g. No one there! The hut was locked. But she sat
on  the  log doorstep,  under the rustic  porch,  and snuggled  into her own
warmth.  So she sat,  looking at the  rain, listening to the many  noiseless
noises of  it, and to the strange soughings of wind in upper branches,  when
there  seemed  to be  no  wind. Old oak-trees  stood around, grey,  powerful
trunks, rain-blackened, round and  vital, throwing off  reckless  limbs. The
ground was fairly free  of undergrowth,  the anemones sprinkled, there was a
bush or two, elder, or guelder-rose, and a  purplish tangle of  bramble: the
old  russet of  bracken almost vanished under green  anemone  ruffs. Perhaps
this was one  of  the  unravished places.  Unravished! The whole  world  was
ravished.
     Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of  sardines. And
so many women are like that; and men. But the earth...!
     The  rain was abating. It was hardly making darkness among the oaks any
more. Connie wanted to go; yet she sat on. But she was getting cold; yet the
overwhelming inertia of her inner resentment kept her there as if paralysed.
     Ravished!  How  ravished  one could  be  without  ever  being  touched.
Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.
     A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of
a tail. The man followed  in a  wet black oilskin jacket,  like a chauffeur,
and face  flushed a little. She felt him  recoil in his quick  walk, when he
saw her. She stood up in the handbreadth of dryness under the  rustic porch.
He saluted without speaking, coming slowly near. She began to withdraw.
     `I'm just going,' she said.
     `Was yer waitin' to get in?' he asked, looking at the hut, not at her.
     `No,  I only sat  a  few  minutes in the shelter,' she said, with quiet
dignity.
     He looked at her. She looked cold.
     `Sir Clifford 'adn't got no other key then?' he asked.
     `No,  but it doesn't  matter. I can sit perfectly dry under this porch.
Good afternoon!' She hated the excess of vernacular in his speech.
     He watched her  closely, as she was moving away. Then he hitched up his
jacket, and put his  hand in his breeches pocket,  taking out the key of the
hut.
     `'Appen yer'd better 'ave this key, an' Ah  min fend  for t'  bods some
other road.'
     She looked at him.
     `What do you mean?' she asked.
     `I mean as 'appen  Ah can  find anuther pleece as'll du for rearin' th'
pheasants. If yer want ter be 'ere, yo'll  non want me messin' abaht a'  th'
time.'
     She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect.
     `Why don't you speak ordinary English?' she said coldly.
     `Me! Ah thowt it wor ordinary.'
     She was silent for a few moments in anger.
     `So if yer want t' key, yer'd  better tacit. Or 'appen Ah'd better gi'e
't yer termorrer, an' clear all t' stuff aht fust. Would that du for yer?'
     She became more angry.
     `I didn't want your key,' she said. `I don't want you to clear anything
out at  all. I  don't  in the least want to  turn you out of your hut, thank
you! I only wanted to be  able to sit here sometimes, like today. But I  can
sit perfectly well under the porch, so please say no more about it.'
     He looked at her again, with his wicked blue eyes.
     `Why,' he began, in the broad slow dialect. `Your Ladyship's as welcome
as Christmas ter th' hut an' th' key an' iverythink as is. On'y this time O'
th' year ther's bods ter set, an'  Ah've got  ter be potterin' abaht a  good
bit,  seein' after 'em,  an'  a'.  Winter  time Ah ned 'ardly come  nigh th'
pleece.  But what  wi'  spring,  an'  Sir  Clifford  wantin' ter  start  th'
pheasants...An'  your Ladyship'd non want me tinkerin' around an' about when
she was 'ere, all the time.'
     She listened with a dim kind of amazement.
     `Why should I mind your being here?' she asked.
     He looked at her curiously.
     `T'nuisance on me!'  he said  briefly, but  significantly. She flushed.
`Very well!' she said  finally.  `I won't trouble  you. But I don't  think I
should  have minded  at all sitting and seeing you  look after the  birds. I
should have liked it. But  since  you think it interferes with you, I  won't
disturb you, don't be afraid. You are Sir Clifford's keeper, not mine.'
     The phrase sounded queer, she didn't know why. But she let it pass.
     `Nay, your Ladyship.  It's  your  Ladyship's  own  'ut.  It's  as  your
Ladyship likes an' pleases,  every time.  Yer can turn  me  off at  a  wik's
notice. It wor only...'
     `Only what?' she asked, baffled.
     He pushed back his hat in an odd comic way.
     `On'y  as 'appen yo'd like the place ter yersen, when yer did come, an'
not me messin' abaht.'
     `But why?' she said, angry. `Aren't you a civilized human being? Do you
think I  ought to be afraid of you? Why should I take  any notice of you and
your being here or not? Why is it important?'
     He looked at her, all his face glimmering with wicked laughter.
     `It's not, your Ladyship. Not in the very least,' he said.
     `Well, why then?' she asked.
     `Shall I get your Ladyship another key then?'
     `No thank you! I don't want it.'
     `Ah'll get it anyhow. We'd best 'ave two keys ter th' place.'
     `And I consider you  are  insolent,' said  Connie,  with her colour up,
panting a little.
     `Nay,  nay!'  he said  quickly. `Dunna yer say that! Nay, nay!  I niver
meant  nuthink. Ah  on'y thought as if yo' come 'ere,  Ah  s'd ave ter clear
out, an' it'd mean a lot of  work,  settin' up somewheres else.  But if your
Ladyship isn't going ter  take no notice O' me,  then...it's  Sir Clifford's
'ut,  an'  everythink is  as your  Ladyship  likes,  everythink is  as  your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, barrin' yer take no notice O' me, doin' th' bits
of jobs as Ah've got ter do.'
     Connie went away completely  bewildered. She was not  sure whether  she
had  been insulted and mortally  of fended,  or not. Perhaps  the man really
only meant what he said; that he thought she would expect him to  keep away.
As if she would dream of it! And as if he could possibly be so important, he
and his stupid presence.
     She went home in confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt.
     Chapters 9
     Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What
is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no
passion in  it. But a profound physical dislike.  Almost, it  seemed to her,
she had married  him because she disliked him, in a secret, physical sort of
way. But of course, she had  married him really  because in a mental  way he
attracted her and excited  her. He had seemed,  in  some  way,  her  master,
beyond her.
     Now the mental excitement  had  worn itself out and  collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose  up in her from her depths:
and she realized how it had been eating her life away.
     She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from
outside. But in the  whole  world  there was no  help. Society was  terrible
because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love
are its two  great  manias; money a  long  way first. The individual asserts
himself in  his disconnected insanity in these two  modes:  money  and love.
Look at Michaelis! His life and activity  were just insanity. His love was a
sort of insanity.
     And Clifford the same. All that talk!  All that writing! All that  wild
struggling to push  himself  forwards! It  was  just  insanity. And  it  was
getting worse, really maniacal.
     Connie felt  washed-out with fear.  But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to  Mrs Bolton. He  did  not know it. Like  many insane
people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of the
great desert tracts in his consciousness.
     Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she  had that  queer sort of
bossiness, endless  assertion of her  own will, which is one of the signs of
insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient and living
for others.  Clifford  fascinated  her  because  he  always, or  so of  ten,
frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a finer, subtler will
of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm for her.
     Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.
     `It's a  lovely day, today!' Mrs  Bolton  would  say in her  caressive,
persuasive voice. `I should think you'd  enjoy a  little  run in your  chair
today, the sun's just lovely.'
     `Yes?  Will you give me that book---there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'
     `Why  they're  so beautiful!'  She  pronounced it  with  the `y' sound:
be-yutiful! `And the scent is simply gorgeous.'
     `The scent is what I object to,' he said. `It's a little funereal.'
     `Do you think so!' she  exclaimed in  surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she  carried the hyacinths out of the room,  impressed by
his higher fastidiousness.
     `Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do  it  yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.
     `I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'
     `Very good,  Sir  Clifford!'  she  replied,  so  soft  and  submissive,
withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.
     When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:
     `I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'
     Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:
     `Very good, Sir Clifford!'
     She was  very  deft, with a  soft, lingering touch, a little  slow.  At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch  of her lingers on his face.
But now he liked  it, with a  growing  voluptuousness. He let her  shave him
nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated, watching
that she did  it  right. And  gradually  her fingertips  knew his cheeks and
lips,  his  jaw  and   chin  and  throat  perfectly.  He  was  well-fed  and
well-liking,  his  face and  throat  were  handsome  enough  and  he  was  a
gentleman.
     She was handsome too, pale,  her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes  bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with  infinite softness,
almost with love, she was getting him by the throat,  and he was yielding to
her.
     She now  did almost  everything for him, and he  felt more at home with
her,  less ashamed of accepting her menial  offices, than  with Connie.  She
liked handling  him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to
the  last menial  offices. She said to Connie  one day: `All men are babies,
when  you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest
customers as  ever  went  down Tevershall pit. But let  anything ail them so
that you have to do  for  them,  and  they're babies, just  big  babies. Oh,
there's not much difference in men!'
