He did not reply at once. He had to think it out.
‘No, I’m not sorry, so to speak. Eh no! I should like to go on an’ let rip. It’s not that. But what do you think of me? You look down on me.’
‘No!’ she said. ‘I’m grateful to you.’
‘Ay!’ he retorted. ‘’Appen so! An’ for the times I’ve had wi’ you, I am. It’s been extra. Oh ay! But not thinkin’ o’ that. — Why, yer don’t think anything of me, how could you!’
She was puzzled what to say. Already he had a grievance.
‘Well—’ she said, ‘If you don’t want me —’
He turned and looked at her, smiling almost frighteningly.
‘You come when you like, an’ you go when you like,’ he said, ‘an’ you take no count of me. But what about me, when I wait and watch across th’ park, an’ you never come? An’ I say to myself: “She wants none o’ thee tonight, lad! Go whoam an’ hang thy gun up!” — Ay, I’ll wait! Yi, an’ I’ll go home, an’ wait again th’ next day. But I know right enough. You think nothing of me. You look down on me. Only you enjoy a bit o’ cunt wi’ me. But you look down on me, cunt an’ all.’
How strange he was! More alien than a foreigner, as if he belonged to a bygone race of men! What language was he speaking?
‘Listen!’ she said. ‘And don’t be unjust. Listen! I love you. Just the woman I am, I love you, and I want to sleep with you in your cottage. I want you to tell me my body is beautiful to you. I want to be your wife, really. — But can’t you understand, can’t you see, there’s Clifford. I can’t leave him in the lurch! He understands that I need you. Can’t you understand that I need him?’
He looked at her with a peculiar glare.
‘What if you told him you’d been wi’ Oliver Parkin, th’ gamekeeper, carryin’ on wi’ him? What would he say?’
‘I don’t know. I shall never tell him in any case.’
‘I bet you won’t. No, an’ I’s warrant you won’t! Eh!’
She sank into profound dejection. She could feel the mockery, the scepticism, the jeering in the fellow’s voice. The radical hostility in him, and the contempt he felt for the sex relation with her! Because he wasn’t her class equal he felt a contempt for his very love or passion, whatever it was, that he felt for her.
‘Well!’ she said at last, rising slowly, and turning to the door. ‘We’d better say goodbye! I am grateful to you for what you’ve given me. I am! You’ve been good to me. — But we’d better say goodbye! — And forget it. I’ll just be as I was before — before this spring.’
He threw back his shoulders with a sudden heave.
‘Eh!’ he said. ‘Don’t say as I’ve been good to you. You’ve gen me more than I’ve gave you.’
He looked into her eyes, that were blue and miserable and heavy with reproach, and his face twisted with passion as if he were going to cry. It had suddenly come over him again, the blind, overwhelming desire to touch her, to lay his hands on her body.
She saw his hands lift involuntarily towards her.
‘No!’ she said, shrinking away. ‘No! You hate me really. I must go. I mustn’t come any more.’
She opened the door wide and looked at the silvery evening with bluebells rich blue under the twilight of boughs. And as she hesitated, wondering at the uncanny beauty that was out there, he put his arm round her waist.
‘Wait a bit!’ he whispered. ‘Dunna go!’
His powerful hand was on her, pressing into the softness of her body.
‘I must go,’ she said, trying to writhe away.
‘Hark!’ he said. ‘Hark!’ And he caught her in both his arms. ‘Hark! Dunna go! Dunna go! Ah dunna want thee ter go! Dunna go an’ leave me for good! Say tha’lt come back. Say tha’lt allers come back — here i’ th’ wood. Say I s’ll allers ha’e thee here i’ th’ wood, for allers! Say summat as’ll keep! Say as summat’ll keep —summat.’
‘What shall I say?’ she murmured.
‘As tha’ll — tha’ll niver break off — say as tha’ll niver break it off, atween us!’
‘What’s between us I’ll never break off,’ she said. He drew back, looking at her doubtfully.
‘Never!’ she repeated.
