‘Look how pretty the brown hair is on your breast!’ she said, ruffling it with her fingers. ‘How could anyone think it not nice You don’t think the hair on my body is nasty, do you? You don’t wish it wasn’t there?’
She kneeled naked before him. He put his face to her belly, an. rubbed his nose among the sharp hair of her body, kissing her gently on the gentle mount of Venus, letting the little hairs brush his mouth, while his moustache brushed her body and made her laugh.
‘You don’t want me shaved or anything, do you?’ she said.
‘No-no!’ he said, in a low voice.
And he suddenly kneeled in front of her and folded her close, rocking her in a queer rhythm, while the phallic sway enveloped them again.
And then again they both dozed. He was awakened by her soft long breasts dangling against his face as she reached over to see what time it was by his watch on the chair. He laughed, and caught at the breast with his teeth.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Only a quarter to seven,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to go,’ he said.
‘Ten more minutes!’ she said, nestling down into his arms.
‘Was it as lovely for you as it was for me?’ she whispered.
‘Ay !’ he said. He hated her to talk.
‘Do you love me?’
‘Yi!’
‘Do you know what love means? Tell me you do!’ she said wistfully.
He held her close in his arms, and said in dialect:
‘Tha knows what Ah know an’ what I dunna know! Dunna keep axin’ me! Tha’rt ’ere, aren’t ter? Tha can feel me! Tha knows, doesn’t ter? What’dost ax for?’
‘No, I won’t ax then!’ she said, with a comic mocking of the dialect.
He laughed.
‘Don’t yer like it when I talk broad?’ he asked.
‘I love it!’ she said, suddenly nestling down over his face and smothering him. ‘I love it when you do it out of niceness,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you do it out of nastiness, don’t you?’
He wriggled his face clear of the soft pressure of her breasts.
‘Maybe!’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I dunno! What art axin’ for again? Tha allers says why!’
‘Because I don’t feel sure, and I want to feel sure,’ she said.
‘Sure o’ thysen, ’appen. That’s what tha’rt niver sure on,’ he said.
‘And you feel sure of me, don’t you? Kiss me! Say you do!’
He kissed her, and said seriously:
‘Ay, I feel sure o’ thee at this minute. If I axed thee for owt, tha’d gi’e ’t me, shouldn’t ter? This minute?’
‘Ask me for something then!’ she said.
For reply he held her fast in his arms.
‘Tha’rt wi’ me at this minute, aren’t ter?’ he said, in a little voice, half pain. ‘Even if ter leaves me, tha’rt wi’ me at this minute?’
She clung to him convulsively and did not answer.
‘An’ I’ve got thee for this minute, ’aven’t I? for this minute tha howds nowt back, does ter?’ came the voice, like a lonely little bell clanging.
She could feel vivid passion mount over her.
‘Take me!’ she whispered. ‘Take me!’
She gave herself, and it was the best she had known.
When he lay in the strange stillness, that always overawed her a little, she said:
‘Was it all right?’
He lifted his head, looked at her, and kissed her. And she hid her face in his shoulder, hid from all consciousness, for some minutes.
They heard the far-off hooters go, for seven o’clock. He still lay motionless, with her in his arms, for a minute or two. Then kissing her quietly he released her, and got out of bed, going to the window in his whiteskinned nakedness. He drew the blind and looked out.
‘Is it a fine day?’ she said.
‘It will be,’ he replied.
And he turned again to her, not ashamed now in his nakedness, the phallus little and sticky. She leaned out of bed, and touched it delicately.
‘How strange it is!’ she said, with a certain awe. ‘So little now, like a bud, and innocent! Little and innocent! What a queer character it’s got, don’t you think?’
He laughed.
‘A bad character, eh?’ he laughed.
‘No, a good one, a lovely one!’ she said.
He laughed, and picked up his shirt, getting it over his head.
‘You must get up,’ he said softly.
‘Yes!’ she said, reaching for her nightdress. He handed it to her, and stooped for his breeches.