     At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different in
a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a good
start  of her. But gradually, as she  came  to the bottom of him, to use her
own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to man's proportions:
but a baby with a queer temper  and a fine manner and power in  its control,
and all sorts of odd  knowledge that she had never dreamed of, with which he
could still bully her.
     Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:
     `For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the  hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run.
     It  was  still  their habit  to  spend the evening  together, till  ten
o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over  his manuscript.
But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But she
still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs Bolton would do even
that.
     For Connie had  suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn  to use a
typewriter.  And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once,  and practised
assiduously.  So now Clifford  would sometimes dictate a letter  to her, and
she  would  take  it  down  rather slowly, but correctly. And  he  was  very
patient, spelling for her the  difficult words, or the occasional phrases in
French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to instruct her.
     Now Connie would sometimes  plead a headache as  an excuse for going up
to her room after dinner.
     `Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.
     `Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to  your own room and rest,
darling.'
     But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton,  and asked her
to take a hand at piquet  or  bezique, or even chess. He had taught her  all
these games. And Connie found it curiously  objectionable to see Mrs Bolton,
flushed and tremulous like a little  girl, touching her queen or  her knight
with  uncertain  fingers, then  drawing  away again. And  Clifford,  faintly
smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying to her:
     `You must say j'adoube!'
     She  looked up at him with bright, startled  eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:
     `J'adoube!'
     Yes,  he was  educating her.  And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power.  And she was thrilled. She  was coming bit by bit  into possession of
all  that  the gentry  knew, all that made them  upper class: apart from the
money.  That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was  making him want to
have her there with him. It was a  subtle deep flattery to  him, her genuine
thrill.
     To Connie,  Clifford seemed to be coming out  in his  true  colours:  a
little  vulgar, a little  common, and uninspired; rather  fat.  Ivy Bolton's
tricks and humble  bossiness were also only too transparent. But  Connie did
wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford. To say she
was in love  with him would be putting it wrongly.  She  was thrilled by her
contact with a man of  the upper class, this  titled gentleman,  this author
who  could  write books and  poems, and  whose  photograph  appeared  in the
illustrated  newspapers.  She  was  thrilled  to  a  weird  passion. And his
`educating' her  roused  in  her a passion  of excitement and response  much
deeper than any love affair  could have done.  In truth, the very  fact that
there could be no love  affair  left her free to  thrill to  her very marrow
with  this other passion,  the  peculiar  passion of knowing, knowing as  he
knew.
     There was no mistake that the woman  was in some way in love with  him:
whatever force  we  give  to the  word love. She  looked so handsome  and so
young, and her  grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time, there
was  a lurking  soft  satisfaction  about her, even of triumph, and  private
satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed it!
     But  no wonder Clifford was  caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her  persistent fashion, and put herself  absolutely at his service,
for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!
     Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it
bas  mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip
about Tevershall village. It  was more than gossip. It was  Mrs  Gaskell and
George Eliot and Miss Mitford  all rolled in  one,  with a  great deal more,
that these women  left out.' Once started, Mrs  Bolton was  better  than any
book, about the  lives of the  people. She knew them  all so intimately, and
had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it  was wonderful, if
just a trifle humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to
`talk Tevershall', as she called it, to Clifford.  But once started, it went
on. Clifford was listening for `material', and he found it in plenty. Connie
realized that his  so-called genius was just this: a  perspicuous talent for
personal  gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was
very warm  when  she `talked Tevershall'. Carried away,  in fact. And it was
marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have
run to dozens of volumes.
     Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all,
one may hear the most private  affairs of other people, but only in a spirit
of respect for the  struggling, battered thing which any human soul is,  and
in a  spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form  of
sympathy.  It  is  the  way  our  sympathy  flows  and  recoils that  really
determines  our lives.  And  here  lies  the vast  importance of the  novel,
properly  handled. It  can inform and lead into new places the  flow  of our
sympathetic consciousness, and it  can lead our sympathy away in recoil from
things gone dead. Therefore,  the novel,  properly  handled,  can reveal the
most  secret places of life: for it is in the  passional  secret  places  of
life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow,
cleansing and freshening.
     But the  novel, like  gossip, can also  excite spurious  sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to  the psyche. The novel can  glorify the
most corrupt feelings, so  long  as they are conventionally `pure'. Then the
novel, like gossip, becomes  at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more
vicious  because it  is always  ostensibly  on  the side of the angels.  Mrs
Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. `And he was such a bad
fellow, and she was  such a nice woman.' Whereas, as  Connie could  see even
from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had  been  merely a  mealy-mouthed sort,
and the  man angrily honest. But angry honesty made  a `bad man' of him, and
mealy-mouthedness  made a `nice woman' of her,  in the vicious, conventional
channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.
     For this reason, the gossip  was humiliating. And  for the same reason,
most  novels,  especially  popular  ones, are  humiliating  too.  The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.
     Nevertheless, one  got  a  new  vision  of Tevershall  village from Mrs
Bolton's  talk.  A terrible, seething welter of  ugly life it seemed: not at
all  the flat drabness it  looked from outside.  Clifford  of course knew by
sight  most  of  the  people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But  it
sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.
     `I suppose you heard as  Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would  you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know
they built a house up at  Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall;
eighty-three, he was,  an'  nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood
Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter,  an' broke his thigh, and
that finished him, poor  old man, it did seem a shame. Well, he left all his
money to  Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five
years---yes, she's fifty-three last  autumn. And  you know  they  were  such
Chapel people, my word!  She taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her
father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I
don't  know  if you know  him,  an  oldish  fellow with a  red  nose, rather
dandified, Willcock, as works in Harrison's  woodyard. Well he's sixty-five,
if  he's  a  day,  yet  you'd  have  thought  they  were  a  pair  of  young
turtle-doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she
sitting on his knee right in the bay  window on Pye Croft Road,  for anybody
to see. And  he's got sons over  forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If
old James Allsopp  hasn't  risen from  his grave, it's  because there is  no
rising: for  he  kept her that strict!  Now they're married and gone to live
down  at  Kinbrook, and  they say  she goes round in  a  dressing-gown  from
morning to  night, a veritable  sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way the  old
ones go  on!  Why  they're  a lot worse than the  young,  and  a sight  more
disgusting. I lay  it down  to the pictures, myself. But you can't keep them
away.  I  was always  saying: go  to a  good  instructive film,  but do  for
goodness sake keep away from  these melodramas and  love films. Anyhow  keep
the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse than the children:
and the old ones beat the  band. Talk about morality!  Nobody cares a thing.
Folks does  as they like, and much better off  they are for it, I must  say.
But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working
so bad,  and  they haven't  got the money.  And the grumbling  they do, it's
awful, especially the women. The men  are so good and patient! What can they
do, poor chaps! But the women,  oh, they do carry on! They go and  show off,
giving contributions for a wedding  present for Princess Mary, and then when
they see  all the grand things that's been  given, they  simply rave:  who's
she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar  give me one fur
coat, instead of giving her  six.  I wish I'd  kept my ten shillings! What's
she going to give me, I should  like to know? Here I can't get a  new spring
coat, my dad's working that  bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as  poor
folks  had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad  it long enough. I  want a
new spring  coat, I do, an' wheer am I  going to get it? I  say  to them, be
thankful you're  well fed and  well clothed, without all the new  finery you
want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about
in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her get van-loads, an' I
can't have a new  spring coat.  It's a damned shame.  Princess! Bloomin' rot
about  Princess! It's  munney as matters,  an' cos she's got lots, they give
her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've  as  much right as anybody  else.
Don't  talk  to  me about education. It's  munney as matters. I  want  a new
spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no munney..." That's all
they care  about,  clothes.  They think nothing  of  giving  seven  or eight
guineas for a  winter coat---colliers' daughters, mind you---and two guineas
for  a child's summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their
two-guinea hat, girls as would have been proud  of a  three-and-sixpenny one
in my day. I  heard that at the  Primitive  Methodist anniversary this year,
when they have a built-up platform for the  Sunday  School children, like  a
grandstand going almost up  to th' ceiling, I heard Miss  Thompson,  who has
the  first class  of girls in  the Sunday  School,  say there'd  be  over  a
thousand pounds  in new Sunday clothes sitting  on that  platform! And times
are what they  are! But you can't  stop  them. They're  mad for clothes. And
boys  the same. The lads spend every penny  on themselves, clothes, smoking,
drinking  in the  Miners'  Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two  or  three
times a  week. Why,  it's  another world.  And  they fear nothing, and  they
respect nothing, the  young don't. The older men are  that patient and good,
really,  they  let the women take everything. And this  is what it leads to.
The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't  like their dads. They're
sacrificing nothing, they  aren't:  they're all  for self. If you tell  them
they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home,  they say: That'll keep, that
will, I'm  goin' t'  enjoy myself while I can. Owt else'll keep! Oh, they're
rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older men, an'  it's
a bad outlook all round.'
     Clifford began  to  get a new idea of  his own  village.  The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now---?
     `Is there much Socialism, Bolshevism, among the people?' he asked.
     `Oh!' said Mrs Bolton, `you  hear a few  loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got  into debt. The men take no notice.  I don't believe
you'll ever turn our Tevershall  men into reds. They're too decent for that.