He let her go, suddenly, and turned to the work-bench, taking up a hammer and some nails.
‘Let’s nail it in,’ he said, taking her by the arm and leading her out into the lovely twilight that was blue with hyacinths and pale with new leaves. He took her across to a big oak tree that spread its budding boughs over the clearing.
‘Shall yer drive yer nail inter th’ oak tree wi’ mine, for good an’ a’?’ he asked her.
‘Yes!’ she said uneasily.
He took a large nail and with a few heavy blows drove it deep into the trunk of the tree. Then he gave another nail to her.
‘Nail it in aside of mine,’ he said.
She drove in her nail close beside his, and he put the hammer in his pocket.
‘Tha’s done it,’ he said.
‘Yes!’ she replied. ‘But I’ve got to go now.’
‘Shall yer come soon again?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘An’ shall yer stop a night i’ the cottage wi’ me?’
She paused before she replied:
‘Soon I will. We’ll arrange, shall we?’
‘Shall yer though?’
He watched her as she turned to go.
‘Don’t come with me,’ she said, meeting his eyes. He said nothing but stood still, watching her go. There was a watchful, unyielding look in those red-brown eyes of his, which made her know she would not have everything her own way, even here.
The evening was very lovely, the after-glow of sunset clearer almost than the sun among the knotted twigs of the oaks overhead. On the riding tall forget-me-nots were myriad tiny stars in a Milky Way, fluffing always up. She hurried past them, feeling that they were laughing at her: each its own tiny speck of a laugh. Because she would be late for dinner. Late for dinner! Late for dinner! called the wild birds.
Clifford had come to the top of the steps in his wheel-chair, and sat there watching the west. It was a brilliant May evening, full of the wild, uncanny disturbance of an English spring.
She waved her hand quickly to him when she saw him, and he waved back. She pulled off her hat as she came up the steps. Her hair was wild, her face soft, her eyes large and dilated.
‘The wood is so lovely!’ she said. ‘Why must one always hurry home?’
‘Did you feel you had to hurry home?’ he said.
She paused and looked into his face, and her heart smote her.
‘Only because it was lovely,’ she said. ‘I wanted to come home as soon as the sun went. But then I was rather far. — Why didn’t you come and meet me?’
‘I!’ he said. ‘Only a real lover should come to meet you on an evening like this.’
She put her hand quickly on his hand that lay on the wheel of the chair.
‘No, I was thinking of you,’ she said.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he said. ‘You are like a flower: and rather like a dryad, but without any sharpness. I wish I had met you on my feet in the wood. Did you feel it a twilight wasted?’
‘I? Why? No, it was lovely: a world to myself! Except I spoke a few words to Parkin.’
‘Did he intrude on your nymph’s career?’
‘No, he was only there. — Aren’t you hungry? I am. Shall I just wash my hands and come to dinner as I am?’
‘Do, darling! —’ He caught her hand suddenly. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked in a low voice.
She was arrested at once.
‘I — I never thought about it,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because you look so beautiful,’ he said, still in a low tone, secretly. ‘You look so adorable. I couldn’t bear it if you were unhappy.’
She bent and kissed him quickly on the brow.
‘My love!’ she said to him, tender as a mother.
‘Yes!’
he said. ‘Perhaps it had better have swept me away altogether. I feel like the Artful Dodger who has dodged death and wishes now he hadn’t.’
‘Oh don’t!’ she said. And she squeezed his hand.
‘I want to cry and howl,’ he said pathetically.
She stopped again and kissed him.
‘You shall cry and howl if you wish,’ she said very softly. ‘I will hold your head against me. You cry if you wish, my dear, my poor dear!’
‘There!’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m all right again. It’s May — for oh! it is not always May! — Alas no! It’s often must! — Wash your hands, darling, and I’ll go in.’ He began to wheel his chair across the hall with his hands. At dinner he was quite gay. But afterwards in his room with her he was sad again.
‘I honestly think I should have died,’ he said. ‘They should have let me die.’
