I couldn’t make him out. — He seemed that jolly an’ good tempered, an’ a good foot-baller, an’ never drank much after he was married, though he used to take too much before. Yet when he lay there dead, you d almost have said he wanted to die An’ that was my cry, when he lay there dead: What did you want to leave me for!—’
‘But he didn’t, did he?’ asked Connie.
‘No! Of course not! But that was what I kep’ on saying. — But it was the pit, really, that killed him. I believe inside himself he couldn’t bear it. But he wouldn’t own up — not even to himself.’
The plants were set, Connie rose from her knees, and looked down the softly steamy garden, full in the sun under the old sandstone wall.
‘It was terrible for you, to have your life end there,’ she said, glancing at the handsome, brooding face of the other woman.
‘It’s true. One, part of my life ended there. One part of me went with him. I could never alter it. It was as if I could only feel his arms round me, an’ his body against me, an’ his legs against my legs. It’s the touch of him that I can never really get over.’
‘But do you want to?’
‘No! Only sometimes I’ve felt bitter, being left. And sometimes I feel it was other folks, an’ the pit, as killed him. It seems silly, doesn’t it! But sometimes I feel, if it ’adn’t been for the pit, an’ them as runs the pit, other folks, he’d never have left me.’
‘But which other folks?’ asked Connie.
‘Oh, I don’t know, my lady. There’s a lot of hard-hearted folks in the world.’
It was queer how even Ivy Bolton could change, Connie had seen her with Clifford, soft-footed, pale-faced, sly, mock-submissive, intimate in the wrong way, and rather hateful. Now here she was, a woman indeed, in love after twenty-three years, with a dead man, caring for nobody else, rather hating the world for having killed him.
‘But can a touch last so long?’ she asked suddenly, quite apart even from her own thoughts. ‘Can a man’s touch on a woman last so long?’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 20