But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it really. They
only want a  bit of  money  in their pocket,  to spend at the Welfare, or go
gadding  to  Sheffield.  That's  all they care. When they've got  no  money,
they'll listen to the reds spouting. But nobody believes in it, really.'
     `So you think there's no danger?'
     `Oh  no! Not if  trade was good, there wouldn't be.  But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones  might go funny. I  tell you, they're a
selfish,  spoilt  lot. But I  don't see how they'd ever  do  anything.  They
aren't ever serious about  anything,  except showing off on  motor-bikes and
dancing  at  the Palais-de-danse in  Sheffield. You can't make them serious.
The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to the Pally to show
off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons and  what not. I'm
sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier
lads, off to the Pally: let alone  those  that have gone with their girls in
motors  or   on  motor-bikes.  They  don't  give  a  serious  thought  to  a
thing---save Doncaster  races, and  the  Derby: for they  all of them bet on
every race. And football! But even football's not what it was, not by a long
chalk. It's too much like hard work, they say. No, they'd  rather  be off on
motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.'
     `But what do they do when they get there?'
     `Oh,  hang  around---and  have tea  in  some  fine tea-place  like  the
Mikado---and go to the Pally or the  pictures or the Empire, with some girl.
The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.'
     `And what do they do when they haven't the money for these things?'
     `They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But I
don't see how you're going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want is just
money to enjoy themselves, and the  girls  the same, with fine clothes:  and
they  don't  care  about  another  thing.  They  haven't the  brains  to  be
socialists. They haven't enough seriousness to take anything really serious,
and they never will have.'
     Connie  thought,  how extremely  like  all the rest of the classes  the
lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair
or  Kensington. There was only one class  nowadays:  moneyboys. The moneyboy
and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much  you'd got, and how much
you wanted.
     Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford  began to take a new interest in
the mines. He  began to feel he  belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came
into him. After all,  he was the real boss in Tevershall,  he was really the
pits. It  was a new  sense of  power, something he had  till now shrunk from
with dread.
     Tevershall  pits  were  running  thin.  There were only two collieries:
Tevershall  itself,  and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous mine,
and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London was never
very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently. But now times were
bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.
     `There's a  lot  of  Tevershall  men left and gone to  Stacks Gate  and
Whiteover,' said Mrs Bolton. `You've not seen the new works at Stacks  Gate,
opened after the war,  have  you,  Sir  Clifford?  Oh, you must go  one day,
they're  something  quite new:  great big  chemical  works at the  pit-head,
doesn't look a bit like a  colliery. They say they get more money out of the
chemical by-products than  out of  the coal---I  forget what it  is. And the
grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of course it's brought a lot of
riff-raff  from  all  over the country. But a  lot  of Tevershall men got on
there, and doin' well,  a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall's
done, finished:  only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut
down. And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no
Tevershall pit working. It's  bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it
closes  for good, it'll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl
it was  the best pit  in the country, and  a man counted himself lucky if he
could  on here. Oh, there's been some money  made in Tevershall. And now the
men  say  it's a sinking ship, and it's  time they all got out.  Doesn't  it
sound awful! But of course there's  a lot as'll never go  till they have to.
They don't like these new fangled mines,  such a depth, and all machinery to
work them.  Some of them simply  dreads those iron  men, as  they call them,
those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they
say it's wasteful  as well. But what goes in waste is saved  in wages, and a
lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth,
it'll be all machines. But they say that's what folks said when they had  to
give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the
more machines, the  more people, that's  what  it  looks like! They say  you
can't get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks
Gate, and that's  funny, they're not three miles apart. But they say so. But
everybody says it's a  shame  something  can't  be  started, to keep the men
going a bit better,  and employ the girls.  All  the girls traipsing off  to
Sheffield every  day! My  word,  it  would be  something to  talk  about  if
Tevershall  Collieries took  a  new lease  of  life, after everybody  saying
they're  finished, and a sinking ship,  and the men ought to leave them like
rats leave  a sinking ship.  But folks talk so much,  of  course there was a
boom during the war. When Sir  Geoffrey made a trust of  himself and got the
money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and
the owners don't get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you!
Why  I always thought the pits  would  go  on for  ever and ever. Who'd have
thought, when I was a girl! But New England's shut down, so is Colwick Wood:
yes, it's  fair haunting  to  go  through  that  coppy  and see Colwick Wood
standing  there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the
pit-head, and the  lines red rusty. It's like death itself, a dead colliery.
Why,  whatever  should we do if  Tevershall  shut down---? It  doesn't  bear
thinking of. Always that throng it's  been, except at strikes, and even then
the fan-wheels didn't stand,  except when they fetched  the  ponies up.  I'm
sure it's a funny world, you don't know where you are from year to year, you
really don't.'
     It was Mrs Bolton's talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His
income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father's trust, even
though  it  was not large. The pits did not  really concern him. It was  the
other  world he  wanted to capture, the world of  literature and  fame;  the
popular world, not the working world.
     Now  he  realized the distinction  between popular  success and working
success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a private
individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace of pleasure.
And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the  populace
of work,  grim,  grimy,  and  rather terrible. They too  had to  have  their
providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of
work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and
`getting on' in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.
     He  realized  now  that  the  bitch-goddess  of  Success  had  two main
appetites:  one  for  flattery,  adulation,  stroking  and tickling  such as
writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite  for meat and
bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men
who made money in industry.
     Yes,   there  were  two  great  groups  of  dogs   wrangling  for   the
bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement,
stories, films,  plays: and  the other, much less  showy, much  more  savage
breed,   those  who  gave  her  meat,  the  real  substance  of  money.  The
well-groomed  showy dogs of amusement wrangled and  snarled among themselves
for  the  favours  of the  bitch-goddess. But  it was  nothing to the silent
fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.
     But under Mrs Bolton's  influence,  Clifford was tempted to  enter this
other  fight, to  capture the  bitch-goddess  by  brute means  of industrial
production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.
     In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of  him, as Connie  never did. Connie
kept him apart, and made him sensitive and  conscious of himself and his own
states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began
to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.
     He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and  when  he  was
there, he went  down in  a tub, and  in a  tub  he was  hauled out into  the
workings. Things he had learned before the war, and  seemed  utterly to have
forgotten, now came back  to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the
underground manager showing him the  seam with a powerful torch. And he said
little. But his mind began to work.
     He began to read again his technical works on the coal-mining industry,
he studied the government reports, and he  read with  care the latest things
on mining and  the chemistry  of coal and of  shale which  were  written  in
German. Of course the most  valuable discoveries were kept secret as far  as
possible.  But  once  you started  a  sort  of  research  in  the  field  of
coal-mining,  a study of  methods and means, a study  of by-products and the
chemical possibilities  of coal,  it  was astounding the  ingenuity and  the
almost  uncanny  cleverness of the modern  technical mind,  as if really the
devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry.
It  was  far more  interesting  than art,  than  literature,  poor emotional
half-witted stuff, was this  technical  science of industry. In  this field,
men were  like  gods, or demons,  inspired to discoveries,  and  fighting to
carry  them  out.  In  this  activity,  men  were  beyond  atty  mental  age
calculable.  But  Clifford  knew that when  it did come to the emotional and
human life,  these  self-made men were of a  mental age  of about  thirteen,
feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.
     But let that be. Let man slide down to  general idiocy in the emotional
and  `human'  mind, Clifford  did  not care. Let  all that go  hang.  He was
interested  in  the  technicalities of  modern coal-mining, and  in  pulling
Tevershall out of the hole.
     He went down to  the pit  day after day, he studied, he put the general
manager,  and the  overhead manager,  and the underground manager,  and  the
engineers  through a mill  they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt  a  new
sense of  power  flowing through  him: power  over all  these men, over  the
hundreds and hundreds of  colliers. He was finding  out: and he  was getting
things into his grip.
     And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had been
gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and
the conscious being. Now let  all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life
rush into him out of  the coal,  out of the  pit. The very  stale air of the
colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power.
He was doing something: and he was going to do  something. He  was going  to
win,  to win:  not as he had won  with his stories,  mere publicity,  amid a
whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man's victory.
     At first he thought the solution lay  in electricity: convert the  coal
into  electric power.  Then a  new idea  came.  The  Germans  invented a new
locomotive  engine with a  self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And  it
was to be fed  with a new  fuel, that  burnt in small quantities at a  great
heat, under peculiar conditions.
     The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness  at
a fierce heat was  what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of
external stimulus of the burning  of  such fuel, not  merely air supply.  He
began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had proved brilliant
in chemistry, to help him.
     And he felt  triumphant.  He had  at  last  got out of himself.  He had
fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out  of  himself. Art had not
done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.
     He was not  aware how much Mrs Bolton was  behind him.  He did not know
how much  he depended  on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he
was  with her his voice  dropped  to  an easy rhythm  of  intimacy, almost a
trifle vulgar.