‘Clifford! don’t!’ she said, coming over and holding his head against her body. ‘But why, dear? Because something is lost it hadn’t better be all lost, had it?’
He felt the soft, slow, healthy breathing of her warm body against which she pressed his face.
‘Would you mind, truly, darling, if I were safely across the Styx?’ he asked.
‘Why ask such things?’ she said, pressing his head closer into her. ‘You know how glad I am that you like life.’
‘I ask such things,’ he said, ‘because there’s no reason for me to live if nobody else wants me to live. And I felt, when I saw the sun set, and you didn’t come, that you’d be better off if I were dead, and perhaps you knew it.’
She slackened her hold on his head.
‘That’s cruel of you, Clifford,’ she said, in a low, serious voice. ‘I shouldn’t be better off if you were dead. I should be worse off. I don’t want you to die. I need you in my life. — And still for all that, it’s cruel to make me responsible for your living. You want to live yourself? You’ve got a great desire to live, haven’t you?’
‘Oh darling!’ he replied. ‘I felt such an agony of uselessness this evening while all the birds in the world whistled their good male music. I felt an agony: useless! useless! useless! only an obstruction to life!’
She looked at him. His blue eyes were wide and fixed. He was letting off his agony on her.
‘But Clifford!’ She sat down and slowly began to cry. Once she had begun, she sobbed blindly, and he could not soothe her. But curiously enough, underneath it all she was rather happy.
‘Darling! My own darling!’ he repeated. ‘I am a brute! I am an undeserving brute and a lamentable Hamletising swine. Darling! If only you’d kick me! Or smack my face! for I deserve it. — But don’t, my dear girl, don’t cry, for I can’t bear it. You’re far, far, far too good to me. Con, my darling Con, please, please don’t cry. For my miserable sake, once more, don’t cry, darling! Don’t, for my selfish miserable sake! — I am not worthy of you, my poor girl, genuinely I’m not.’
But she wept in a burst flood of distress. And underneath she was rather happy. She wept in her old and very sincere grief for Clifford. And underneath she was rather happy because she had knocked her nail in beside the other man’s nail and had promised to go to his cottage to spend a night with him.
The grief, too, seemed older, shallower, less radical than the other, the adventurous sort of happiness.
When she had wept all her tears away they passed a quiet, tender evening together. She was happy then with Clifford, when he was quietly, almost wistfully straying and musing, talking fitfully. They talked about everything, people, books, ideas, art, and all in a quiet illuminative way, without emphasis or repudiation, just straying on in harmony.
‘Yes, I agree with you,’ he said to her. ‘Immortality is a sort of fourth dimension, it’s always there, only we lose the sense of it. I do agree with you, it’s not a long-drawn-out thing. Only we lose something inside us which feels our immortality and so doesn’t bother about it. — Now tonight, talking quietly with you, I’ve had the feeling of immortality. And what else should I want? — We share our immortality in common, you and I, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘We share an immortality in common. — But there are lots of immortalities, even. I felt another one when I was coming home through the forget-me-nots, and they seemed like little stars of laughter all laughing. — But I do think you and I share an immortality, and that’s why it hurts me so when you say you don’t want to live. It hurts my half of the immortality, that does.’
‘What a fool I am! What an ungrateful brute!’ he swore softly. ‘I’ve got life, and I’ve got you, and then I whine! — Smack my face another time.’
‘Shall I?’ she said, smiling and kissing him goodnight. She knew he had been quite happy after his outburst. And she laughed to herself.
‘Shall we go together into the wood?’ he said next morning, when another lovely day had come.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Now?’
She and Mrs Bolton helped him into his motor-chair. His legs were absolutely helpless: they had to be lifted into place, one at a time. But he had great strength in his arms, to pull himself up. Constance hardly felt the shock any more of lifting those long, inert legs and covering them up with a rug. She had steeled herself. And now she reminded herself, when her pity was likely to give her a twist of anguish, that he had always believed in the mortality of the body and the immortality of the spirit. He ought not to mind so terribly: and perhaps, truly, he did not. Perhaps in a way it was a relief, an escape for him, his crippled condition. It was really easier to be only half a man.