In a moment he was dressed, had tied the garters round his stockings, and slung on his waistcoat. Then he looked at her as she sat up in bed in her nightdress.
‘You must be quick,’ he said gently.
‘All right!’
And with another quick look, he went downstairs.
She got up, and went to the dormer window, opening the sash wider. The wood stood there, hoary and still, showing in the haze of morning the fleece of half-open leaves, and a blue mist of hyacinths, almost identical with the haze of day, deeper in beyond the hazels. As yet the sun was not clear, yet the sky was blue overhead. The world was very still, not yet roused from its dream. The dream is very old, yet hyacinthine every spring.
She washed herself in the ugly basin, decorated with brown chrysanthemum transfers, and thought vaguely about Bertha Coutts. And as she combed her hair with the little black comb he had laid on the bare dressing-table, she thought how many times the swivel mirror had reflected the face of the other woman. Ah well!. Bertha Coutts had had her chance with a sensitive, passionate man, and she had thrown it away, in her violence and coarse egoism. Now, probably, she regretted it, with the same egoistic violence. Remembering him in his naked quickness, Connie pitied the other woman a little. But also she disliked her deeply. It was such coarse egoism in women that ruins the world for women.
He was in the scullery when Connie came down the steep little stairs, and she heard the splashing of the water over his face. She slipped on her tennis shoes, and went to the inner doorway. He was wiping his face and neck on the roller-towel that hung, behind the back door. He looked at her out of the towel, giving it a jerk so that the roller rattled, to bring it to a dry place.
‘Don’t bother to come out with me,’ she said. ‘I must go.’
‘Shan’t you have nothing to eat nor anything?’ he asked.
‘It’s twenty past seven! I’d better go.’
‘I’ll come with you to the green riding, then?’
He hastily combed his brown hair at the little mirror that hung low, by the window, so that he had to stoop. Then taking his coat and hat, he went with her into the still, fresh morning.
‘How lovely it is here!’ she said, as they crossed from the little white gate of the front garden, over the rough grass, to the hazel thicket. There was just the narrow track which his feet kept worn. ‘This is one of the loveliest places in the world.’
‘Should you like to stop, to live here?’ he asked.
She pondered a moment.
‘If the world was different, I should love it,’ she said, ‘to stay here with you and have your children. If the world were only different.’
He strode in silence, through the wet grass of the woodland path.
‘Ay!’ he said at last. ‘The world would have to be different.’
And they both walked in silence, in the freshness and the stillness of the half-awake wood, whose trees stood around like presences, like witnesses, among the mist of bluebells. There was something of the phallic stillness and power in them, too, as they stood deep-rooted. And the birds darted among them, in little flashes.
In the green riding, the forget-me-nots were fluffing up. The greenway made a cleft through the wood. The sun was delicately beginning to shine, among the tree-trunks, frail and tentative in its new beams. And a new glow rose from the greenway.
‘There!’ she said to him. ‘Don’t come any further! You haven’t eaten yet: and I’d best go alone.’
‘Ay!’ he said. And he made her an odd, slight salute, turned, and was striding away.
She went on slowly down the dip, watching the heavenly blue of the flowers on the upslope opposite. Slowly, in the soft, full life of the body, she climbed the upslope among the bluebells. They too knew it, the fulness of the beauty of being in the flesh. She could tell, by the way they hung their purple bud-cluster, and starred out their azure bells. There was a hint of, night in them too, and in their bodily blossom, fulness from the night.
She felt still and full and hyacinthine as they were, on the cool stem of flesh. The body! It was a greater mystery and complexity than anything. It was not even physical. It was like the hyacinths, a thing of bloom, the love body. A thing of bloom.
CHAPTER XII
At Wragby, the door was open, and nobody was about. She went to her room in silence. And it was the same.
She did not bathe. She changed into fresh clothes, slowly. But she did not want to disturb the touch upon her flesh. Later, this evening, she would bathe.
