John Thomas and Lady Jane

by D. H. Lawrence

  ‘It’s so different,’ said Connie to Hilda, ‘knowing life, and being it.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Look at those sailors in jerseys: they are alive, and they don’t know it. And people like Clifford know life so well, yet they aren’t really it.’

  Hilda watched the sailors, laughing over a game.

  ‘Yet you marry a Clifford,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I wouldn’t again,’ said Connie.

  ‘You would never marry one of these sailors, no matter how alive he was.’

  ‘Why not !’ said Connie. ‘Parkin is almost like one of them.’

  ‘You haven’t married him,’ said Hilda coldly.

  ‘I want to.’

  Hilda, annoyed, was silent for a time. Then she said:

  ‘I doubt it. I see the attraction of him — or of those sailors. But it doesn’t attract us. We only think it attracts us. We never have one of those men for a lover.’

  ‘Why don’t we?’ said Connie. ‘I’m sure they’d be much nicer than our own sort.’

  ‘They have no meaning for us, when it comes to actual contact,’ said Hilda, in a dull voice.

  ‘Then it’s our own fault,’ said Connie. ‘I’m sure they’re nicer than men like Clifford, or your Everard, or even Duncan Forbes or Tommy Dukes.’

  ‘Yes! But you see, these sailors are all just workmen, under somebody’s authority. And Clifford and Everard and Duncan and Tommy are all in authority themselves. They are all master and these are just hired men. And a woman is always ashamed if she takes a hired man. She must take a master, somebody in authority, she can’t submit to a man who is under another man.’

  Connie received this piece of truth as if it were new to her. Of course, it meant Parkin. He was a hired man. He was not a master among men: not even by birthright nor money-right nor intellectual-right. He was just one-who-must-obey. The thought made her angry.

  ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘the real phallic man doesn’t care. It doesn’t enter there — into the love-activity.’

  ‘Doesn’t it! I should have thought it did!’ said Hilda. If what you call the real phallic man is always an underling and hired worker, then he’ll have to look for different women from us: at least, for wives. We may take him for a time as a lover — But we only marry men who are, in some way or other, men of authority.’

  ‘But!’ said Connie slowly, ‘Parkin is as good a man as father, for example.’

  ‘He would have to take father’s orders, nevertheless, while father was at Wragby. And a woman always loves half-pitifully a man who is a servant or an underling. You have a lot of pity for Parkin in your love for him: and a lot of self-superiority. You feel you could buy him his freedom. — It’s all very well for a short time. He’s got a nice body. But you can’t go down among those who have to be servants, or wage-earners, and who are under all the rest of the bosses. Parkin is far away down below Mr Linley — and Mrs Linley; they’d both order him about, and he’d more or less have to obey. — How could he be your husband? Supposing you heard Mrs Linley giving him orders —’

  Connie had to admit to herself that it was impossible. It produced a great sense of frustration and anger and anarchic confusion in her.

  ‘Yet,’ she said, ‘he is so wonderful! There’s something a bit starry about him.’

  ‘What?’ said Hilda. ‘What is starry?’

  ‘His body! even his penis! You don’t know, Hilda, how strange it is, like a little god. Surely, surely it is more sacred than Clifford’s being a baronet, or father’s being an artist, or that awful Sir Andrew being so stinkingly rich. Surely it really means more —‘

  ‘It may to you, at the moment. But even you’d get over it, and realize that Parkin’s penis doesn’t rule the world, whereas Clifford’s baronetcy and Sir Andrew’s money does, — father’s art, too.

  ‘But Hilda, I don’t care.’

  ‘Yes you do. Everybody does. Every woman does. A woman falls for the ruling man — he can rule in what way he likes, as a saint or an aristocrat or an artist or a brewer with money or even a politician or a journalist — and women will fall for him. Whereas a woman will despise herself for being the wife of a mere servant or a man who only takes orders, and never gives them: “whether his penis is like a little god,” or whether it isn’t.’

  ‘But I’m not like that.’

