John Thomas and Lady Jane

by D. H. Lawrence

  ‘No no! No no, she never cared about me! No, she only cared about having her own way with me, an’ then wipin’ her feet on me because I’d let her have it. No, she cared about nobody, not even the child. Herself, maybe; nobody else!’

  Constance felt very unhappy.

  ‘But she may want to come back to you,’ she said.

  He slowly shook his head.

  ‘I think not!’ he said. ‘I think not. She’s had out of me all she’ll ever get — an’ I sort of don’t know her any more. She’s gone out of me, we’ve gone apart, an’ I feel as if I’d been asleep, an wakened up. She’s gone dead out of me.’

  ‘And do you think you’ve gone dead in her?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. I think I was dead in her when the child was born, comes to that I’

  Constance pondered, unconvinced.

  ‘Yet she was good to you,’ she said, ‘when she first married you.

  ‘Ay! she was! she was! she was good to me! An’ that made me a fool over her, I was so glad to be all right with a woman, an’ to have a woman — you know — as wanted me as well. I’d have given her the soul out of my body. ’Appen I did, for that matter. ’Appen that was what made her start wipin’ her feet on me. It was my own fault. I know it. That’s why I wish her no harm. I wish to God the other man could make her content. With me she was never content. Yi, I hope she’s content.’

  ‘Do you think she is?’

  ‘Maybe she is! She’s got a sort of life that suits her better. I never could stand her goin’ to th’ pub. An’ I never went with her. An’ for years, I’d nothing to say to her. Seemed as if there was nothing to say. Oh, she’s better off with him, you back your life. An’ I think she knows it.’

  She could hear in his voice the dazed relief at being rid of the woman who had oppressed him for so many years. It amused her, and angered her a little.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust her, though,’ said Constance. ‘She might just turn up because she knew you didn’t want her.’

  ‘She might. But that would upset her game wi’ th’ other fellow, who’s got a grand idea of himself. So I don’t think she will.’

  The clock on the wall struck eleven. Constance looked round the bare little room, that seemed so cheerless, save for the fire and the copper kettle, the white hearth, the steel fender. This was where the other woman had lived! Upstairs she had borne the child.

  ‘Do you sleep in the same bed where she slept?’ she asked him.

  He looked at her quickly.

  ‘Ay! There’s no other.’

  Constance sank into a muse. He put his boots on the rack of the fireplace, to dry: and put up hers too. Then’ he found his slippers, and went out of doors to bring in the big lump of coal, with small coal for backing, with which to rake the fire, to keep it in till morning. Connie watched him carefully pressing the big lump, called the raker, down on the red coals, then packing the slack behind it. It was a task he had done every night, since he had had a house of his own. Then he washed his hands, and looked at the porridge in the double cooker, setting it on the hob above the oven. After which he opened the stairfoot door, and went up the creaking stairs.

  He came down in a moment, saying:

  ‘I’ve lit the candle.’

  Constance was staring at the fire, extinguished by the coal of the big black raker, dismal.

  ‘And did you think,’ she said, looking up at him as he stood on the hearthrug with one foot on the fender, and his hand on the mantelshelf above his head, ‘did you think you’d never have anything to do with women any more, when your wife was gone?’

  He looked at her steadily.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said.

  ‘And wouldn’t you, do you think? but for me?’ she asked.

  ‘Eh, don’t ask me! I know nothing,’ he said, with a certain helplessness.

  ‘But you’re not sorry you have me?’

  ‘No!’ he said, with a queer smile. ‘It’ll probably end in more trouble. — But it’s ’appened, so no use talkin’. An’ if I’ve got me a woman — eh well! I’d rather have a woman an’ — what should I say? — good fuckin’ — and get shot for it after, than not have a woman, an’ no fuckin’, and not get shot —’

  ‘Well, you’ve not had many women!’ she said with a smile. ‘One!’ he said.

  ‘Two with me,’ she said in irony.

  ‘Ay! Two with you.’

