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Table of contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 1
Ours
is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The
cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up
new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard
work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round,
or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many
skies have fallen.This
was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had brought
the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live
and learn.She
married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on
leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders:
to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in
bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he
was twenty-nine.His
hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to
grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands.
Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with
the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.This
was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,
Wragby Hall, the family 'seat'. His father had died, Clifford was now
a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came
to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of
the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister,
but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The
elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he
could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky
Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.He
was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled
chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he
could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the fine
melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended
to be flippant about it.Having
suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left
him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might
say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue,
challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his
hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome
neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful
look, the slight vacancy of a cripple.He
had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his
eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he
had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of
his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.Constance,
his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and
sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had big,
wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come
from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the
once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one
of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days.
Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister
Hilda had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional
upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to
breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction,
to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the
speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.The
two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted by
either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They
were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan
provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.They
had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other
things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among
the students, they argued with the men over philosophical,
sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men
themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off
to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They
sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the
great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning,
with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they
liked, and--above all--to say what they liked. It was the talk that
mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was
only a minor accompaniment.Both
Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the time
they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so
passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such
freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were
doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was
supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and craving.
Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?So
they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were
only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One
was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to
hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom.
For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life
consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and
noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? To shake off the old
and sordid connexions and subjections.And
however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the
most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified
it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something
better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than
ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more
wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that
men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the
sex thing like dogs.And
a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A
woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would
probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very
pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding
her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not
seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a
man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him
without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex
thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back
in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without
herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the
connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely
her tool.Both
sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and
they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man
unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were
profoundly interested, talking to
one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there
was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the
hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had never
realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men
to talk to!--had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they
knew what a promise it was.And
if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let
it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a
queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of
self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row
of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a
break in the theme.When
the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was
twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they
had had the love experience.L'amour
avait passe par la,
as somebody puts it. But he was a man of experience himself, and let
life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the
last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be 'free', and
to 'fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she
was a woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her
husband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old impression of
authority on her own mind or soul that she could not get rid of. It
had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm, who left his nervously hostile,
high-spirited wife to rule her own roost, while he went his own way.So
the girls were 'free', and went back to Dresden, and their music, and
the university and the young men. They loved their respective young
men, and their respective young men loved them with all the passion
of mental attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought
and expressed and wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the
young women. Connie's young man was musical, Hilda's was technical.
But they simply lived for their young women. In their minds and their
mental excitements, that is. Somewhere else they were a little
rebuffed, though they did not know it.It
was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the
physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman
more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened,
and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much
quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his
buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.In
the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves,
took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the
men, in gratitude to the woman for the sex experience, let their
souls go out to her. And afterwards looked rather as if they had lost
a shilling and found sixpence. Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and
Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never
satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't;
and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason.
Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children,
and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she
may.However,
came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after having
been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before Christmas
of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the sisters
wept, and loved the young men passionately, but underneath forgot
them. They didn't exist any more.Both
sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's, Kensington
house, and mixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood
for 'freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the
neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering,
murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.
Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself,
an elder member of the same Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount
of money, and a comfortable family job in the government: he also
wrote philosophical essays. She lived with him in a smallish house in
Westminster, and moved in that good sort of society of people in the
government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or would be, the
real intelligent power in the nation: people who know what they're
talking about, or talk as if they did.Connie
did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the flannel-trousers
Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at everything, so far. Her
'friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who
had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying the technicalities
of coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at Cambridge. Now
he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so he could
mock at everything more becomingly in uniform.Clifford
Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do
intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still
it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount's
daughter.But
Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more 'society',
was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease
in the narrow 'great world', that is, landed aristocracy society, but
he was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of
the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If
the truth must be told, he was just a little bit frightened of
middle-and lower-class humanity, and of foreigners not of his own
class. He was, in some paralysing way, conscious of his own
defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege. Which is
curious, but a phenomenon of our day.Therefore
the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid fascinated
him. She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer world of
chaos than he was master of himself.Nevertheless
he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or perhaps
rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in the
general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against
any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own
obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own
wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old
buffers of generals altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely.