     With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and
he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long  as she gave him
mere  outward respect. But it was obvious he had  a secret dread of her. The
new Achilles in hint had a heel, and in this  heel the woman, the woman like
Connie,  his  wife,   could   lame  him  fatally.  He  went  in   a  certain
half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her.  But his voice
was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he  began to be silent whenever
she was present.
     Only when he was alone with  Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and a
master, and  his  voice ran on with  her almost as easily and garrulously as
her own could run. And he let her shave him or  sponge all his body as if he
were a child, really as if he were a child.

        Chapter 10

     Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford
no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer.
He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense,  with a good
deal  of success at  last. He could  sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even
there in the uneasy Midlands.
     And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing
forth. It  amazed and stunned  Connie. But there he would sit, with  a blank
entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen,
or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.
     Was he really listening?  Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst
something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did now know. She fled up
to  her room,  or out  of doors  to the wood.  A  kind of  terror filled her
sometimes,  a  terror  of  the  incipient insanity of  the  whole  civilized
species.
     But now  that  Clifford was  drifting  off to this  other weirdness  of
industrial activity,  becoming  almost a creature,  with  a  hard, efficient
shell of an exterior and a pulpy  interior,  one  of  the  amazing crabs and
lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the
crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and  inner bodies  of
soft pulp, Connie herself was really completely stranded.
     She was not even free,  for Clifford must  have her there. He seemed to
have a nervous terror that she should leave  him. The  curious pulpy part of
him, the emotional and humanly-individual part, depended on her with terror,
like a  child, almost like  an idiot. She must be there,  there at Wragby, a
Lady  Chatterley,  his wife. Otherwise  he would be  lost like an idiot on a
moor.
     This  amazing  dependence  Connie realized  with a sort of horror.  She
heard him with his pit managers, with the members  of his Board,  with young
scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power,
his uncanny material power over what is called practical men.  He had become
a practical man himself and an  amazingly astute and powerful one, a master.
Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence upon him, just at  the crisis
in his life.
     But  this astute and practical man was almost an  idiot when left alone
to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie. She was his wife,  a higher
being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a
worship based  on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the
dread idol.  All he  wanted  was for Connie to swear, to swear  not to leave
him, not to give him away.
     `Clifford,' she said to him---but this was after she had the key to the
hut---`Would you really like me to have a child one day?'
     He looked  at  her with a furtive apprehension in his rather  prominent
pale eyes.
     `I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us,' he said.
     `No difference to what?' she asked.
     `To you and me;  to our love for  one another.  If it's going to affect
that,  then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my
own!'
     She looked at him in amazement.
     `I mean, it might come back to me one of these days.'
     She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.
     `So you would not like it if I had a child?' she said.
     `I tell you,' he  replied  quickly,  like a cornered dog,  `I am  quite
willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that,
I am dead against it.'
     Connie could only  be silent in  cold  fear and contempt. Such talk was
really the  gabbling of an  idiot.  He  no longer knew what  he  was talking
about.
     `Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,' she  said,
with a certain sarcasm.
     `There!' he said. `That is the point! In that case I don't mind  in the
least. I  mean it would  be  awfully nice to have a child running  about the
house, and feel one was building up a future for it. I should have something
to strive for then, and I should  know it was your child, shouldn't I, dear?
And it  would seem just the same  as my own. Because it is you who count  in
these matters. You know that, don't you, dear? I don't enter, I am a cypher.
You are  the great  I-am!  as far as life goes. You know that,  don't you? I
mean, as far as I am concerned. I mean, but for you I am absolutely nothing.
I live for your sake and your future. I am nothing to myself'
     Connie  heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion. It was one of
the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence. What man in his  senses
would say such things to a woman! But men  aren't in their senses.  What man
with a spark of honour would put this ghastly  burden of life-responsibility
upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?
     Moreover, in half an hour's time, Connie heard Clifford talking  to Mrs
Bolton,  in  a  hot,  impulsive  voice,  revealing  himself  in  a  sort  of
passionless passion  to  the  woman,  as  if she were  half  mistress,  half
foster-mother to  him. And  Mrs Bolton was carefully dressing him in evening
clothes, for there were important business guests in the house.
     Connie  really  sometimes felt she would die at this time. She felt she
was being crushed  to  death by  weird lies,  and  by the amazing cruelty of
idiocy. Clifford's strange business efficiency in  a way  over-awed her, and
his declaration  of private worship put her into  a panic. There was nothing
between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and he never touched her.
He never even took her hand and held it kindly. No, and because they were so
utterly out  of touch, he tortured her with his declaration of  idolatry. It
was the cruelty of utter impotence.  And she felt her reason would give way,
or she would die.
     She  fled as  much as  possible to the wood. One afternoon, as she  sat
brooding,  watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well, the keeper had
strode up to her.
     `I got you a key made,  my Lady!' he said, saluting, and he offered her
the key.
     `Thank you so much!' she said, startled.
     `The  hut's not very  tidy, if you don't mind,'  he said. `I cleared it
what I could.'
     `But I didn't want you to trouble!' she said.
     `Oh, it wasn't any trouble. I am setting  the hens in about a week. But
they won't  be scared  of you. I s'll have to see to them morning and night,
but I shan't bother you any more than I can help.'
     `But you wouldn't bother  me,' she  pleaded. `I'd rather  not go to the
hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.'
     He looked at her  with  his  keen  blue  eyes.  He seemed  kindly,  but
distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and
ill. A cough troubled him.
     `You have a cough,' she said.
     `Nothing---a cold!  The last pneumonia left me  with a  cough, but it's
nothing.'
     He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer.
     She  went fairly often to the hut, in the morning  or in the afternoon,
but he was never there.  No  doubt he  avoided  her on purpose. He wanted to
keep his own privacy.
     He had made the  hut  tidy,  put  the little table  and  chair near the
fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the  tools
and  traps  away  as  far  as  possible, effacing himself. Outside,  by  the
clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw,  a shelter for
the birds, and  under it  stood the  live coops. And, one day when she came,
she  found two brown hens sitting alert  and fierce in the coops, sitting on
pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in  all the heat  of  the
pondering female blood. This almost  broke Connie's heart.  She, herself was
so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.
     Then all the live coops were occupied by  hens, three brown and a  grey
and a black.  All alike, they clustered themselves down on  the  eggs in the
soft nestling ponderosity of  the  female urge, the female nature,  fluffing
out  their feathers.  And with brilliant  eyes they watched  Connie,  as she
crouched  before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger  and alarm,
but chiefly of female anger at being approached.
     Connie found corn  in the corn-bin in  the  hut. She offered it to  the
hens in  her hand. They would not eat  it.  Only one  hen pecked at her hand
with  a fierce  little  jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to
give  them  something,  the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves  nor
drank. She brought water in  a little tin, and was delighted when one of the
hens drank.
     Now she came every day  to the  hens, they were the only  things in the
world that warmed  her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from
head  to foot.  Mrs Bolton's voice made her  go cold,  and the sound  of the
business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with
the  same  sense of chill. She felt she would  surely die if it lasted  much
longer.
     Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were  coming in the wood, and  the
leaf-buds on the  hazels were opening like  the  spatter of  green rain. How
terrible  it  was  that  it should be spring, and  everything  cold-hearted,
cold-hearted. Only  the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on  the eggs, were warm
with  their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living  on  the
brink of fainting all the time.
     Then,  one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts  of primroses under
the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to
the coops  and there was  one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round
in front of a coop, and the mother  hen clucking in terror. The  slim little
chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little
spark  of a creature  in seven kingdoms  at that  moment. Connie crouched to
watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! pure, sparky, fearless new life! New
life! So tiny and so  utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little,
scrambling into the coop again, and disappeared under  the hen's feathers in
answer to the mother hen's  wild  alarm-cries, it was not really frightened,
it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny  sharp head
was  poking through  the  gold-brown  feathers of  the hen,  and eyeing  the
Cosmos.
     Connie  was fascinated. And at the  same time, never  had she  felt  so
acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.
     She had only  one desire now, to go  to  the clearing in the wood.  The
rest was a  kind  of  painful dream. But  sometimes she was kept all  day at
Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were going
blank, just blank and insane.
     One evening,  guests or no guests, she escaped after tea.  It was late,
and she fled across the park like one who  fears to  be called back. The sun
was  setting  rosy as she  entered the wood, but she pressed  on  among  the
flowers. The light would last long overhead.
     She arrived  at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was
there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the
little occupants would  be  safe.  But still one little  trio  was pattering
about on  tiny feet, alert drab  mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to
be called in by the anxious mother.
     `I had to come and see the chickens!' she said, panting, glancing shyly
at the keeper, almost unaware of him. `Are there any more?'
     `Thurty-six so far!' he said. `Not bad!'
     He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.
     Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in.
But  still  their  cheeky  heads came  poking  sharply  through  the  yellow
feathers,  then  withdrawing,  then only one  beady little head eyeing forth
from the vast mother-body.
     `I'd  love  to  touch  them,' she said,  putting her  lingers  gingerly
through the  bars  of the  coop.  But  the  mother-hen  pecked  at her  hand
fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.
     `How she pecks  at me!  She hates me!'  she said in a  wondering voice.