  ‘Yes you are! If your Parkin, or your phallic man as you call him, asserted himself and made himself a ruler, practically any woman would want him. But it’s the ruling spirit, or the authority, a woman yields to, in a man. If your Parkin was master of anything except just his dog and his penis, he might stand a chance. But as it is, you won’t marry him. Or if you do, it will only be because you have an income, and can still live in your own way, and stay in the ruling class, the class that gives orders, rather than takes them. You couldn’t take orders from anybody—’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Quite! Every reason why you shouldn’t! But Parkin has to take them from Clifford, and from you: and he used to have to take them from the bosses at the pit. If his penis is a little god, I’m afraid it’s a fallen idol, as far as power goes.’

  This made Connie very angry. And yet she could not contradict it. The thought weighed on her all the afternoon, and oppressed her in the evening, when she came to the sea and saw the stars shining above it.

  ‘I don’t care!’ she said stubbornly to Hilda at bed-time. ‘I know the penis is the most godly part of a man.’

  ‘Of a man like Parkin, who has nothing else, maybe! But other men have minds, and creative power, and power to command or control. And then the penis is not the most sacred part of the man.’

  ‘Then it should be!’ said Connie. ‘I know it is the penis which connects us with the stars and the sea and everything. It is the penis which touches the planets, and makes us feel their special light. I know it. I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was the penis gave it me.’

  ‘Well!’ said Hilda. ‘I suppose you’re in love, that’s all. It’s a pity your Parkin doesn’t manage to make himself a captain of some sort. As it is, the penis is like the grass-that withereth, and the place thereof shall know it no more.’

  With this final shot, the sisters parted. Connie took the early morning boat over to Newhaven, and Hilda had to wait till the night boat, because of the car.

  There was a fog on the Channel, and the boat thumped slowly forwards in the nothingness of yellow-white mist, bellowing and hooting. Everybody was nervous, in a state of tension. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to do but to sit still and breathe vapour. Connie sat inert, and the horn dragged out, the engines sometimes went a little faster, sometimes seemed to stop altogether. So they edged their way through the nothingness of things, as if it were the end of things. Connie felt that if it were, she wouldn’t greatly care. There was a great dismalness everywhere.

  They landed at last, however, and Connie wired to Clifford, before getting into the train. In London she crossed straight to St Pancras, and got a late afternoon train. The fog did not affect the land, but the day was grey. She watched the familiar landscape go by.

  At Uthwaite she looked out, to see if Field were on the platform. And the first thing she saw, so that her heart jumped almost out of her breast, was Clifford, standing on crutches leaning back against an iron pillar. He saw her at once, and made a sharp little salute. How well he looked, ruddy and alert! But the sight of him on crutches was a great shock.

  The train stopped, Field came running to the door, she got out and went towards her husband. But she could hardly bear his light-blue, keen, abstract eyes staring at her face. They seemed almost more electric than human.

  ‘Why Clifford!’ she said, in a breathless voice.

  He leaned forward slightly a
nd kissed her forehead.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, watching her with those keen, cold eyes.

  ‘Perfectly well!’ she said. ‘But it’s you! How wonderful that you are here! Can you really walk? It’s a miracle!’

  He laid his hand on her shoulder, the crutch under his armpit.

  ‘I can’t exactly walk,’ he said, ‘but I can go, after a fashion.’

  How strange his hand on her shoulder! She wanted to crouch and shrink away from under it. How strange, his naked face near hers! She had forgotten him, physically, while she was away, and his actuality came as a shock to her. It frightened her too.

  He also realised with a sudden change of temperature, what strangers, alien to one another, he and she were. They had come apart.

  ‘But how did you learn?’ she asked in wonder. ‘How did you begin?’ Her eyes, however, avoided his face.

  ‘Mrs Bolton put me up to it! She’s a determined woman, in her own quiet way. I think she wanted to give you a surprise.’

  ‘I must say, she has done! It’s perfectly wonderful! And aren’t you a bit nervous?’ she asked, solicitously. But in her mind she was thinking: ‘That’s it! He’s gone completely into Mrs Bolton’s hands. That’s why he seems so strange!’ And thinking this, she let her old, habitual effusion of intimacy towards Clifford ford sink down and die out. He was Mrs Bolton’s man! Very good! Then she herself need not trouble.