She went up to her room, her sitting-room, when the maid tapped. This too was a new arrangement. Coffee was brought up for her on a tray to her own room. Clifford had his in his room. Breakfast had become a slight meal for him. So they did not meet often, till lunch.
There was a letter from Hilda on the tray. ‘Father is going to London this week, so I shall call for you on Thursday week, 7th June, and we will go on at once. I shall probably stay the night with the Coxleys at Retford, and start early in the morning for Wragby, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then if you are ready, we could start about tea-time. There is no need for me to spend an evening at Wragby, with Clifford trying to show how much he dislikes me and how he can ignore my existence. I know he loathes me for taking you away, so the quicker we go, the better. Send your trunk to London, to father, in time for him to give it to his man to bring along. Let me know you are expecting me on the seventh —’
So! In a week’s time she, Connie, would have to be off. So it was! As sure as she did not want to go, she must. She must go. She felt it inevitable: it was her destiny. And her heart clung to the wood at Wragby, to the keeper’s cottage, to the naked man of last night.
Yet she knew she would go. After all, after all, it was but a month. And things would come clear, in her own soul most of all, in the interval. She would go, if only to test her own experience.
For some reason, she put off telling Clifford. He was in a mood that irritated her: a sort of silent overbearing, silently putting people down. It was almost like a game with him. Whoever came near him, he would try, in silence, to make feel small. He had done it in the past with her, and for a long time she had been puzzled by her own feeling of subjection, almost of fear. Till at last she realized that Clifford tried to do it to her, almost deliberately. When he felt she was too uppish, too much herself, he would play the silent trick on her, of silently willing to make her feel small: using his will against her.
She had never been able to decide whether he did it in full consciousness, or whether it was an instinctive retaliation of his wounded egoism. Anyhow the result was the same. And in the past, it had succeeded with her. She would feel a nameless fear, a nameless guilt, a nameless necessity to cringe to some god, perhaps a god of hate. Now, however, she knew what it was. It was Clifford setting his will against her, So she avoided him, and shook off his influence.
He then tried the trick on Mrs Bolton, on Linley, the pit-manager, on the engineer — on anybody who had come near him. Silently putting them down and robbing them of their own life. He would ring for Mrs Bolton: then when she came, ignore be presence entirely.
‘Did you ring, Sir Clifford?’
‘Oh! Did I? Yes! I suppose I did.’
‘Was there anything I could do?’
Then he would look at her, in the eyes, with his cold, devilish look, till she had to turn her face aside.
‘Do you mind seeing if there is a bottle of fountain-pen ink anywhere,’ he said calmly, as if she were at the other end of a telephone, and not in the room at all.
‘I have a bottle of my own in my room. I’ll fetch it,’ she said, flustered.
‘Er —! No thanks! Go upstairs and see if her ladyship has any.’
‘Very good
But Mrs Bolton went out of the room furious. She felt deliberately insulted. ‘I’m hanged if I’ll go up two flights of stairs,’ she said to herself. So she went into her room, and sat there for a few minutes, with two red spots of anger on her cheeks.
Then she took her bottle of ink, tapped at Sir Clifford’s door, entered and set the ink on the table within his reach, turning at once to go.
He picked up the ink-bottle as if it were some marine specimen, and looked at it.
‘Er—’ he said, when she was at the door.
She stopped, turned and said:
‘Yes?’
‘This is her ladyship’s ink, of course?’
The woman stood dumb, for a second. Then she replied:
‘The moment her ladyship wanted it, it would be.’
And the red spots of colour flew brighter in her cheeks. He looked at her with a faint smile of contempt.
‘You are very kind, I’m sure!’ he said, with a sneer.
She still stood motionless at the door.
‘Is there anything else?’ she asked.
‘Nothing thanks!’ he said, in his most courteous voice, but with the most perfect contempt.
And poor Ivy Bolton went round all day, feeling as if she had been caught in some dirty, dishonorable deed, and privately exposed. It was as if she could not get her head erect.