`But I wouldn't hurt them!'
     The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees
apart, and put his hand with quiet  confidence slowly into the coop. The old
hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with sure gentle
lingers,  he   felt  among   the   old   bird's  feathers  and  drew  out  a
faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.
     `There!' he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab
thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little stalks
of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through  its almost weightless
feet  into Connie's hands. But  it lifted  its handsome, clean-shaped little
head  boldly,  and looked  sharply  round,  and  gave  a little  `peep'. `So
adorable! So cheeky!' she said softly.
     The keeper, squatting beside her, was also watching with an amused face
the bold little bird in her hands. Suddenly he saw  a  tear  fall  on to her
wrist.
     And he stood up, and stood away, moving to the other coop. For suddenly
he was aware of the old flame shooting and  leaping up in his loins, that he
had hoped was quiescent  for ever. He fought against it, turning his back to
her. But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees.
     He  turned  again to look at her. She was kneeling and  holding her two
hands slowly forward,  blindly,  so that  the chicken should run in  to  the
mother-hen  again. And  there  was  something so mute  and forlorn  in  her,
compassion flamed in his bowels for her.
     Without  knowing, he came quickly towards her  and  crouched beside her
again,  taking the chick from her hands, because she was  afraid of the hen,
and putting it back in the coop. At  the back of his loins the lire suddenly
darted stronger.
     He glanced  apprehensively  at her. Her  face  was averted, and she was
crying  blindly, in  all  the  anguish  of her generation's forlornness. His
heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid
his lingers on her knee.
     `You shouldn't cry,' he said softly.
     But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart
was broken and nothing mattered any more.
     He laid his hand on  her  shoulder, and  softly,  gently, it  began  to
travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to
the curve of her crouching loins. And there his hand softly, softly, stroked
the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.
     She had found her  scrap of handkerchief and was blindly  trying to dry
her face.
     `Shall you come to the hut?' he said, in a quiet, neutral voice.
     And closing his hand softly  on her upper arm,  he  drew her up and led
her  slowly to the hut, not  letting go of her till she was  inside. Then he
cleared aside the chair and table, and took a brown, soldier's blanket  from
the tool chest, spreading it slowly.  She glanced  at his face, as she stood
motionless.
     His face was pale and without expression, like that of a man submitting
to fate.
     `You lie there,'  he said softly,  and he shut the door, so that it was
dark, quite dark.
     With a queer obedience, she lay down on the  blanket. Then she felt the
soft,  groping, helplessly desirous hand touching her  body, feeling for her
face. The hand stroked her  face softly,  softly, with infinite soothing and
assurance, and at last there was the soft touch of a kiss on her cheek.
     She lay  quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream.  Then she
quivered as she  felt his  hand  groping  softly,  yet with  queer  thwarted
clumsiness, among her `clothing. Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her
where it wanted. He drew down the thin silk sheath, slowly, carefully, right
down and over her feet. Then with  a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched
the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had
to come  in to  her  at once,  to  enter  the  peace on earth  of her  soft,
quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry  into the
body of the woman.
     She lay still,  in a  kind of sleep, always  in a kind  of  sleep.  The
activity, the orgasm was his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.
Even the  tightness of his arms round her, even the intense movement of  his
body, and the springing of his seed in her, was a kind of sleep, from  which
she did not begin  to  rouse  till he  had finished and  lay  softly panting
against her breast.
     Then she wondered, just  dimly  wondered, why? Why was  this necessary?
Why had it lifted a great cloud from  her and given her  peace? Was it real?
Was it real?
     Her tormented  modern-woman's brain still had no rest. Was it real? And
she knew, if she gave  herself  to  the man, it  was  real.  But if she kept
herself for herself it was nothing. She was  old; millions of years old, she
felt. And at last, she could bear  the burden of herself no more. She was to
be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.
     The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he
thinking? She did not know.  He  was a strange man to her, she  did not know
him.  She  must  only  wait,  for she did not dare  to  break his mysterious
stillness. He  lay there with his arms round her, his  body on hers, his wet
body touching  hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet  not  unpeaceful.
His very stillness was peaceful.
     She knew that, when at last he  roused and drew away  from her.  It was
like an abandonment. He drew  her dress  in the darkness down over her knees
and  stood a  few  moments, apparently  adjusting his own clothing.  Then he
quietly opened the door and went out.
     She saw a very brilliant little moon  shining above  the afterglow over
the oaks.  Quickly she  got up and arranged herself she was tidy.  Then  she
went to the door of the hut.
     All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead
was crystal. But  it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower shadow
towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch.
     `Shall we go then?' he said.
     `Where?'
     `I'll go with you to the gate.'
     He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of  the hut and came
after her.
     `You aren't sorry, are you?' he asked, as he went at her side.
     `No! No! Are you?' she said.
     `For that! No!'  he said. Then after a while he added: `But there's the
rest of things.'
     `What rest of things?' she said.
     `Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications.'
     `Why complications?' she said, disappointed.
     `It's  always  so.  For  you  as  well   as  for  me.   There's  always
complications.' He walked on steadily in the dark.
     `And are you sorry?' she said.
     `In a way!' he replied, looking up at the sky. `I thought I'd done with
it all. Now I've begun again.'
     `Begun what?'
     `Life.'
     `Life!' she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.
     `It's life,'  he said. `There's  no keeping clear.  And  if you do keep
clear you might almost as well die.  So if I've got to be broken open again,
I have.'
     She did not quite see it that way, but still `It's just love,' she said
cheerfully.
     `Whatever that may be,' he replied.
     They  went on  through the  darkening wood in  silence,  till they were
almost at the gate.
     `But you don't hate me, do you?' she said wistfully.
     `Nay, nay,'  he  replied.  And  suddenly  he held her fast  against his
breast again, with the old connecting passion.  `Nay, for me it was good, it
was good. Was it for you?'
     `Yes, for me too,' she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not
been conscious of much.
     He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth.
     `If only  there weren't  so many other people in the  world,'  he  said
lugubriously.
     She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened it for her.
     `I won't come any further,' he said.
     `No!' And she held  out her hand, as if to shake hands. But he  took it
in both his.
     `Shall I come again?' she asked wistfully.
     `Yes! Yes!'
     She left him and went across the park.
     He stood back and watched her going  into the dark, against the  pallor
of the horizon. Almost  with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected
him up  again, when he  had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter
privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.
     He turned into the dark  of the wood. All was still, the moon had  set.
But he was aware of the noises of the night, the engines at Stacks Gate, the
traffic on the main road. Slowly he  climbed the denuded knoll. And from the
top he could see the country, bright rows of  lights at Stacks Gate, smaller
lights  at  Tevershall  pit,  the  yellow lights  of  Tevershall  and lights
everywhere, here and there, on the dark  country, with the  distant blush of
furnaces,  faint and  rosy,  since the night was  clear, the rosiness of the
outpouring of white-hot metal. Sharp, wicked electric lights at Stacks Gate!
An undefinable quick of evil  in them! And all the unease, the ever-shifting
dread  of  the  industrial   night  in  the  Midlands.  He  could  hear  the
winding-engines  at Stacks Gate  turning down the seven-o'clock miners.  The
pit worked three shifts.
     He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the  wood. But he
knew  that the  seclusion of the  wood was illusory. The  industrial  noises
broke  the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could
no longer be private and withdrawn. The world  allows no hermits. And now he
had taken the woman, and brought on  himself a new cycle  of  pain and doom.
For he knew by experience what it meant.
     It was not woman's fault, nor  even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical
rattlings of  engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy
mechanism  and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal
and roaring with traffic, there  lay the vast evil thing,  ready to  destroy
whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy  the wood, and the bluebells
would spring no  more. All vulnerable things  must perish under  the rolling
and running of iron.
     He  thought  with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing,
she  was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she
was  in contact with. Poor thing, she  too  had some of the vulnerability of
the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the
modern girl. And they  would  do her in! As sure  as life, they would do her
in, as  they do  in all  naturally tender life.  Tender!  Somewhere she  was
tender, tender  with  a  tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that
has gone out of the celluloid women of  today. But he would protect her with
his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron
world  and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them  both in, her as well  as
him.
     He went  home with his gun and his  dog,  to the dark cottage,  lit the
lamp, started the fire, and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions
and  beer. He was alone, in a silence he loved. His room was clean and tidy,
but  rather stark. Yet the  fire was bright, the hearth white, the petroleum
lamp  hung bright over the table, with its white oil-cloth. He tried to read
a book about India, but tonight he could not read. He sat by the fire in his
shirt-sleeves, not smoking, but with a mug of beer in reach.  And he thought
about Connie.
     To tell the truth, he was sorry for what had happened, perhaps most for
her sake. He had a sense of  foreboding. No  sense of wrong or  sin; he  was
troubled by  no conscience  in that  respect.  He knew  that  conscience was
chiefly tear of society,  or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of  himself.
But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to
be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.