  She was silent, having nothing to say to him. He was looking round for his man Field. Connie saw that square, stout, powerful young man bustling up the platform towards them, watching them, and waiting to salute.

  ‘Why Field!’ said Connie. ‘How do you do? All right? Isn’t Sir Clifford too wonderful!’

  ‘Was yer surprised, my lady?’ said Field, smiling a broad smile. Yet his rather small, light-blue eyes were quite keen and subtle.

  ‘Amazed!’ said Connie. ‘And a bit scared! Is it really safe, really?’

  ‘Oh ay! We get on fine!’ said Field. Then he added to Sir Clifford, in that queer tone of respectful distance and benevolent protection, which Clifford used to resent: ‘Are you ready, then? Shall we be goin’? Th’ bags is in.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Clifford.

  Field took his master round the waist, and carefully held him balanced, while Clifford took the first leap. There was a queer look in Clifford’s face, like some weird bird making one of its flights, a look of excitement tinged with fear and exaltation.

  Then with a strange swift plunge of his crutches, he was off, and poling himself with long, anxious strides of his crutches along the platform, his body swinging huge and loose in weird pendulum-strokes, the inert legs coming to earth and holding long enough for another strange wing-sweep of the crutches, as on he went, with a sort of wildness, like a wounded huge bird flapping along. Everybody made way, and Field trotted at his side, watching him sideways with that alert, almost maternal watchfulness of a male nurse. Field too looked an odd figure squat and broad and very active, trotting there absorbed in Clifford’s motion, his fat, fresh-coloured face turned in steady attention, the light-blue eyes with colourless lashes looking as keen as a young pig’s. Queer he was and of some old, earth-bound aboriginal race.

  Constance followed breathless. She was frightened, and a bit awe-struck. Life seemed so weird.

  She emerged from the station in time to see Clifford with his hands on the side of the open car, the crutches fallen to ground, and Field lifting his master bodily into the automobile, when Clifford let himself subside carefully. into the seat. Then Field picked up the crutches and placed them by Clifford’s side. Such a quick, squat’ young man, with such amazing strength in his fat body. He turned with perspiring face and beaming smile to Constance as she approached, holding the door for her.

  ‘We’ve managed it then!’ he said, with that broad quick smile of his, speaking with the dialect twang.

  ‘I think it’s marvellous!’ she said.

  ‘Do you! Sir Clifford’s such a clever balancer, he times himself that well,’ said the chauffeur, in a low, confidential sort of voice. He was infinitely proud of the new achievement, as if it were he who was lame. And Connie was amazed at the power of gentleness there was in the broad, fat body, and at the utter willingness to serve.

  ‘Well!’ said Clifford, looking at her benignly as the car moved off. ‘You look blooming. Is it very hard to have to come back to these regions?’

  ‘Not at all!’ she said, shrinking still, with an odd dread from his physical nearness. ‘I was quite ready to come home.’

  ‘Ah! You don’t find the district too ugly, then?’

  ‘It is uglier than I thought,’ she said, looking round at the great iron-works and the rows of workmen’s dwellings. It is ugly. And it is unnatural. But for all that, I don’t mind coming back. It is — I don’t know how to put it — part of one’s destiny.’

  ‘You feel that, do you?’ he said.

  ‘And one gets fearfully fed up with trying to enjoy oneself. I begin to loathe what they call being happy and enjoying oneself. I prefer infinitely to be humdrum,’ she said.

  ‘Ah! — Well, you have ample opportunity to be humdrum at Wragby!’ he said, in his well-bred, self-assured voice.

  ‘But you are the wonderful one,’ she said, looking at him, yet shrinking away from him. ‘Tell me how you did it.’

  ‘What? Going on crutches? I tell you, I yielded to Mrs Bolton’s urging: and she declared how pleased you would be. So there is the circle, as usual.’

  ‘But how did you do it? Where did you first try?’