Even the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of
people.In
fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous:
certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the
army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a
degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to
govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father,
was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men
out of his colliery to shove them into the war; and himself being so
safe and patriotic; but, also, spending more money on his country
than he'd got.When
Miss Chatterley--Emma--came down to London from the Midlands to do
some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir
Geoffrey and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother
and heir, laughed outright, though it was his trees that were felling
for trench props. But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily.
Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But when it came too close and
oneself became ridiculous too...? At least people of a different
class, like Connie, were earnest about something. They believed in
something.They
were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children.
In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at
fault. But Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the
authorities were ridiculous ab
ovo,
not because of toffee or Tommies.And
the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous
fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while. Till
things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the
situation over here. And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant
young laughed no more.In
1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was
terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey, and
child of Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it.
And yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething
world, was ridiculous. Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby.
Was that not terrible? and also splendid and at the same time,
perhaps, purely absurd?Sir
Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense,
withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his
country and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might.
So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that was really
England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio
Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his
forebears had stood for England and St George: and he never knew
there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for
Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.And
he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his
father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any
further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of
everything, and the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For
willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby with the last
seriousness.The
gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and
horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an
anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife.The
Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously isolated,
shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their connexions.
A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the
weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of,
or because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those
industrial Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were
cut off from their own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up
nature of Sir Geoffrey, their father, whom they ridiculed, but whom
they were so sensitive about.The
three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey
barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding
insistence that it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up
against.But
Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt his
marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones
of the family had stood for.Clifford
married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon with her.
It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people
who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so
close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in
this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's
'satisfaction'. Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his
'satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was
deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, or
an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which
persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her
sister-in-law Emma.But
early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.
CHAPTER 2
Connie
and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss
Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed
and was living in a little flat in London.Wragby
was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of
the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a
place without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather
fine old park of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near
distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and
smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of
Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates,
and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile:
houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black
slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.Connie
was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex downs:
that was her England. With the stoicism of the young she took in the
utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance,
and left it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about.
From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of
the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the
clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse little whistle of the
colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank was burning, had been
burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put it out. So it
had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was often, the
house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the
earth's excrement. But even on windless days the air always smelt of
something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like
black manna from the skies of doom.Well,
there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but
why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all
the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches
burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like
burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated
Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground.
Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.Clifford
professed to like Wragby better than London. This country had a grim
will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else
they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as
haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly.
Only there was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the
dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they
trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and
a bit mysterious.There
had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no
deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car
up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the
slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll
where the house spread its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and
her husband were hovering, like unsure tenants on the face of the
earth, ready to stammer a welcome.There
was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,
none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The colliers merely
stared; the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an
acquaintance, and nodded awkwardly to Clifford; that was all. Gulf
impassable, and a quiet sort of resentment on either side. At first
Connie suffered from the steady drizzle of resentment that came from
the village. Then she hardened herself to it, and it became a sort of
tonic, something to live up to. It was not that she and Clifford were
unpopular, they merely belonged to another species altogether from
the colliers. Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is
perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent. But in the Midlands and the
industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could
take place. You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange
denial of the common pulse of humanity.Yet
the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract. In
the flesh it was--You leave me alone!--on either side.The
rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty, and reduced,
personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent--You leave me
alone!--of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all Methodists.
The miners were nothing. But even so much official uniform as the
clergyman wore was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a
man like any other man. No, he was Mester Ashby, a sort of automatic
preaching and praying concern.This
stubborn, instinctive--We think ourselves as good as you, if
you are Lady
Chatterley!--puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The
curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives
met her overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of--Oh dear me!
I am somebody
now, with Lady Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm
not as good as her for all that!--which she always heard twanging in
the women's half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting
past it. It was hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.Clifford
left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went by
without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax
figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty
and contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact
he was altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not
in his own class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at
conciliation. And he was neither liked nor disliked by the people: he
was just part of things, like the pit-bank and Wragby itself.But
Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was
lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For
he had to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair.
