She clung to him, with a hiss of wonder that was almost awe, terror. He held her close, but he said nothing. He would never say anything. She crept nearer to him, nearer, only to be near to the sensual wonder of him. And out of his utter, incomprehensible stillness, she felt again the slow momentous, surging rise of the phallus again, the other power. And her heart melted out with a kind of awe.
And this time his being within her was all soft and iridescent, purely soft and iridescent, such as no consciousness could seize. Her whole self quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm. She could not know what it was. She could not remember what it had been. Only that it had been more lovely than anything ever could be. Only that. And afterwards she was utterly still, utterly unknowing, she was not aware for how long. And he was still with her, in an unfathomable silence along with her. And of this, they would never speak.
When awareness of the outside began to come back, she clung to his breast, murmuring ‘My love! My love!’ And he held her silently. And she curled on his breast, perfect.
But his silence was fathomless. His hands held her like flowers, so still aid strange.
‘Where are you?’ she whispered to him. ‘Where are you? Speak to me! Say something to me!’
He kissed her softly, murmuring: ‘Ay, my lass!’
But she did not know what he meant, she did not know where he was. In his silence he seemed lost to her.
‘You love me, don’t you?’ she murmured.
‘Ay, tha knows!’ he said.
‘But tell me!’ she pleaded.
‘Ay! Ay! ‘asn’t ter felt it?’ he said dimly, but softly and surely. And she clung close to him, closer. He was so much more peaceful in love than she was, and she wanted him to reassure her.
‘You do love me!’ she whispered, assertive. And his hands stroked her softly, as if she were a flower, without the quiver of desire, but with delicate nearness. And still there haunted her a restless necessity to get a grip on love.
‘Say you’ll always love me!’ she pleaded.
‘Ay!’ he said, abstractedly. And she felt her questions driving him away from her.
‘Mustn’t we get up?’ he said at last.
‘No!’ she said.
But she could feel his consciousness straying, listening to the noises outside.
‘It’ll be nearly dark,’ he said. And she heard the pressure of circumstances in his voice. She kissed him, with a woman’s grief at yielding up her hour.
He rose, and turned up the lantern, then began to pull on his clothes, quickly disappearing inside them. Then he stood there, above her, fastening his breeches and looking down at her with dark, wide-eyes, his face a little flushed and his hair ruffled, curiously warm and still and beautiful in the dim light of the lantern, so beautiful, she would never tell him how beautiful. It made her want to cling fast to him, to hold him, for there was a warm, half-sleepy remoteness in his beauty that made her want to cry out and clutch him, to have him. She would never have him. So she lay on the blanket with curved, soft naked haunches, and he had no idea what she was thinking, but to him too she was beautiful, the soft, marvellous thing he could go into, beyond everything.
‘I love thee that I can go into thee,’ he said.
‘Do you like me?’ she said, her heart beating.
‘It heals it all up, that I can go into thee. I love thee that tha opened to me. I love thee that I came into thee like that.’
He bent down and kissed her soft flank, rubbed his cheek against it, then covered it up.
‘And will you never leave me?’ she said.
‘Dunna ask them things,’ he said.
‘But you do believe I love you?’ she said.
‘Tha loved me just now, wider than iver tha thout tha would. But who knows what’ll ‘appen, once tha starts thinkin’ about it!’
‘No, don’t say those things! — And you don’t really think that I wanted to make use of you, do you?’
‘How?’
‘To have a child — ?’
‘Now anybody can ‘ave any childt i’ th’ world,’ he said, as he sat down fastening on his leggings.
‘Ah no!’ she cried. ‘You don’t mean it?’
‘Eh well!’ he said, looking at her under his brows. ‘This wor t’ best.’
She lay still. He softly opened the door. The sky was dark blue, with crystalline, turquoise rim. He went out, to shut up the hens, speaking softly to his dog. And she lay and wondered at the wonder of life, and of being.
When he came back she was still lying there, glowing like a gipsy. He sat on the stool by her.
‘Tha mun come one naight ter th’ cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?’ he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees.
‘Sholl ter?’ she echoed, teasing.
He smiled. ‘Ay, sholl ter?’ he repeated.
‘Ay!’ she said, imitating the dialect sound.
‘Yi!’ he said.
‘Yi!’ she repeated.
‘An’ slaip wi’ me,’ he said. ‘It needs that. When sholt come?’
‘When sholl I?’ she said.
‘Nay,’ he said, ‘tha canna do’t. When sholt come then?’
‘‘Appen Sunday,’ she said.
‘‘Appen a’ Sunday! Ay!’
He laughed at her quickly.
‘Nay, tha canna,’ he protested.
‘Why canna I?’ she said.
CHAPTER 13
On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood. It was a lovely morning, the pear-blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world in a wonder of white here and there.
It was cruel for Clifford, while the world bloomed, to have to be helped from chair to bath-chair. But he had forgotten, and even seemed to have a certain conceit of himself in his lameness. Connie still suffered, having to lift his inert legs into place. Mrs Bolton did it now, or Field.
She waited for him at the top of the drive, at the edge of the screen of beeches. His chair came puffing along with a sort of valetudinarian slow importance. As he joined his wife he said:
‘Sir Clifford on his roaming steed!’
‘Snorting, at least!’ she laughed.
He stopped and looked round at the facade of the long, low old brown house.
‘Wragby doesn’t wink an eyelid!’ he said. ‘But then why should it! I ride upon the achievements of the mind of man, and that beats a horse.’