He had another go, at Parkin, when that individual came to report the case of the two poachers, who had been before the magistrate.
‘Good-morning!’ said Clifford, when Parkin saluted. ‘Which of the rooms have you left your dog in?’
‘I’ve tied her up by the back door.’
‘Ah! Well? What is it?’
‘Them two poachers as was ’ad up at Uthwaite yesterday —’
‘What did they get?’
‘They got off.’
Clifford looked at his man in silence, but with queer smiling hate. He hated the fresh red face, that showed so little subservience. For a long time, he said nothing, just fixed the gamekeeper with his light blue-gimlet-sharp eyes, and stared him out of countenance. But Parkin, who was hard on his guard, stared with concentrated attention at a new, futuristic picture which Clifford had hung in his room. He stared with such strange, animal fixity, that Clifford had to glance to see what he was staring at.
Then he said:
‘Who was the magistrate?’
‘Mr Merfin.’
Now Mr Merfin had never forgiven Clifford for a certain snub that young gentleman had given him.
‘You gave evidence?’ Clifford said at last. ‘What did you say?
‘I towd ’em where I catched ’em, an’ what wi’ —’
‘What did you catch them with?’ asked Clifford, with a slight sneering smile.
‘I catched ’em with two rabbits apiece on ’em,’ said Parkin, sharp and hard.
‘And what then?’
‘Then Joe gave evidence—’
‘Towd ’em where you catched ’em, like?’ said Clifford, who could imitate the dialect with disastrous effect.
Parkin glanced at him quickly, to see if he were jesting. But on Clifford’s face was only the faint, subtle sneer.
‘Summat same!’ said Parkin — ‘Anyway, Mr Merfin knowed what he meant,’ he added in perfect good-humour.
‘We’ll give him the credit. Go on!’
‘Then he axed if it wor t’ first time they was ’ad up.’
‘And you said it was the second or third?’
‘No! I said I’d catched ’em, the same fellers, twice afore. An’ they swore as I hadn’t, �
�cause they’d nobbut just come from Ilson, road: which was a lie anyhow. — Anyway Mr Merfin let ’em off with a caution —’
‘Did he tell you you were a bright man —?’
‘No, Sir Clifford. He said I had to do my duty by my employer, like any man in any other employment.’
‘And the court, no doubt, gave you three cheers.’
‘They might ha’ done, only they didn’t,’ said Parkin, with a faint smile. His eyes were very bright.
‘Good-morning!’ said Clifford, with sudden bland abruptness.
Parkin stared at him, and asked quietly, very slowly:
‘Did you mean as I was to go, Sir Clifford?’
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head,’ said Clifford, who had already turned away and was pretending to sort some papers.
‘I give you good-morning, Sir Clifford!’ said Parkin, with a stately sort of slowness. But he added mentally, ‘An’ lucky for you as it wor nobbut th’ nail I hit on th’ ’ead!’ Clifford ignored him entirely, so he left the room, giving a glance at the broad, hulking shoulders of the cripple, leaning forward over the table.
And this time, it was Clifford’s turn to feel small.
Constance, who had heard Flossie yelp, was out on the drive. Parkin saluted as he came up. She saw his bright eyes.
‘What was it?’ she asked, in a low voice.
‘I was only telling Sir Clifford as them two poachers as was ’ad up at Uthwaite yesterday had got off with a caution.’
‘It’s just as well,’ said Constance.
He gave a queer tip of his head, looked into her eyes with a faint yet glittering smile, saluted, and went on.
So that evening Constance told Clifford of Hilda’s letter.
‘Well!’ he said calmly. ‘I suppose you’re going?’
‘I suppose so,’ she replied.
He turned to his book in complete indifference: or with that appearance. Constance knew it meant anger, and resentment. But she went upstairs, and began sorting out her clothes. She had nothing new at all. But she could get something in London and Paris. She went slowly over her wardrobe.
Clifford said nothing for a day or two, neither did she. Then he asked casually:
‘Your sister Hilda comes on Thursday?’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 28