     The woman! If she  could be there with him, arid there were nobody else
in  the world! The desire  rose again, his penis began  to  stir like a live
bird. At the same time an oppression, a dread of exposing himself and her to
that outside Thing that sparkled viciously  in the electric  lights, weighed
down his shoulders. She, poor young thing, was just  a young female creature
to  him; but a  young female  creature whom he had  gone  into  and whom  he
desired again.
     Stretching with the curious yawn of desire, for  he had been alone  and
apart from man or woman for four years, he rose and took his coat again, and
his gun, lowered the lamp and went out into the starry night, with the  dog.
Driven by desire  and by dread of  the malevolent Thing outside, he made his
round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved the darkness arid folded himself
into it. It fitted the turgidity  of his desire  which, in spite of all, was
like a riches; the stirring restlessness of his  penis, the stirring fire in
his  loins! Oh, if  only  there were other men  to  be  with, to fight  that
sparkling electric Thing outside  there, to preserve the tenderness of life,
the  tenderness of women,  and the natural  riches of desire. If only  there
were  men to fight side  by side with! But the  men were  all outside there,
glorying in  the  Thing, triumphing  or  being trodden  down  in the rush of
mechanized greed or of greedy mechanism.
     Constance,  for her part,  had  hurried across the  park, home,  almost
without thinking. As  yet she had no afterthought.  She would be in time for
dinner.
     She was annoyed to find the doors fastened, however, so that she had to
ring. Mrs Bolton opened.
     `Why  there you are, your Ladyship! I was beginning to wonder  if you'd
gone lost!' she said a little roguishly. `Sir Clifford hasn't asked for you,
though; he's got Mr Linley in with him, talking over something. It  looks as
if he'd stay to dinner, doesn't it, my Lady?'
     `It does rather,' said Connie.
     `Shall I put dinner back a quarter of an hour? That would give you time
to dress in comfort.'
     `Perhaps you'd better.'
     Mr Linley  was  the general  manager  of the collieries, an elderly man
from the north, with not  quite  enough punch  to suit  Clifford; not up  to
post-war conditions, nor post-war colliers  either,  with their  `ca' canny'
creed. But  Connie liked  Mr Linley, though  she was glad  to  be spared the
toadying of his wife.
     Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess  men liked so much,
so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with  big, wide blue eyes arid a soft
repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie had played
this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but still, decidedly
second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared from her consciousness
while she played it.
     She  waited  patiently  till  she could go  upstairs and think her  own
thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
     Once in  her room,  however,  she felt  still  vague and  confused. She
didn't know what  to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really
like her? Not much, she felt. Yet  he was kind. There was something, a  sort
of warm naive kindness, curious and sudden,  that almost  opened her womb to
him. But she  felt he might be kind  like that to any woman. Though even so,
it  was  curiously  soothing,  comforting.  And  he  was  a passionate  man,
wholesome and passionate. But  perhaps he wasn't quite individual enough; he
might be the same with any woman as he had been  with her.  It really wasn't
personal. She was only really a female to him.
     But perhaps that  was better.  And after all, he was kind to the female
in  her, which  no man had ever been. Men were  very kind  to the person she
was,  but  rather  cruel  to  the  female,  despising  her  or ignoring  her
altogether. Men were awfully  kind  to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley;
but not to her womb they weren't kind. And he took no notice of Constance or
of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.
     She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the
dark-green dogs-mercury  spreading  under the hazel copse, and all the trees
making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in
her  own body, the  huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up,
up to  the  bud-a, there to push into little flamey  oak-leaves,  bronze  as
blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.
     She  came to  the clearing, but  he was not  there. She  had only  half
expected  him.  The pheasant chicks  were  running lightly abroad, light  as
insects, from  the coops where the fellow hens clucked anxiously. Connie sat
and watched them,  and waited. She only waited.  Even the  chicks she hardly
saw. She waited.
     The time  passed with dream-like slowness, and he did not come. She had
only half expected him. He never came in  the afternoon. She must go home to
tea. But she had to force herself to leave.
     As she went home, a fine drizzle of rain fell.
     `Is it raining again?' said Clifford, seeing her shake her hat.
     `Just drizzle.'
     She poured tea  in  silence, absorbed in  a  sort of obstinacy. She did
want  to  see the keeper  today, to  see if it  were really real. If it were
really real.
     `Shall I read a little to you afterwards?' said Clifford.
     She looked at him. Had he sensed something?
     `The spring makes me feel queer---I thought I might rest a little,' she
said.
     `Just as you like. Not feeling really unwell, are you?'
     `No! Only  rather tired---with the spring. Will you  have Mrs Bolton to
play something with you?'
     `No! I think I'll listen in.'
     She heard  the curious satisfaction in  his voice. She went upstairs to
her  bedroom.  There  she  heard  the  loudspeaker  begin to  bellow,  in an
idiotically velveteen-genteel  sort  of  voice, something about a series  of
street-cries,  the  very cream of  genteel affectation imitating old criers.
She pulled  on her  old  violet coloured mackintosh, and slipped out  of the
house at the side door.
     The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed,
not  cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open
her light waterproof.
     The  wood was silent, still and secret in  the evening drizzle of rain,
full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers.  In
the dimness  of  it  all  trees glistened  naked  and  dark as  if they  had
unclothed  themselves,  and  the green things  on  earth  seemed to hum with
greenness.
     There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks  had nearly all gone
under the  mother-hens, only  one or two  last adventurous ones still dibbed
about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were doubtful of
themselves.
     So! He still had not been. He  was staying  away on purpose. Or perhaps
something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.
     But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her  key. It was  all
tidy, the  corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on  the shelf, the straw
neat in a  corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail.
The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.
     She  sat down on  a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The
fine rain  blew  very softly,  filmily, but the wind made no noise.  Nothing
made any sound. The trees  stood like powerful beings, dim,  twilit,  silent
and alive. How alive everything was!
     Night was  drawing  near again; she  would have to go. He  was avoiding
her.
     But suddenly  he came striding into the clearing, in his  black oilskin
jacket  like a  chauffeur, shining with  wet. He glanced quickly at the hut,
half-saluted, then veered  aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched
in silence,  looking  carefully  at everything, then carefully shutting  the
hens and chicks up safe against the night.
     At  last  he  came  slowly towards her. She still sat on her  stool. He
stood before her under the porch.
     `You come then,' he said, using the intonation of the dialect.
     `Yes,' she said, looking up at him. `You're late!'
     `Ay!' he replied, looking away into the wood.
     She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool.
     `Did you want to come in?' she asked.
     He looked down at her shrewdly.
     `Won't folks be thinkin' somethink, you  comin'  here every night?'  he
said.
     `Why?'  She looked up  at him,  at  a loss. `I  said  I'd  come. Nobody
knows.'
     `They soon will, though,' he replied. `An' what then?'
     She was at a loss for an answer.
     `Why should they know?' she said.
     `Folks always does,' he said fatally.
     Her lip quivered a little.
     `Well I can't help it,' she faltered.
     `Nay,' he said.  `You  can help it  by not comin'---if yer want to,' he
added, in a lower tone.
     `But I don't want to,' she murmured.
     He looked away into the wood, and was silent.
     `But  what when  folks  finds out?' he asked at last. `Think  about it!
Think how lowered you'll feel, one of your husband's servants.'
     She looked up at his averted face.
     `Is it,' she stammered, `is it that you don't want me?'
     `Think!'  he  said.  `Think  what if folks find out  Sir  Clifford  an'
a'---an' everybody talkin'---'
     `Well, I can go away.'
     `Where to?'
     `Anywhere! I've got money of my own. My mother left me  twenty thousand
pounds in trust, and I know Clifford can't touch it. I can go away.'
     `But 'appen you don't want to go away.'
     `Yes, yes! I don't care what happens to me.'
     `Ay,  you  think that! But you'll care! You'll have  to care, everybody
has. You've got to remember your Ladyship is carrying on with a game-keeper.
It's not as if I was a gentleman. Yes, you'd care. You'd care.'
     `I shouldn't. What do I care about  my  ladyship!  I hate it  really. I
feel people are jeering every time they say it. And they are, they are! Even
you jeer when you say it.'
     `Me!'
     For the first time he looked straight  at  her, and  into  her eyes. `I
don't jeer at you,' he said.
     As he  looked into her  eyes she saw his  own eyes go dark, quite dark,
the pupils dilating.
     `Don't you  care about a' the risk?' he asked  in a  husky voice.  `You
should care. Don't care when it's too late!'
     There was a curious warning pleading in his voice.
     `But I've nothing to lose,' she  said fretfully. `If  you  knew what it
is, you'd think I'd be glad to lose it. But are you afraid for yourself?'
     `Ay!'  he  said briefly. `I am.  I'm  afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid O'
things.'
     `What things?' she asked.
     He gave  a curious  backward jerk of  his  head, indicating  the  outer
world.
     `Things! Everybody! The lot of 'em.'
     Then he bent down and suddenly kissed her unhappy face.
     `Nay, I don't care,' he said. `Let's have it, an' damn the rest. But if
you was to feel sorry you'd ever done it---!'
     `Don't put me off,' she pleaded.
     He put his fingers to her cheek and kissed her again suddenly.