‘I suppose it does. And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,’ she said.
‘Or a Rolls-Royce: Plato was an aristocrat!’
‘Quite! No more black horse to thrash and maltreat. Plato never thought we’d go one better than his black steed and his white steed, and have no steeds at all, only an engine!’
‘Only an engine and gas!’ said Clifford. ‘I hope I can have some repairs done to the old place next year. I think I shall have about a thousand to spare for that: but work costs so much!’ he added.
‘Oh, good!’ said Connie. ‘If only there aren’t more strikes!’
‘What would be the use of their striking again! Merely ruin the industry, what’s left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!’
‘Perhaps they don’t mind ruining the industry,’ said Connie.
‘Ah, don’t talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if it can’t keep their pockets quite so flush,’ he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs Bolton.
‘But didn’t you say the other day that you were a conservative-anarchist,’ she asked innocently.
‘And did you understand what I meant?’ he retorted. ‘All I meant is, people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the form of life intact, and the apparatus.’
Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:
‘It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell
on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves.’
‘I don’t think people are eggs,’ he said. ‘Not even angels’ eggs, my dear little evangelist.’
He was in rather high feather this bright morning. The larks were trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent steam. It was almost like old days, before the war. Connie didn’t really want to argue. But then she did not really want to go to the wood with Clifford either. So she walked beside his chair in a certain obstinacy of spirit.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There will be no more strikes, if the thing is properly managed.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because strikes will be made as good as impossible.’
‘But will the men let you?’ she asked.
‘We shan’t ask them. We shall do it while they aren’t looking: for their own good, to save the industry.’
‘For your own good too,’ she said.
‘Naturally! For the good of everybody. But for their good even more than mine. I can live without the pits. They can’t. They’ll starve if there are no pits. I’ve got other provision.’
They looked up the shallow valley at the mine, and beyond it, at the black-lidded houses of Tevershall crawling like some serpent up the hill. From the old brown church the bells were ringing: Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!
‘But will the men let you dictate terms?’ she said.
‘My dear, they will have to: if one does it gently.’
‘But mightn’t there be a mutual understanding?’
‘Absolutely: when they realize that the industry comes before the individual.’
‘But must you own the industry?’ she said.
‘I don’t. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor. It’s the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies. Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us. And universal starvation is no high aim. Even general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly.’
‘But the disparity?’
‘That is fate. Why is the star Jupiter bigger than the star Neptune? You can’t start altering the make-up of things!’
‘But when this envy and jealousy and discontent has once started — ’ she began.
‘Do your best to stop it. Somebody’s got to be boss of the show.’
‘But who is boss of the show?’ she asked.
‘The men who own and run the industries.’
There was a long silence.
‘It seems to me they’re a bad boss,’ she said.
‘Then you suggest what they should do.’
‘They don’t take their boss-ship seriously enough,’ she said.
‘They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,’ he said.
‘That’s thrust upon me. I don’t really want it,’ she blurted out. He stopped the chair and looked at her.
‘Who’s shirking their responsibility now!’ he said. ‘Who is trying to get away now from the responsibility of their own boss-ship, as you call it?’
‘But I don’t want any boss-ship,’ she protested.
‘Ah! But that is funk. You’ve got it: fated to it. And you should live up to it. Who has given the colliers all they have that’s worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health-conditions, their books, their music, everything. Who has given it them? Have colliers given it to colliers? No! All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving. There’s your responsibility.’
Connie listened, and flushed very red.
‘I’d like to give something,’ she said. ‘But I’m not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley sells them to the people, at a good profit. Everything is sold. You don’t give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?’
‘And what must I do?’ he asked, green. ‘Ask them to come and pillage me?’
‘Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?’
‘They built their own Tevershall, that’s part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can’t live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.’
‘But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal-mine.’
‘Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.
‘Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,’ she cried.
‘I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism. You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.’
Which was true. For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, in the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong, yet she couldn’t say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.
‘No wonder the men hate you,’ she said.
‘They don’t!’ he replied. ‘And don’t fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don’t understand, and never could. Don’t thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we’ve made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.’
When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.
Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.
‘And what we need to take up now,’ he said, ‘is whips, not swords. The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.’
‘But can you rule them?’ she asked.
‘I? Oh yes! Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don’t rule with my legs. I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me.’
‘But he wouldn’t be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not,’ she stammered.
‘I don’t care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence. Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him. It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler. Put kings’ and dukes’ children among the masses, and they’ll be little plebeians, mass products. It is the overwhelming pressure of environment.’
‘Then the common people aren’t a race, and the aristocrats aren’t blood,’ she said.
‘No, my child! All that is romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a
question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.’
‘Then there is no common humanity between us all!’
‘Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.’
Connie looked at him with dazed eyes.
‘Won’t you come on?’ she said.
And he started his chair. He had said his say. Now he lapsed into his peculiar and rather vacant apathy, that Connie found so trying. In the wood, anyhow, she was determined not to argue.
In front of them ran the open cleft of the riding, between the hazel walls and the gay grey trees. The chair puffed slowly on, slowly surging into the forget-me-nots that rose up in the drive like milk froth, beyond the hazel shadows. Clifford steered the middle course, where feet passing had kept a channel through the flowers. But Connie, walking behind, had watched the wheels jolt over the wood-ruff and the bugle, and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny. Now they made a wake through the forget-me-nots.
All the flowers were there, the first bluebells in blue pools, like standing water.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 497