  ‘Where? Oh, in the hall. Mrs Bolton got the crutches, and we got in Field.’

  ‘But didn’t you feel awfully scared, the first time?’

  ‘I did, rather. It was like a second infancy. It made me realise what a lot of courage must lie behind a new evolutionary stride.— But I soon learned to trust to Field.’

  ‘He is amazingly good,’ said Connie.

  ‘He really is,’ Clifford admitted.

  The car was running on through the well-known landscape, in the grey, cool evening of July. It all seemed strange to Connie. She felt herself such a stranger. She looked at it all as if from a far distance. It was unreal. Everything was unreal, Clifford, the dull-coloured hills, the pits, the rows of dwellings, the low grey, darkening sky, the weird, ghoulish country, it was all unreal. And the very thought of Parkin was unreal.

  In spite of herself, the sun and the old clarity of southern Europe were reality to her, and once more, the grey, weird ghoulishness of this middle of England seemed unbelievable as if it were a phantom of the world, and everything that happened there were phantasmal.

  Mrs Bolton was on the steps at Wragby, almost like a hostess welcoming Connie home. Her long, pale cheeks were flushed with red spots of excitement, her eyes were flashing.

  ‘Welcome home, my lady, welcome home!’ she cried, almost hysterical.

  And Wragby lay there sombre and gloomy, spread out in the twilight, the great trees in front massive in full foliage.

  It was so queer to sit tête-à-tête with Clifford again, in the dining-room with the dark Dutch pictures. The sunlessness! This was what entered Connie’s soul with such a shock: the eternal sunlessness of it all! From the beginning of time it had been in shadow, nearly always in shadow. It was a land that the great globe tilted away from the sun, thrusting it into an almost perpetual twilight. And in the twilight it had grown great, and learned weird and potent secrets. And now the world had grown weary of it. The secrets must be carried into the sun, the world of twilight must die. It was passing into real ghoulishness and the after-death, this realm of twilight and the mystery of iron, this disembowelled earth of coal and steel and steam, and the glare of red fire and of shadow. It was becoming a region of dread dreams.

  The next world, the electric world, would be short and sharp, and would lead back into the sun again. Back into the sun!

  She sat like a strange bird from the sun, in Clifford’s p
arlour, where the red fire glowed. And the red fire of coal made her feel uneasy, frightened her a little as it frightens wild animals.

  ‘Are you really at all glad to be back?’ Clifford asked her again, as he sat in his chair with his glass of liqueur.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, looking at him evasively. ‘I wanted to come back. I’d have come sooner if I could.’

  ‘That’s good hearing,’ he said.

  Nevertheless, he felt puzzled, and a little thrown out of gear.

  ‘But I hope you had a good time?’ he said.

  ‘Yes! Very! — But it felt like a holiday, and one gets impatient of a holiday feeling.’

  ‘I suppose one does! Though a holiday from oneself might be a very pleasant change. For me at least. — But I think we might go away together for a little spell one day. — What do you think?’ He looked at her uneasily.

  ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Other men travel who have been wounded! You are so healthy! Of course you could go anywhere.’

  ‘Another year, we’ll think of it,’ he said.

  He was excited, and he kept her up a long time, talking, talking. He was queer, so interested in everything, drawing everything out of her. The thought of the south suddenly seemed to have cast a spell on him too. He could see the sun in her. And it seemed to him like new life. And he thought it meant love, some other kind of irresponsible passion, all mixed with sunshine and roses. An elation, and a sense of illusion came over him. He drew her forth, her feelings, her impressions — and she told him about all the people, and the natives of the country, and the few Basques she had met, and the French — the feeling of other races, nearer the sun. And it had for him the glamour of illusion. He knew, in a sense, that it was all illusion: that passion and sunshine and roses and sea-surf were an illusion one had at a distance, that the reality was quite different. Yet the illusion held him. He was in the spell of unreality. And she talked and talked as if her suppressed, pent-up life were streaming out of her in talk. All the time, she hated doing it. Yet she went on till past midnight. And then the flow choked.