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- Herausgeber: Olympia Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
In this sequel, Connie splits off from Mellors, finding intellectual stimulation and affirmation among expats in Paris and Egypt. Eventually the pair reunite, with the stalwart gamekeeper, who embodied fertility and manliness--things that, in Lawrence's eyes, England needed to rebound from the horrors of the Somme--now consenting to be one of her four+ lovers, when she got around to him. Soon to be a Lifetime movie. Or maybe they've already filmed it. 11,000 times. Out of print for eight decades. With good reason. But ya can catch an early Hemingway gibe in there somewheres if you care.
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Lady Chatterley's Friends
Anonymous
This page copyright © 2009 Olympia Press.
LADY
CHATTERLEY'S FRIENDS
A New Sequel to LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER and LADY CHATTERLEY'S HUSBANDS
CHAPTER I
It was a muggy fog-thick day, when Lady Constance Chatterley flew across the Channel from Paris to London, with her second husband, Oliver Mellors.
What had happened in Paris had shown her that this marriage, too, was a failure. And yet her heart was tense and brisk, and young again, as it had not been for years. She felt that her own fogs were lifting, rather than deepening. She saw Mellors clearly now, with the illusive clarity of the sated, yet still hungry, woman. When she noted Tommy Dukes was also flying to London on the same plane, she felt that life was good.
Constance had a habit of sitting stiffly on the horsehair padded seat of serenity. It was only when she could loll in the fauteuil of turbulence that she was really comfortable.
Mellors had just greeted her at the hangar, when they both spied the former friend of Sir Clifford Chatterley. Lady Chatterley had rushed over to him, her hands outstretched. “Why, Tommy! This is marvelous.” Suddenly the fog had become a friendly mist, maliciously barring Mellors from the secret web it spun over Tommy and herself. She had a swift vision of the negligee she had bought a bit dispiritedly in Paris.
“Well, well, Connie!” Tommy's hands closed firmly over her own. Then, more coolly, over her shoulder, to the husband, “How are you, Mellors?”
Sir Clifford's former gamekeeper did not smile. “Hello,” he said brusquely. Connie read the tightening of his lips which locked over the thought, “I'd hoped we'd have this trip to ourselves.”
“Men!” reflected Connie impatiently, glaring at her husband through her cool, thin mask of breeding. “You want them to want you jealously and possessively, and once they do, you cease wanting them.”
Tommy reflected that Mellors was as gracious as a surly peasant. A man never emerged from his background. Tommy's alert eyes passed from husband to wife. “Second honeymoon?” he inquired jovially.
Mellors laughed bitterly. Connie explained, with the engaging frankness which infuriated her husband, “Oliver is angry with me. In Paris I followed my precedents.”
“Precedents?” blankly.
“I played about a bit with Cyril Stitchlane. Oliver bloodied his face for him.”
“It was a pale little face,” said Mellors calmly. “I was surprised that the little whippersnapper could shed red blood.”
Connie's color rose. “It was nothing at all, Tommy, believe what I say. Cyril wasn't important, but he is a literary figure. We were staying at Lillian Fairfax's — you know the rich American with the lively salon. Mellors grew furious when we all went nudist one morning—as if there was any harm in that!”
, “It was a poor exchange, Connie,” said Mellors. “Your beautiful nude for his monstrously puny one.”
“That's not what one would say of his wit,” said Connie.
“Do you have to go nudist to find his wit?”
Tommy yawned. “So you bloodied his nose, eh?” he said with a dry chuckle.
“Oh yes. He's a swine. That's how I treat any man who poaches on my preserves.”
“In that case, darling,” said Connie sweetly, “it shouldn't surprise you if you come to your cupboard some morning and find all your preserves gone.”
“Indeed!”
“The man who regards a woman today, wife or not, as his preserves, soon finds himself let out, and looking for a new shop,” continued Connie. “But aren't they about to start?” She threw a reassuring glance at Tommy. The three of them moved forward into the vast, gleaming new passenger plane. She saw to it that she and Mellors took a seat far forward. Tommy sat right behind her. As she sat down she felt a reassuring pat on her shoulder from Tommy: not so much furtive, as promising. Her body thrilled to it. Her limbs parted a trifle, as a flood of slow warmth stole over her body, opening it like an oyster shell slowly spread apart by a deftly twisted knife.
Mellors, without a glance at her, sat back and opened a copy of the “Times.” As the plane rose, he leaned back, closing his eyes, face stern and forbidding. Connie could feel Tommy's fingers playing a queer, disturbing little tune between her shoulder blades. The fingers moved deftly, disquietingly, delightingly, up and down. She had heard of some quaint Oriental custom of rousing a woman so, with no other touch. Evidently Tommy knew something about the ignored art of love-making. Her fancies warmed, her body relaxed into a slow, melting reverie. They could not talk, but she could think....