     `Let me come in then,' he said softly. `An' take off your mackintosh.'
     He hung up his gun, slipped out of his wet leather jacket, and  reached
for the blankets.
     `I brought another blanket,' he said, `so we can put one over us if you
like.'
     `I can't stay long,' she said. `Dinner is half-past seven.'
     He looked at her swiftly, then at his watch.
     `All right,' he said.
     He shut the  door, and lit a  tiny light in the hanging hurricane lamp.
`One time we'll have a long time,' he said.
     He put the blankets  down carefully, one  folded  for her head. Then he
sat down a  moment on the stool, and drew her to him, holding her close with
one arm, feeling for her body with his free hand. She heard the catch of his
intaken breath as he found her. Under her frail petticoat she was naked.
     `Eh! what it is to  touch thee!'  he  said, as his  finger caressed the
delicate, warm, secret skin of her waist and  hips. He put his face down and
rubbed his  cheek against  her belly and against her thighs again and again.
And again  she wondered a little over the sort of rapture it was to him. She
did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living
secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it.
And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is
incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact,
so much deeper than the beauty of vision. She felt the glide of his cheek on
her thighs and belly and buttocks,  and the close  brushing of his moustache
and his soft thick hair, and her knees began to  quiver. Far down in her she
felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging. And she was half afraid. Half
she wished he would not caress her  so. He was encompassing her somehow. Yet
she was waiting, waiting.
     And when  he  came into  her,  with  an  intensification of  relief and
consummation that was pure peace  to him, still she  was  waiting. She  felt
herself a little  left out. And she knew, partly it  was her own fault.  She
willed  herself into this separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it.
She lay  still, feeling his motion within her, his deep-sunk intentness, the
sudden quiver of him at  the springing of his seed, then the  slow-subsiding
thrust. That thrust of the  buttocks, surely it  was a little ridiculous. If
you were  a woman, and a part in all the business, surely  that thrusting of
the  man's buttocks was  supremely ridiculous.  Surely the man was intensely
ridiculous in this posture and this act!
     But she lay still,  without recoil. Even when he had  finished, she did
not rouse herself to get a grip  on her  own satisfaction, as  she  had done
with Michaelis; she lay still, and the tears slowly filled and ran  from her
eyes.
     He lay  still, too. But he held her  close and tried to cover  her poor
naked  legs  with his legs, to keep them  warm.  He lay on her with a close,
undoubting warmth.
     `Are yer cold?' he asked, in a soft, small voice, as if she were close,
so close. Whereas she was left out, distant.
     `No! But I must go,' she said gently.
     He sighed, held her closer, then relaxed to rest again.
     He had not guessed her tears. He thought she was there with him.
     `I must go,' she repeated.
     He lifted himself kneeled beside her a moment, kissed the inner side of
her thighs, then drew down her skirts, buttoning his own clothes unthinking,
not even turning aside, in the faint, faint light from the lantern.
     `Tha mun come  ter  th' cottage one time,' he said, looking down at her
with a warm, sure, easy face.
     But she  lay there inert, and was gazing up  at him thinking: Stranger!
Stranger! She even resented him a little.
     He  put  on his coat and looked for his  hat, which had fallen, then he
slung on his gun.
     `Come  then!' he said, looking  down  at  her with those warm, peaceful
sort of eyes.
     She rose slowly. She didn't  want  to  go.  She  also  rather  resented
staying. He helped her with her thin waterproof and saw she was tidy.
     Then he opened the door. The outside  was quite dark. The  faithful dog
under  the  porch stood  up  with  pleasure  seeing him. The drizzle of rain
drifted greyly past upon the darkness. It was quite dark.
     `Ah mun ta'e th' lantern,' he said. `The'll be nob'dy.'
     He walked just  before her  in the narrow  path, swinging the hurricane
lamp low, revealing  the wet grass, the  black shiny tree-roots like snakes,
wan flowers. For the rest, all was grey rain-mist and complete darkness.
     `Tha mun come to the cottage one time,' he said, `shall ta? We might as
well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.'
     It  puzzled  her,  his queer,  persistent wanting  her,  when there was
nothing  between  them, when he never really  spoke to  her, and in spite of
herself she resented the dialect. His `tha mun come' seemed not addressed to
her, but some common woman. She recognized the foxglove leaves of the riding
and knew, more or less, where they were.
     `It's quarter past  seven,' he said, `you'll do it.' He had changed his
voice,  seemed to feel  her distance. As  they turned  the last bend  in the
riding towards the  hazel wall and the gate, he  blew out  the light. `We'll
see from here,' be said, taking her gently by the arm.
     But it was difficult, the earth under their feet was a mystery,  but he
felt  his  way by  tread: he was used to it. At  the gate he  gave  her  his
electric torch. `It's a bit lighter in the  park,' he said; `but take it for
fear you get off th' path.'
     It was true, there seemed a ghost-glimmer of greyness in the open space
of the park. He suddenly drew her  to  him and  whipped  his hand  under her
dress again, feeling her warm body with his wet, chill hand.
     `I  could die  for the  touch  of  a woman like thee,'  he said  in his
throat. `If tha' would stop another minute.'
     She felt the sudden force of his wanting her again.
     `No, I must run,' she said, a little wildly.
     `Ay,' he replied, suddenly changed, letting her go.
     She  turned  away, and on the instant she  turned  back  to him saying:
`Kiss me.'
     He bent over her indistinguishable and kissed her on the left eye.  She
held her mouth  and he softly  kissed it, but at  once drew  away.  He hated
mouth kisses.
     `I'll come tomorrow,' she said, drawing away; `if I can,' she added.
     `Ay! not so  late,' he replied  out  of the darkness. Already she could
not see him at all.
     `Goodnight,' she said.
     `Goodnight, your Ladyship,' his voice.
     She stopped and looked back into  the wet dark. She could just see  the
bulk of him. `Why did you say that?' she said.
     `Nay,' he replied. `Goodnight then, run!'
     She plunged on in the dark-grey tangible night. She found the side-door
open,  and slipped into her room  unseen.  As she closed the  door the  gong
sounded, but she would take her bath all the same---she must take her  bath.
`But I won't be late any more,' she said to herself; `it's too annoying.'
     The next day she did not go to the wood. She went instead with Clifford
to Uthwaite.  He could  occasionally go  out now in the car, and  had  got a
strong young man as chauffeur, who could help him out of the car if need be.
He particularly wanted  to see his godfather,  Leslie Winter,  who  lived at
Shipley Hall, not far  from  Uthwaite. Winter was an elderly  gentleman now,
wealthy, one of the  wealthy  coal-owners who had had their hey-day in  King
Edward's  time. King Edward had  stayed more  than  once at Shipley, for the
shooting. It was a handsome old stucco hall, very  elegantly appointed,  for
Winter was a bachelor  and prided  himself on his style;  but the place  was
beset  by collieries. Leslie Winter was attached to Clifford, but personally
did not  entertain a great  respect  for him, because of the photographs  in
illustrated papers and the  literature. The  old man was a buck of  the King
Edward school,  who thought life was life and  the  scribbling fellows  were
something  else. Towards  Connie  the Squire was always  rather gallant;  he
thought her an attractive  demure maiden and rather wasted on Clifford,  and
it  was a  thousand pities she stood no chance of bringing forth an  heir to
Wragby. He himself had no heir.
     Connie  wondered  what  he  would  say  if   he  knew  that  Clifford's
game-keeper had been having intercourse with her, and saying to her `tha mun
come to  th' cottage one  time.' He would detest and despise her, for he had
come almost to hate the shoving forward of the working classes. A man of her
own  class  he  would not mind, for Connie was gifted from nature with  this
appearance of demure, submissive maidenliness,  and  perhaps it was part  of
her nature. Winter  called her `dear child'  and  gave her  a rather  lovely
miniature of an eighteenth-century lady, rather against her will.
     But Connie was preoccupied with her affair with the keeper.  After all,
Mr Winter, who was really a gentleman and a man of the world, treated her as
a person  and a discriminating individual; he did not lump her together with
all the rest of his female womanhood in his `thee' and `tha'.
     She  did not go  to the  wood that  day  nor  the  next,  nor  the  day
following. She did not go so long as she felt, or imagined she felt, the man
waiting for her, wanting her. But the fourth day she was  terribly unsettled
and uneasy. She  still refused to go to the  wood  and open her  thighs once
more  to  the  man. She thought  of  all the things  she might do---drive to
Sheffield, pay visits, and the thought of all these things was repellent. At
last she decided to  take a  walk, not towards the wood, but in the opposite
direction; she would go to  Marehay, through  the little iron  gate  in  the
other side  of  the park  fence.  It was a quiet grey day of  spring, almost
warm. She  walked  on  unheeding,  absorbed in  thoughts  she was  not  even
conscious of  She was not really aware of anything outside her, till she was
startled by the loud barking  of the dog at Marehay Farm. Marehay  Farm! Its
pastures  ran up to Wragby park fence, so they were  neighbours, but it  was
some time since Connie had called.
