Tevershall was the home village for Wragby Hall, but both Clifford and Constance avoided it completely. It was a village that catered absolutely for the miners and consisted of miners: and it did not like the Chatterleys. The only thing to do was to leave it alone. So the inmates of the hall left it alone, scarcely setting foot in the two straggling miles of ugliness. And yet, thought Constance, in one of those dwellings he was brought up, and his old mother lives in one of them with his child! And he belongs there.
She sighed. It was the hopeless, dismal ugliness that so depressed her. She had been used to Sussex, and a lovely old house in a fold of the downs. She could never get used to this awful colliery region of the north Midlands. And yet she liked it too: it gave her a certain feeling of blind virility, a certain blind, pathetic forcefulness of life. If only it could realise how ugly it was and change a bit.
The car mounted the hill and ran on towards Stacks Gate. Away to the left, hanging over the rolling country, she could see the shadow of Bolsover Castle, powerful-looking. But beyond and below it was a pinkish plastering of newish dwellings, and plumes of black smoke, plumes of white steam rose in the damp April air from the collieries.
A great new hotel, red and gilt and splendid, the Coningsby Hotel, stood at the road-crossing. Further on a few yards, was Stacks Gate itself, fourteen rows of new, spick and span pink dwellings, set down as it were by hazard in the dismayed fields. And beyond them, the big new colliery, sending up huge feathers of steam, a rich colliery with all the modern contrivances for by-products. Here, indeed, there was not a chapel, not a church, not even any real shop. Only the great proud colliery like a noble activity of the devil, at one end, and the huge hotel at the other. The hotel was in fact merely a miner’s pub, but it had all the modern adaptations for by-products, just like the colliery.
And the people had filled in; even since Constance had been at Wragby Stacks Gate had been created, and the human element had flowed into it out of nowhere, even in her few short years of married life.
The car ran to a high place again, and away in the distance Constance saw the looming of the great Elizabethan house, Hardwick, noble above its great park. But already they were turning, dipping between old, blackish-red miners’ cottages that lined the road and led down to the old town of Uthwaite, whose twisted spire pricked up in the valley, beyond great ‘works’, collieries and foundries.
Uthwaite was a little knot of an old, old country town crouching in a valley below the big, open, rolling country where the castles and great houses had once dominated like lions. Now, however, a tangle of railway lines ran into the town nakedly, and everywhere the collieries and foundries and ‘works’ steamed and smoked, obscuring the little town. Around its old crooked streets hordes of oldish, blackish-red miners’ dwellings crowded, lining the big new highroads. And in the wide region where the castles and the stately homes hung couchant, smoke waved against steam, and patch after patch showed the new mining settlements upon the repeated slopes of the open country. One meaning blotted out another, and though the great houses still loomed, the stately homes of England, they were mostly empty, just shells. The handsome old Georgian hall at Fritchley was just being pulled down. It was too big, like a great handsome derelict.
Constance felt that the old world was doomed. Even Wragby, she felt, was doomed, The great landowners when they opened the collieries doomed their own ancestral halls. One thing pushes out another.
For a long time Constance had rebelled against this awful ugly Midlands and northern world. It was unbearable. Yet even in her short time she had seen it grow. Now Fritchley Hall was being broken up, and Shipley was to come down next year: Shipley, such a pleasant 1760 stucco house, with its suave round bays and its beautiful rooms panelled and delicately painted! Even King Edward had liked it, liked to stay there, because it had such an atmosphere. And Squire Manby, as the people called him, how he had loved his home and the great, proud beeches that stood apart around it!
The squire died: his heirs inherited the wealth that had come from the mines. But the collieries were almost on the doorstep. The park had a right of way through it, and gangs of colliers lounged and sauntered by the lake, looking out of work. The old, proud squire did not mind. ‘The colliers have made my income,’ he would say. ‘They are as ornamental to the park as deer.’ He said this to King Edward.
‘I agree with you,’ said the king. ‘If there were coal under the lawn at Sandringham I would open a mine there and think it fine landscape gardening.’