Fog all around them... but her own fog was clearing, now. She felt that she had been blundering in a fog, through all of her marriage to Sir Clifford. Of course, she would never have married such a war-relic—a half-man, paralyzed and dead from the waist down. The war had done that to him. She had tried to be a dutiful wife, but love could not live on thin, peevish conversation, on bloodless esoteric argument—which was all the bond by which Clifford had hoped to weld her to him. Some sense of loyalty—perhaps it was sentimentality —for that first month of their honeymoon— before he went back to the front line, and received his withering injuries, had held her to him.
It had been decent of Clifford to suggest that she have a child by another man—any man, so long as he did not know the chap's identity. But only half-way decent; after all his main object had been to get an heir to Wragby Hall and the baronetcy.
That callow first affair of hers in Dresden with dreamy Emil Wolfe, who seemed to live his songs, had been more like love. Was that merely because it was first love? Subsequent experience had seemed to prove that love was located in one's own sense organs. He who could most surely determine this paradise hidden in her nerve centers, was the beloved object for the time. And yet, no, she could not fully subscribe to this theory. She could not believe that the authors of Heloise, Isolte, and Juliet had been Actionizing—giving their publics what they had been taught to believe. Connie was still the romanticist.
She had thought it was love, when she gave herself to her husband's other friend, the playwright, Michaelis. But he had been all pose, all selfishness, as all men seemed to be. It had been a relief, when that ended. It had served her greedy sister, Hilda, right—in those waiting weeks of pregnancy at Dunoon, when Michaelis, rebuffed by Connie, had cheapened the whole family by taking Hilda, too. Her own interest in Michaelis had been dead long before.
And then, Mellors.... Queer she could never bring herself back to the first, passionately grateful love she had for him. At that time, she had been cheated, envious of every bird and blade of grass, and country housewife who taunted her with destiny fulfilled — while she, the Lady of the countryside had been slowly withering. And then she had found Mellors—a male animal, with virile desire to answer the insistent cry of her female body which Clifford had failed so long. The promise of the baby... the hideous accident that ended the promise... and, then, this trip to Paris.
Now her delicately-intricate female mind moved restlessly beneath the weight of Mellor's solid virtues. He had picked up a smattering of culture in the army, in India, and Afghanistan and other places; a man couldn't rise to be lieutenant from the ranks and fail to acquire a little of the polish that culture gave. She had found him most charming, of course, in wild places, where he did not compare to disadvantage with trees, and wind, and rough hewn furniture. But in Paris—he did cut his lettuce with a knife, not so much from ignorance as from defiance.
She laughed softly, cynically, to herself, her fancies warmed more and more by Tommy Duke's light, unseen fingering. Her back arched in scarcely perceptible response. She, who had lived so long in numbness, would not now refuse any sensation that life offered her. Mellors had been the way out—that was all. Her open sesame to feeling.
This trip to Paris was to have been their escape from Wragby, from England, from civilization. How blind she had been! It was his idea—to get away from that which men had built in thousands of years, to return somehow to primitive cleanness and fineness of living. But for all their talk, their bodies could not carry out the theories of their minds. She found it difficult to worship the sun-god beneath a lace-brimmed French hat; and Mellors loved his ease a trifle more than his principles. She grew impatient with the slow epic of the soil, when she could see the telescoped version on the Paris stage, played by actors who could depict primitive nature with more art than nature herself. They had aimed at the wilds, and ended in Lillian Fairfax's salon, in a suburb of slowly rotting Paris.
At a place like this—at any place, in fact —you did what the others did. The man who wears full dress on the banks of the Congo is an ass; the women who expect formal dinner service in the Antarctic are zanys. Of course, Lillian's friends were wasters, in their own amusing way. But Connie knew, in her heart, that she would rather spend an evening teasing at love-making here, than hoeing yams in Central Africa.
And what a white light the whole incident had thrown on Mellors, her husband! Sometimes she found herself thinking of him with a resentment that terrified her because of its pettiness—boor, collier's son, peasant, my husband! He had been jealous as an enraged bull of that frothy nothing, Cyril. He had sulked off like an angry schoolboy when he had come upon her and Cyril, and the rest, sitting, quite innocently, sans attire in the prevailing nudist fashion. He had torn off, got drunk, and embarrassed her with his recourse to barmaids. She realized her own narrow-mindedness, hated herself for it, yet could not help labeling what might be an amusing peccadillo in Tommy, crudity in Mellors. It was certainly Mellors' unreasoning jealousy which had determined Connie to let Cyril have the unimportant lolly-pop he whined for. If Mellors looked on her as a bitch instead of a lamb—she might as well be one.
To cap it all, Mellors had unnecessarily called on Cyril and brawled with him, as though they had been two drunken cab-drivers, instead of gentlemen. Connie forgot the day when she had looked enviously, even upon a drunken cab-driver, while she was married to her own Lord Gentleman. Mellors had beaten up the harmless little poseur, merely because he had done innocently what Connie herself had wanted him to do.
Then why was she following Mellors to England? Was there still the primitive hunger in her blood? Was it secret admiration? Her lips curled crisply. She had started something, and would see it through to a decent termination. They must have an understanding which must lead, somehow, to separation, unless Mellors was able to snap out of his surliness and become more like the mate Constance Reid Chatterley Mellors—she made a wry face to herself as she said it all to herself—was entitled to, and was going to have.