  He still hung with his hand on the high mantel-shelf, his face looking down at the blackened fire, his foot on the fender. She still sat in his chair.

  ‘And are you sure you even want me?’ she said.

  He looked down at her, his eyes stirring and dilating.

  ‘Ay, I’m sure as I want you, as far as ever I s’ll get you. Are you sure you want me?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said softly.

  He lifted his chin with an odd tossing motion.

  ‘Ay, sometimes!’ he said smiling. ‘I’d forgot that.’

  He rested his head on his arm, and she saw the little quiver of restrained desire chasing over his body in light shudders, stiffening the muscles oddly.

  She looked up at him pleadingly.

  ‘Would you love me?’ she said.

  He looked into her eyes, with a sort of smile.

  ‘I’d love you if you wanted to be loved,’ he said quietly.

  And she dropped her head.

  She heard him sigh, and looked up. He met her eyes.

  ‘Shall you go upstairs?’ he said.

  ‘She rose, with a certain unwillingness: unwilling, really, to give herself. He saw it. And she knew he saw it.

  ‘I don’t want to force you in any way,’ he said.

  She looked back at him from the stairfoot door.

  ‘Come too!’ she said, a little pathetic.

  He blew out the lamp, and closed the stairfoot door after him, as he slowly mounted the stairs behind her. The candle shone through the open door of the bedroom, on the tiny landing at the top of the stair. The other door was shut.

  The bedroom was small, with a whitewashed sloping ceiling, and stuffed with cheap furniture, pushed under the slopes of the roof. The big iron bedstead stood in the corner by the door, facing the gable window. Under the roof-slope by the window was a yellow-painted dressing-table with swing mirror, but with no cloth, nothing on its bareness. There was a yellow-painted washstand, with basin and ewer decorated with chrysanthemums, under another roof-slope, and across from the bed, a chest of drawers. So there was hardly a yard of empty space in the little room.

  Constance stood on the strip of matting by the bed, and looked round. On the wall were two cheap pictures. The candle flickered on the chest of drawers. The big white bed stood untouched. He stood in the doorway. Then he entered and closed the door.

  ‘Shall you sleep inside?’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so!’ she replied.

  She sat on the bed, while he stood at a loss near the door: then pulling off her stockings, she hung them over the bedrail. Then she slipped out of her silk washing-dress, and stood bake-armed in her almost transparent nightdress. As she hung her dress over the bedrail, she saw her own queer, fixed face in the swivel mirror, and she was startled. Then she looked at him. He was watching her with bright eyes, as he stood waiting near the door.

  ‘Aren’t you coming too?’ she said, glancing at the bed.

  He nodded. And as she was getting into the bed, suddenly his hands were clasping her body, closing on her hanging breasts, and he was putting back her nightdress to kiss her body, with sharp kisses, then pressing his cheeks against her warm flesh.

  She turned and took his head between her arms, holding it fast to her breast. She daren’t let him look at her.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll love me?’ she quavered.

  ‘Ay, I’ll love you,’ he said, from her breast.

  ‘I want you to! I want you to!’ she whispered wildly.

  And she slipped into the bed, away from him.

  He quickly pushed off his
stockings and breeches, and dropped his waistcoat, and turned to her, in his flannelette day, shirt.

  ‘Take your shirt off too!’ she said.

  ‘Then you take off that nightie!’ he replied.

  Obediently she began to pull the frail thing over her head and he watched, watched her long breasts shaking as they emerged. Then he turned his back to her, to take off his shirt with his rapid, slipping movements. She reached out from the bed and laid her hand on his warm, white-skinned body, at the waist. She felt his body wince.

  ‘Turn round to me! Turn round before you blow the candle out,’ she said quickly.

  He turned slowly, in the unwillingness of his roused, exposed nakedness. He saw her looking at his phallus, then up into his eyes, with big, strange blue eyes. .

  ‘Tell me it isn’t only fucking,’ she said, pleading.