If men had believed in the immortality of the body they would never have made that war, or any such war.
When Clifford was seated in his chair, at the back door, he slowly started off to the light puffing of his little motor round the house to the front, to the drive, where Constance was waiting for him under the great beech tree at the turn of the loop. He came slowly and proudly along in his low three-wheeled chair that puffed so mildly as it bore him forward. And as he came near her he glanced round at the long façade of the low old brown-stone house, and said:
‘“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage” — not since man has invented motor traction, do they? See how I can leave the house. Do you think the soul looks back on the body as I look back on the old place?’
‘The soul doesn’t go out for a ride in a bath chair,’ she said.
‘Maybe not!’ he laughed. ‘But perhaps it’s something similar — our mental flights and spiritual excursions. — I think we must have some repairs done to the old place in the autumn — or next spring. Don’t you think I might spend a few hundreds on it?’
‘Yes! I do! If there isn’t a coal strike.’
‘Quiet! What do the beggars want to strike for, really? They’ll only drive us back to some sort of slavery again, that’s all they’ll do.’
‘Drive who back?’ she said.
‘Oh, all of us! We, typifying the governing classes, shall in the end be forced to institute a mild form of slavery to keep the working class at work. There’s no other real alternative except anarchy.’
‘But would they let you? Would the working people let you?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we should have to do it quietly, while they weren’t looking. But we shall do it: have to.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? It’s obvious. To keep the mines working and the whole machine running. To let it stop means starvation and raving anarchy. The change to Communism means the stopping of a big part of the machine, inevitably. Which, in our tight little island, means anarchy. Nothing to be done then but to slip the light-weight shackles on in time. What else is there to be done?’
They had come to the brow of the park and were looking out over the rolling slopes, with their separate, beautiful trees, away to the outer morning, where could be seen the colliery sending its usual white plumes and black plumes, and the dark glisten of the slate roofs of the miners’ dwellings: and topping it all, the
old square tower of the church, of brown stone like Wragby House, away on the opposite hill. The dwellings, in curious overlapping steps of slate roofs, mounted up to the church and its bunch of trees.
There was something phantasmal in the view.
‘Do you think there must be a war between the classes?’ she asked him.
‘No! But I think the few must govern the many.’
‘You don’t think there might really be a mutual agreement?’
He slowly shook his head.
‘No!’ he said. ‘Between the haves and the have-nots there will never be a permanent mutual agreement: except in so far as a tug-of-war is a mutual agreement. One side pulls the other side into extinction: or what is much better, a mild, benevolent form of slavery.’
‘Don’t you think men are anything except haves and have-nots. Are you, for example, just a have?’
‘As far as the coal question goes, I am. It’s all right, so long as you don’t raise the question. But once you’ve raised the question, there you are! — You’re at opposite ends of the rope, and you’ll pull till you pull your guts out — or pull the other party down on to his face.’
‘But it needn’t be so.’
‘I don’t know about needn’t. It is.’
‘But if you didn’t hang on to your own end of the rope? — if you didn’t hang on to your possessions?’ she said.
He looked round at the house, at the park.
‘Poor old Wragby!’ he said. ‘I’d feel like a captain who abandons his ship to the enemy.’
‘But are they the enemy — the miners?’
‘When you see them skulking in the park, trespassing, trying to poach, don’t they seem like the enemy to you?’
‘Yes! But — need one let even Wragby come between oneself and —and — and the people?’
‘Aren’t you jolly well thankful that Wragby does stand between you and Tevershall village? How would you like to live in Bonfoot’s Row, for example — or any of the other rows of miners’ dwellings?’
‘I shouldn’t. — But the miners see no reason why they shouldn’t live in Wragby.’
‘Oh yes they do!’ he said slowly. ‘They see every reason but one —and that is an abstraction, not a reason at all.’
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 10