But that was the last generation: even the last but one.
Now at Shipley the grand beeches were already gone, and the park looked queer and bald. The hall was to be broken up. Rows of dwellings would be erected. The present Manbys had a house in town, a lodge in Scotland, and a villa near Nice. They detested Shipley.
Constance knew it all. She knew the Manbys, she knew all the county. Everybody had very carefully called, very kindly and warmly offered her — what? Not friendship exactly. Acquaintance! The Duke and Duchess of Coningsby, the chief family in the county, were really attentive. Poor Clifford! That was it! ‘That poor young Sir Clifford Chatterley!’ Oh but people were kind, when they were sorry for you.
Kind! Was it kindness? She thought of Parkin and the soft dilation of passion in his eyes, with those quick, quivering lights. That peculiar naked softness of passion that flashed with such strange lightnings. Kindness? She began to feel that many of the great old words had lost their meaning, like flowers that have withered yet leave the husks standing. Kindness? — ‘Oh yes, people make a point of being kind to Constance and me.’ This was what Clifford said to Lady Eva. But what did it mean? — make a point of being kind?
Constance brushed her thoughts away, for the car had stopped at the back of the old church at Uthwaite, in the curving narrow street. She got down to the pavement. The policeman saluted and held up the traffic for her. Here, at least, in the old core of this town she was my lady! She crossed the road to the old druggist’s shop.
She spent some time, shopping and chatting a little. Even she had a cup of tea in the clean, awkward little tea-shop. It was nice to be on one’s own again, even for an hour. Like being in London again, going to the Academy School of Drawing and popping into tea-shops and restaurants.
As she went home in the car, the rain started again. She looked out of the windows. No! She would not go and see Parkin tonight. Not tonight! — But thinking of him and the beauty she had seen in him, in his body, in his naked, dilated passion; some quick of loveliness apart from his uncouthness and commonness, something tender and fragile, yet really him, and beautiful as an open crocus flower; thinking of this, a tenderness came over her, a wistfulness, for this disfigured countryside, and the disfigured, strange, almost wraithlike populace. Perhaps there was a wild, tender quirk of passion in many of them, something generous and unsheathed. Yet at the same time, they were so crude, so limited, so inflexibly ugly.
‘If one could have a sense of life-beauty with them,’ she said to herself, thinking of Parkin: ‘The beauty of a live thing! If one could waken them to that! Not art and aesthetics, which somehow is always snobbery! Look! He is beautiful. Even his face when it suddenly softens and goes fresh like a flower! I shall tell him so. I shall tell him. They are so terribly cut off from their own beauty, these people. —And yet I feel they’ve got it, somewhere: even when they look so ugly. But they’ve got something tender in them that might blossom out in generations into a lovely life. It only needs developing. — Oh, how wrong our education is! How wicked we are to them, really!’
‘I had tea already in Uthwaite,’ she said to Clifford.
‘Did you, dear? In Miss Bentley’s tea-shop? And how was the assiduous Miss Bentley?’
‘Just the same,’ she said.
Miss Bentley was an old maid, dark and with a rather large nose, who served her teas with a careful intensity with which one might administer a sacrament.
‘It’s very fine,’ said Cliffor
d, ‘mashing the tea with as much soul as dear Miss Bentley puts into it. But that Ceylon tea is hardly worth it. She should have been a ministrant in some temple of virginity. Did she ask after me?’
‘Oh yes!’ And Constance imitated Miss Bentley’s hushed murmur, ‘May I ask how Sir Clifford is, my lady?’
Clifford laughed. ‘Did you tell her I was blooming?’
‘Yes! I said you were wonderfully well. And if she came to Tevershall she was to come up to Wragby to see you.’
‘The deuce you did! What a pretty fool I should look, with Miss Bentley almost kissing my hand! I know she would if she dared. —Well, and what did she say to that?’
‘She blushed. Yes, she blushed and lowered her eyes for a moment. She looked quite a young thing. She must have been pretty too. And then she said she didn’t think she would dare to presume.’