Nevertheless he was just as carefully dressed as ever, by his
expensive tailors, and he wore the careful Bond Street neckties just
as before, and from the top he looked just as smart and impressive as
ever. He had never been one of the modern ladylike young men: rather
bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad shoulders. But his very
quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same time bold and
frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His manner
was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and
self-effacing, almost tremulous.Connie
and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He was
much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy
and flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him
passionately.But
she could not help feeling how little connexion he really had with
people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as
objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life,
crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was
in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at
him now he was lame. And their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural
as that of hedgehogs.He
was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope, or
up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with
anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close
bond of family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched
him. Connie felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch
him; perhaps there was nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation
of human contact.Yet
he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big
and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about
in a wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor
attachment, in which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone
he was like a lost thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him
he existed at all.Still
he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very
personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful,
and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was
extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual
contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And
since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage
today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern
psychology, that is.Clifford
was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted everyone
to think them good, of the best, ne
plus ultra.
They appeared in the most modern magazines, and were praised and
blamed as usual. But to Clifford the blame was torture, like knives
goading him. It was as if the whole of his being were in his stories.Connie
helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He talked
everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and
she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul
and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into theme stories of his.
This thrilled her and absorbed her.Of
physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the
house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years,
and the dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could
hardly call her a parlour-maid, or even a woman...who waited at
table, had been in the house for forty years. Even the very
housemaids were no longer young. It was awful! What could you do with
such a place, but leave it alone! All these endless rooms that nobody
used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical cleanliness and the
mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook, an experienced
woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest the
place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty
good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty
strict honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No
warmth of feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary
as a disused street.What
could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone. Miss
Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face, and
triumphed, finding nothing altered. She would never forgive Connie
for ousting her from her union in consciousness with her brother. It
was she, Emma, who should be bringing forth the stories, these books,
with him; the Chatterley stories, something new in the world,
that they,
the Chatterleys, had put there. There was no other standard. There
was no organic connexion with the thought and expression that had
gone before. Only something new in the world: the Chatterley books,
entirely personal.Connie's
father, where he paid a flying visit to Wragby, and in private to his
daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart, but there's nothing
in it.
It won't last! Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had
done himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big,
still-wondering blue eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he
mean by nothing in it? If the critics praised it, and Clifford's name
was almost famous, and it even brought in money...what did her father
mean by saying there was nothing in Clifford's writing? What else
could there be?For
Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the
moment was everything. And moments followed one another without
necessarily belonging to one another.It
was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her: 'I hope,
Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a
demi-vierge.''A
demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely. 'Why? Why not?''Unless
you like it, of course!' said her father hastily. To Clifford he said
the same, when the two men were alone: 'I'm afraid it doesn't quite
suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.''A
half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating the phrase to be sure of
it.He
thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry and
offended.'In
what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked stiffly.'She's
getting thin...angular. It's not her style. She's not the pilchard
sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch trout.''Without
the spots, of course!' said Clifford.He
wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge
business...the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not
bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not
intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and
hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither
could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and
utterly out of touch.Connie
guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that
something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind
whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he didn't
absolutely know, and wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and
the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.Connie
and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living their
vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests
had never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and
wrestled in the throes of composition, and felt as if something were
happening, really happening, really in the void.And
thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was
non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants...but spectral, not
really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods
that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery,
kicking the brown leaves of autumn, and picking the primroses of
spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum
of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling
in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about,
picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No
substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact! Only this life
with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae
of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing
in, and they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why
should they last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of
reality.Clifford
had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he invited
them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers,
people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at
being asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all
perfectly. But why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the
mirror. What was wrong with it?She
was hostess to these people...mostly men. She was hostess also to
Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy,
country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and
curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female
loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and 'womanly'. She
was not a 'little pilchard sort of fish', like a boy, with a boy's
flat breast and little buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite
smart.So
the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her
indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the
slightest sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no
encouragement at all. She was quiet and vague, she had no contact
with them and intended to have none. Clifford was extraordinarily
proud of himself.His
relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the kindliness
indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no respect for
you unless you could frighten them a little. But again she had no
contact. She let them be kindly and disdainful, she let them feel
they had no need to draw their steel in readiness. She had no real
connexion with them.Time
went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so
beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and
his books. She entertained...there were always people in the house.
Time went on as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past
seven.
CHAPTER 3
Connie
was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her
disconnexion, a restlessness was taking possession of her like
madness. It twitched her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them,
it jerked her spine when she didn't want to jerk upright but
preferred to rest comfortably. It thrilled inside her body, in her
womb, somewhere, till she felt she must jump into water and swim to
get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made her heart beat
violently for no reason. And she was getting thinner.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!