  He was breathless for a moment. But the tense phallus did not change. It was like another being.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by only!’ he said, baffled.

  Only the erect phallus seemed sure, cocksure, a strange, wildly alert proud presence between the two beings.

  ‘How strange it is!’ she said.

  She put her arms round his waist, and her swinging breasts touched the summit of the erect phallus in a sort of homage. He managed to twist, reach over, and knock out the flame of the candle, then he got into bed and went straight in to her.

  ‘What is there more? What is there more than fucking?’ came his puzzled voice like an unknown voice out of the night. And for the moment she submitted, and was gone.

  Afterwards, he slept, with her left breast cupped in his right hand, for she had her back to him. And she knew that he must have slept with his wife like that, in the first years: Bertha Coutts! Because his hand came with a strange blind instinct and gathered her breast and held it as in a cup, in sleep. If she moved, and shifted his hand away, it came back by itself, stirring, groping, till it had her breast again softly enclosed, while he slept. And she lay encircled in his arm, feeling as if her very soul were cupped in the soft hollow of his hand.

  It was a kind of prison: a prison! Yet she knew she could break it. So she lay perfectly still, as in a kind of inertia, in the circle of his arm, letting her breast rest like an egg in the strong, warm cup of his hand. Her heart was sad, and wouldn’t let her sleep. And something flickered like a spark of irritation in her mind.

  It was what he had told her, about Bertha Courts and about himself. She found nothing extraordinary in it. Yet her heart hurt her, because she had felt the bitterness and the hate of him. His desire for sex intercourse, and his hatred of sex! His desire for woman, and his hatred of women! This made a gnawing soreness in her heart.

  Now, he slept absolutely motionless, keeping her within the circle of his arm, her breast like a fruit on the tree, in the hollow of his hand. And now he seemed really at peace, he seemed to have achieved his own peace, perhaps at the expense of her own. While she would lie still and submissive in the circle of his enclosing arm, he was at peace, and his wounds were closed. But the moment she broke away, he would wake, and memory would open like a wound.

  She could feel the slow, strong thudding of his heart, as he held her against him. And it made her think of that other strange creature in him, the erect, sightless, overweening phallus. A little frightening that had been, in its erect, blind overweening. And somehow she realised that it was the soul of his phallus, the overweening blind male soul in him, that had been wounded all his life, wounded through his mother and his step-father from the beginning of his days, and whose wound gaped with the pain and hatred of sex. Because, his phallus was rooted in his soul, and rose erect from the soul’s deeps, in naïve pride of, creation. And it was this queer, sightless, mindless phallic nature that had been hurt in him all his life, and whose wound only closed now, in sleep, while she lay submissive in the circle of his flesh.

  Vaguely, she realised for the first time in her life what the phallus meant, and her heart seemed to enter a new, wide world. Between the two hesitating, baffled creatures, himself and he she had seen the third creature, erect, alert, overweening, utterly unhesitating, stand there in a queer new assertion, rising from the roots of his body. It was like some primitive, grotesque god but alive, and unspeakably vivid, alert with its own weird 1ife, apart from both their personalities. Sightless, it seemed to look round, like a mole risen from the depths of the earth. The resurrection of the flesh, it was called in joke. But wasn’t it really so? Wasn’t there a weird, grotesque godhead in it?

  And this godhead in him had always been wounded, yet even now was not dead. In most men it was dead. To most men, the penis was merely a member, at the disposal of the personality. Most men merely used their penis as they use their fingers, for some personal purpose of their own. But in a true man, the penis has a life of its own, and is the second man within the man. It is prior to the personality. And the personality must yield before the priority and the mysterious root-knowledge of the penis, or the phallus. For this is the difference between the two: the penis is a mere member of the physiological body. But the phallus, in the old sense, has roots, the deepest roots of all, in the soul and the greater consciousness of man, and it is through the phallic roots that inspiration enters the soul.