Of course, Mellors didn't dream what was in her mind. He believed with typical trustfulness, that she was with him, as she had been with him in those fogged, seeking days when she was married to Clifford. He'd find out soon enough.
What a god-send to find Tommy Dukes on board! Some link with her old life—the lovely life of gentility she had led before the nightmare of the war and what followed had fallen like a pall over her. And Tommy was a fine boy. Queer he'd always looked upon her as on a younger sister. She fell asleep wondering about this.
The plane glided gently to a stop in the London air field. Connie roused herself with a start, and looked guiltily at Mellors as though he might yet read the vestiges of her dreams upon her face.
Brigather-General Tommy grinned amiably. “Where you putting up?”
Mellors answered gruffly. “We stop at the Claridge.”
“Fine. I stop at the same place. We may as well go in together.”
Mellors looked at him suspiciously. The language of the aristocrat subtly angered him with its assumption that a polite inflection could absolve a scheming phrase. It was below his comprehension. “I suppose we may as well,” he grudged brusquely.
Tommy led the way, his face as innocent as that of the girl on the Pears Soap wrapper. They must get together with the old crowd, he said—Charlie May, Arnold Hammond, Harry Winterslow, Jack. Strangeways. They were in London somewhere—they'd been shooting on one of the Dalhousie estates, and were somewhere in London now. Olive and Julia, the two wives in the group, were on the Riviera. They could have a reunion....
“The less I see of that crowd, the happier I'll be,” grumbled Mellors.
“It will be lovely of you to get us together,” said Connie quietly.
The clerk at the Claridge bowed deferentially to Tommy, and looked more aloofly at the other two. “Well, General?”
“My old diggings, of course. I suppose you two—”
Mellors wearily addressed the clerk. “Best suite. Two bedrooms, living room—” He might as well please Connie, he reflected.
She had become so difficult lately. She had always thawed when he found a way to spend her money—as though by this sign he were moving surely into her camp....
Connie stared aghast. She drew him aside. “People just don't do that sort of thing. English people. They'd charge you a fortune. Only South African diamond men, and American pork packers—”
“I suppose I know what we can afford,” stiffly.
“It isn't what we can afford; it's what nice people do. Why do you suppose the English nobility travel second class on ships and trains?” She turned casually to the clerk. “Fix us up with a couple of cozy rooms and a small living room. Oh, look Mellors, at this marvelous map of the Middle Counties.”
Mellor's cheeks were burning. He remembered that his mother, collier's wife that she was, had the delicacy never to correct her children during the curate's visit. She waited until the company had left. For the moment, he almost hated Connie.
The clerk leaned over the desk; now he was deferential. “I'm putting you on the third floor. A charming two room suite, with madame's room quite as sunny and pleasant as a suite living-room.”
“I'm on the seventh as usual, Hodges?” queried Tommy casually. Only Connie guessed how pointed was the query.
“Surely, General.”
Somehow, Mellors was unable to shake him. He was blandly impervious to all hints that they wished to be alone for their second honeymoon. And, since Connie backed up his bland lack of understanding, Mellors had no chance to achieve his own way. The three of them dined in the hotel, went to a music hall, dropped by for a bite at a quaint old inn Tommy knew, and returned together to the hotel. Only then did Tommy bid them good night, when they got out of the lift at the third floor.
Mellors followed Connie to her room. She turned, smiling, to him at the door. “I know you'll forgive me tonight. I'm really awfully fagged. I'm going to turn right in. Good night.” With a bright smile she closed her door.
In his own room, Mellors paced restlessly, then opened the windows wide, and looked over the city. Spires pricked a veiled, impenetrable sky; people slid along the wet pavements like insects which emerge after rain; a sign calling humanity to Christian Endeavor, elbowed an equally benevolent poster bearing the kindly message of Witherspoon's Ice Cream. Beneath him surged the futile mystery of civilization, topped by a close-lipped sky—but Mellors wasn't thinking of death, or God, or the enigma of human bustle in the wheel within the wheel. All his thoughts were taken up with a problem fully as knotty as all philosophical puzzles put together—the problem of his wife.
Connie closed her door, and wound her arms around herself. “Alone at last,” she told the reflection in the mirror. She made a soft little grimace and surveyed the voluptuous room, done in soft Moorish drapes that seemed to tinkle as they swayed. Her eyes narrowed, as they observed the door to the right. That evidently led to Mellor's room. She tiptoed over, turned the key noiselessly in the lock, and tested the door, to make sure it was locked. She smiled cryptically.
The maid had opened her bags, and laid a clinging black net negligee on the bed, above the tufted black mules. Connie slipped her smart little frock over her head, and flung it negligently over a chair. Then, more considerately, she reclaimed it, and hung it on a hanger. She let down her hair, its soft, brown cascades crackling as her fingers removed the pins. Crisp, vibrant energy there! She walked over to the pier-glass, and [...]