‘Dare to presume!’ he laughed. ‘She is an absurd old thing. Do you think she has a special feeling about me?’
‘I think she has: you are the preux chevalier of her imagination.’
‘I suppose that kind of thing is what made preux chevalier;’ he said.
‘Of course! The men lived up to it.’
‘Did they, I wonder! At least it was a pretty bluff.’
They had a quiet happy evening together. It was raining and very dark out of doors. She thought of the other man. Then, when lamps were lit, didn’t think of him any more.
‘Look here, Con!’ said Clifford as he filled his pipe after coffee. ‘Do you really care a bean whether you’re immortal or not?’
She looked up at him. He was in good form, and he looked well.
‘It’s not one of my problems, I think,’ she said.
‘Ha!’ he drawled. ‘No, I don’t believe it is. — I fancy it is one of mine. Do you mean you really don’t care whether you’re immortal or whether you aren’t?’
‘I don’t know quite what sort of immortality you are thinking of.’
‘Oh! — Yes you do! — Whether your soul, or your self, or your essential you, call it what you like, will reach a state where it is — well — perfect, if you like. And being perfect, it has a life eternal of its own.’
She put her sewing aside to attend to him seriously.
‘Well!’ she hesitated. ‘I don’t really feel very interested in a sort of long-drawn-out immortality, I must confess.’
‘But when you come to die? — And we all must.’
‘I know. But when I come to die —’ she frowned. ‘I think I shall have enough faith — to — to be glad — and just to leave it to the Lord.’
‘Ah! So you don’t really care what becomes of you afterwards?’
‘Not very much. Whatever it is brought me into being will carry me out again in its arms, as it were. A baby before it’s born knows it will be born and leaves it at that. But it doesn’t even know what being born is, or consists in, or anything. And the same with me about dying. I know I’ll die and be carried away. Where, how, when, why, I’ve no idea, and I don’t know how to make any idea of it. So I leave it as an unborn baby leaves it.’
‘Plato’s ideas, and heaven, and those things, mean nothing to you?’
‘Pictures! They make pictures. But they’re like a picture gallery. I’m an onlooker, I’m not in the picture. If I try to put myself into the picture, it’s only a strain on me. — No! With heaven and Plato’s ideas and all those things, I feel as I do in the National Gallery, or in the Uffizi. I’m looking at something rather lovely, or very lovely, but the world is outside, and my life is in the world.’
He puffed at his pipe.
‘Do you mean to say,’ he cried, ‘that nothing means any more to you than anything else? — Than Miss Bentley, for example?’
‘Miss Bentley fussing about a butter-knife to the butter doesn’t interest me. But when she blushed and looked like a shy girl for a minute — that interests me as much as Plato or as much as Titian.’
‘Does it really?’ he asked in amazement. ‘Why?’
There was a silence. She did not know what to say. But she felt she had to have something out with Clifford: establish her own sort of immortality, perhaps; not always be commandeered by his.
‘Immortality can’t be anything we know. It can only be something we feel,’ she said.
‘And we can’t feel it because it doesn’t happen to us till we’re dead!’ he said.
‘Why?’ — she paused, dazed. ‘I think that’s silly,’ she said. ‘If I don’t feel I’m immortal now what’s the good of fussing about it later on? The first time I ever really felt a Titian picture — I used to think his nude women silly and boring — but when I one day suddenly felt in all my body the soft glowing loveliness, loveliness of the flesh — then I said to myself, quite distinct and alone — “that is the immortality of the flesh.”’
‘Titian’s art, you mean,’ he said.
‘No! I don’t. Titian’s art only revealed to me what I’ve been able to see ever since in people: the immortality of the flesh. I saw it in Miss Bentley when she blushed.’
‘But not when she was bringing a butter-knife?’
‘No.’
‘Why not then?’
‘Because she was fussing.’
‘Well, but —!’ he laughed. ‘Her flesh was the same.’