  Vaguely, she realized it. Vaguely, she knew now what he meant when he said: ‘I don’t know what you mean by only,’ to him, there could never be ‘only fucking’. Because his phallus rose in its own weird godhead, with its own swarthy pride and surety, and ‘fucking’ went to the phallic roots of his soul. It was not just sensational excitation, worked from the ego and the personality. His phallus was not the vulgar organ, the penis. And with the life or death of his phallus, he would live or die. That too she realised. Men like Clifford, and a vast number of modern men, lived in the petty triumph over the phallus. They have a nasty penis, with which they play about like dirty little boys. But when it comes to the act, in spite of all the gush about love, it is merely fucking, the functional orgasm, the momentary sensational thrill, the cheap and nasty excitation of a moment.

  She herself was enclosed in the phallic circle of flesh, and her female nature set in the socket of the male clasp. For the moment. But this night, at least, she submitted. She did not feel a prisoner. She felt enclosed, and safe, and her heart at last was still, had lost its tightness. She was no longer afraid. Always, all her life, she had had a seed of fear in her heart, that could suddenly grow like a grain of mustard-seed. Fear of what? Of nothing, and of everything. Fear of life, fear of society, fear of what would happen, fear of what would not happen. The war had ratified the fear, once and for all. And to conquer the fear, she had wanted to be free, and free, and more free. And the freerer she was, the deeper the fear sent its root in her soul.

  Tonight she realized. The root of the fear had been fear of the phallus. This is the root-fear of all mankind. Hence the frenzied efforts of mankind to despise the phallus, and to nullify it. All out of fear. Hence the modern jazz desire to make the phallus quite trivial, a silly little popgun. Fear, just the same. Fear of this alter ego, this homunculus, this little master which is inside a man, the phallus. Men and women alike committed endless obscenities, in order to be rid of this little master, to be free of it! Free! Free! Freedom! Oh tale told by an idiot!

  Tonight she submitted. Tonight she would be enclosed and encircled within the phallic body, like an egg set in a cup. Tonight for once she would be without fear. The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing — the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety. There was something that danger could not touch: one thing and one only: the perfect sleeping circle of the male and femal
e, phallic body.

  For once, her heart yielded, yielded and passed out. What did it matter who he was, in the daytime world! Now he was the silent man who enclosed her in the phallic circle, and she was like the yolk of the egg, enclosed. She wanted only, only to be perfectly enclosed, to be perfectly comforted, to be put perfectly to sleep.

  She slipped round in his arms, and clung to his body, pressing her body to his, in the nakedness. And she felt the mysterious change in his flesh, the beginnings of the inrush of power, the subtle potency that accompanies the rousing of the phallus. And her own flesh quivered and seemed to melt, in wave after wave of new moltenness, as he entered her and melted her in successive sharp, soft waves of unspeakable pleasure, molten and for ever molten, while her voice uttered sharp, strange cries, till she reached the climax and was gone, in the pure bath of forgetting and of birth.

  Then at last she nestled into him, and slept as he had slept, in the new sleep. And her breast lay in the socket of his hand, and she was unaware of it. She was only the yolk in the egg.

  He woke at dawn in the morning. But he lay still, thinking. It was so good to lie like this, so still, within the inner circle of the angels, beyond all fear and pain. She slept, and his soul slept with her. Only his eyes watched the light through the window-blind, his ears heard the voices of birds, the moving of Flossie downstairs. If one could remain forever so, naked in the stillness, with the sleeping, naked woman! On the edge of his consciousness pressed the day, with its fear, its evil problems. But he remained within the inner circle of the phallic angels, with the woman.

  And at last she stirred too, woke, with a certain wonder, and turned round to meet his wide-open, quiet eyes, that gazed at her.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she said to him.

  He smiled a little with his eyes, but did not answer. And again her breasts and all her body yearned for him with the, great yearning. And she clung to his firm, live body, as he softly stroked the silky, voluptuous arches of her waist.

  ‘Let me kiss you!’ she said, suddenly kneeling in the bed and bending over his naked breast, kissing the male nipples.