‘No!’ she said. ‘It changes.’
‘Do you ever see the immortality of the flesh in me?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘When, for instance? Now?’
‘No, not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘You look tough.’
‘Only when I look tender, then? — Not when I look tough?’ he mocked.
‘When there is a certain tenderness on you, and you look as if you didn’t turn the wind, if you know what I mean.’
‘And when do I look like that?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes when you are a bit sad, and you’re not thinking. Or when you’re feeling rather pleased because you know you are better. Or when you’re suddenly really angry.’
He was silent for a long time. Then he said bitterly: ‘When I look at my dead legs I don’t see much immortality of the flesh, I assure you.’
There was almost a cynicism in his tone, something that frightened her. And a voice inside her warned her: ‘Don’t go any further.’ She had a sudden dread of him, as of something perhaps fiendish.
‘Clifford,’ she said suddenly, looking up at him. ‘You know I am fond of you. And I want always to be fond of you. Never mind what has happened to your legs. You are you.’
‘I am I!’ he repeated. ‘I am I! And when I am out of the body, perhaps I shall be a real thing. Till then I’m not.’
‘Yes you are! Think what a great part of life you are, even to me!’
‘And what I’m not, even to you,’ he said.
‘Never mind that,’ she said.
‘I mind it,’ he said. ‘Titian’s women! The immortality of the flesh! Do you think I don’t know what you mean, even if you don’t know yourself? — I hope you’ll find a man to love you and give you babies —the immortality of the flesh you’re after.’
‘Would you mind if I had a child, Clifford?’
He looked up at her suddenly.
‘If you had whose child?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Would you mind if I had a child by a man?’
‘Couldn’t you promise it would be by the Holy Ghost?’ he said satirically.
‘Perhaps!’ she murmured. ‘The Holy Ghost!’ There was a pause.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re going to have a child?’
‘No!’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’
‘Not yet! How not yet?’
‘Would you mind if I did have a child?’ she repeated.
‘Whose child, I ask.’
‘But need you ask? Isn’t it the Holy Ghost, if one looks at it that way?’
‘It’s no good my looking at it that way. All I see is some man or other who probably
was never in the war and so —’
There was a pause.
‘But why need you ask which man?’ she said softly.
‘Haven’t I the right?’
‘Have you?’
There was another dead pause.
‘No by God!’ he said suddenly. ‘Probably I haven’t. Probably I’ve no right to a wife at all: a wife in name and appearance. No, I’ve no right. I’ve no right to you. You can go to what man you like.’
‘No but listen, Clifford! I love you. You’ve taught me so...
(Pages 87—90 of the original manuscript missing)
‘I shall go to Nottingham this afternoon, to the dentist,’ she said. ‘I suspect one of my teeth.’
‘Will you?’ he replied in a peculiar tone.
A dull red colour came into her cheek. He was pretending to let her know by his tone that all kinds of things might lie behind this visit to the dentist.
‘I got an appointment for three o’clock,’ she said, ‘so I shall have to be off.’
‘You’ll be home for dinner?’
‘Oh yes!’
‘Oh! You will!’
His pretended surprise was an insult. The colour again came to her cheek. But she departed.
She was growing angry herself. She had tried to be simple with him and take him at his word. And, it seemed, she had just stirred a nest of vipers. She sat in the car, rather stiff and aware of nothing. It was almost a shock to her when the chauffeur opened the door and asked her where she would care to go. She was in town, in the market place. The hour and a half had gone by without her knowing, she had been so tense and involved.
She saw her dentist, drank tea, made a few purchases, and set off home. She was amazed at the hard cold anger that filled her at the thought of Clifford. What a subtle, cruel tyranny he had exerted over her all the time! He had absorbed her life and had sought to absorb her will, her very thoughts were never to be free of him. How cold he was, really! What a cold determination there was in him, coldly to subjugate her! Yes, a subtle, cold determination to have her subjugated. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of it even himself. Perhaps it was instinct, cold and serpentlike: to have her insidiously mastered.
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 6