     `Bell!'  she  said  to  the  big  white bull-terrier.  `Bell! have  you
forgotten me? Don't  you know  me?'  She was afraid  of dogs, and Bell stood
back  and bellowed, and  she wanted to pass through  the farmyard on  to the
warren path.
     Mrs Flint appeared. She  was a woman of Constance's own age, had been a
school-teacher, but  Connie  suspected her of  being rather  a false  little
thing.
     `Why,  it's  Lady Chatterley! Why!' And Mrs Flint's eyes glowed  again,
and she  flushed  like  a  young girl.  `Bell,  Bell. Why! barking  at  Lady
Chatterley! Bell! Be quiet!' She  darted forward and slashed at the dog with
a white cloth she held in her hand, then came forward to Connie.
     `She  used  to  know me,' said Connie, shaking hands.  The Flints  were
Chatterley tenants.
     `Of course she  knows your  Ladyship! She's just showing off,' said Mrs
Flint, glowing and looking up with a sort of flushed confusion, `but it's so
long since she's seen you. I do hope you are better.'
     `Yes thanks, I'm all right.'
     `We've  hardly  seen you all  winter. Will you come in and  look at the
baby?'
     `Well!' Connie hesitated. `Just for a minute.'
     Mrs Flint flew wildly in  to tidy up, and Connie came slowly after her,
hesitating in  the rather dark kitchen where  the kettle was  boiling by the
fire. Back came Mrs Flint.
     `I do hope you'll excuse me,' she said. `Will you come in here?'
     They  went  into the living-room, where a  baby was sitting on the  rag
hearth  rug, and  the table was roughly set  for  tea. A young  servant-girl
backed down the passage, shy and awkward.
     The baby was  a perky little thing  of about a year, with red hair like
its father, and cheeky pale-blue eyes. It was a girl, and not to be daunted.
It  sat among cushions and was surrounded with rag  dolls  and other toys in
modern excess.
     `Why,  what  a dear she  is!' said Connie, `and how she's grown!  A big
girl! A big girl!'
     She had given  it a shawl  when  it was born, and celluloid  ducks  for
Christmas.
     `There, Josephine!  Who's that  come to see you? Who's this, Josephine?
Lady Chatterley---you know Lady Chatterley, don't you?'
     The queer  pert  little mite gazed cheekily  at Connie. Ladyships  were
still all the same to her.
     `Come! Will you come to me?' said Connie to the baby.
     The baby didn't care one way or another,  so  Connie picked  her up and
held her  in her lap.  How warm and lovely  it was to hold a child in  one's
lap, and the soft little arms, the unconscious cheeky little legs.
     `I  was just having a rough  cup  of tea all by myself.  Luke's gone to
market, so  I can  have  it when I  like.  Would you care  for  a  cup, Lady
Chatterley? I don't suppose it's what you're used to, but if you would...'
     Connie would, though  she didn't want to be  reminded  of  what she was
used to. There was a great relaying of the table, and  the best cups brought
and the best tea-pot.
     `If only you wouldn't take any trouble,' said Connie.
     But if Mrs Flint took no  trouble, where was the fun!  So Connie played
with the child and was amused by  its little female dauntlessness, and got a
deep  voluptuous pleasure out of  its soft  young warmth. Young life! And so
fearless! So  fearless,  because so defenceless. All  the other  people,  so
narrow with fear!
     She  had a cup of tea, which was rather strong, and very good bread and
butter, and bottled damsons. Mrs  Flint flushed and glowed  and bridled with
excitement, as  if Connie  were some gallant  knight.  And  they had a  real
female chat, and both of them enjoyed it.
     `It's a poor little tea, though,' said Mrs Flint.
     `It's much nicer than at home,' said Connie truthfully.
     `Oh-h!' said Mrs Flint, not believing, of course.
     But at last Connie rose.
     `I must  go,' she said. `My husband has  no  idea where I am.  He'll be
wondering all kinds of things.'
     `He'll never think you're here,' laughed Mrs Flint excitedly. `He'll be
sending the crier round.'
     `Goodbye,  Josephine,' said Connie, kissing the baby  and ruffling  its
red, wispy hair.
     Mrs Flint insisted on opening the locked  and barred front door. Connie
emerged in the farm's little front garden, shut  in by a privet hedge. There
were two rows of auriculas by the path, very velvety and rich.
     `Lovely auriculas,' said Connie.
     `Recklesses, as Luke calls them,' laughed Mrs Flint. `Have some.'
     And eagerly she picked the velvet and primrose flowers.
     `Enough! Enough!' said Connie.
     They came to the little garden gate.
     `Which way were you going?' asked Mrs Flint.
     `By the Warren.'
     `Let me see! Oh yes, the cows  are in the gin close. But they're not up
yet. But the gate's locked, you'll have to climb.'
     `I can climb,' said Connie.
     `Perhaps I can just go down the close with you.'
     They went down the poor, rabbit-bitten pasture. Birds were whistling in
wild evening triumph in the wood. A  man was calling up the last cows, which
trailed slowly over the path-worn pasture.
     `They're late, milking,  tonight,'  said Mrs Flint severely. `They know
Luke won't be back till after dark.'
     They came to the fence, beyond which the young fir-wood bristled dense.
There was a little gate, but it was locked. In the grass on the inside stood
a bottle, empty.
     `There's the keeper's empty bottle for his milk,'  explained Mrs Flint.
`We bring it as far as here for him, and then he fetches it himself'
     `When?' said Connie.
     `Oh, any time he's  around. Often in the  morning.  Well, goodbye  Lady
Chatterley! And do come again. It was so lovely having you.'
     Connie  climbed  the  fence into  the  narrow path  between  the dense,
bristling young firs.  Mrs Flint went  running back across the pasture, in a
sun-bonnet, because she was really  a  schoolteacher. Constance didn't  like
this dense new part of the wood; it seemed gruesome and choking. She hurried
on with her head down, thinking of the  Flints' baby.  It was a  dear little
thing, but it would be a bit  bow-legged like its father. It showed already,
but perhaps it would grow out of it. How warm and fulfilling somehow to have
a baby, and how Mrs Flint had showed it off!  She had something anyhow  that
Connie hadn't got, and apparently couldn't have. Yes, Mrs Flint had flaunted
her  motherhood. And Connie had been just a bit, just a  little bit jealous.
She couldn't help it.
     She started out of  her muse, and gave  a little cry of fear. A man was
there.
     It was the keeper.  He stood in the path like Balaam's ass, barring her
way.
     `How's this?' he said in surprise.
     `How did you come?' she panted.
     `How did you? Have you been to the hut?'
     `No! No! I went to Marehay.'
     He looked at her curiously, searchingly, and she hung her head a little
guiltily.
     `And  were you going to the  hut now?'  he asked rather sternly. `No! I
mustn't. I stayed at Marehay. No one knows where I am. I'm late. I've got to
run.'
     `Giving  me  the slip, like?' he said, with a faint ironic smile.  `No!
No. Not that. Only---'
     `Why, what else?' he said. And he stepped  up  to  her and put his arms
around her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.
     `Oh, not now, not now,' she cried, trying to push him away.
     `Why not? It's only six o'clock. You've  got half  an hour. Nay! Nay! I
want you.'
     He held  her  fast and she felt  his urgency. Her old instinct  was  to
fight  for her freedom. But something else in  her was strange and inert and
heavy. His body was urgent against her, and she hadn't the heart any more to
fight.
     He looked around.
     `Come---come here! Through here,'  he said,  looking penetratingly into
the dense fir-trees, that were young and not more than half-grown.
     He looked  back at her. She saw his eyes, tense  and brilliant, fierce,
not loving. But  her will had left her.  A strange weight was  on her limbs.
She was giving way. She was giving up.
     He led her through the wall  of prickly trees,  that were  difficult to
come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead boughs.
He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and
she  had to  lie down there  under the boughs of the tree, like  an  animal,
while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with
haunted  eyes.  But  still  he was  provident---he  made her  lie  properly,
properly. Yet  he broke  the  band of her underclothes, for she did not help
him, only lay inert.
     He  too  had bared  the front part  of his body and she felt  his naked
flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her,
turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless
orgasm,  there  awoke  in  her  new  strange  thrills  rippling  inside her.
Rippling,  rippling,  rippling, like  a flapping overlapping of soft flames,
soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance,  exquisite, exquisite and
melting her  all  molten inside.  It was like bells rippling up  and up to a
culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the
last. But it was over  too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her
own conclusion  with her  own  activity. This was different,  different. She
could  do  nothing.  She  could  no  longer  harden  and  grip  for  her own
satisfaction  upon him. She could only wait,  wait and moan in spirit as she
felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and  contracting,  coming to the  terrible
moment when he would  slip out  of her and be gone. Whilst all her  womb was
open and  soft, and softly clamouring, like  a  sea-anemone under  the tide,
clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She clung
to him unconscious iii passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she
felt the  soft bud of  him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing
up into her with  a  strange rhythmic growing motion,  swelling and swelling
till it  filled  all  her cleaving consciousness,  and  then began again the
unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools
of  sensation  swirling  deeper  and  deeper  through  all  her  tissue  and
consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she
lay  there crying  in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice  out  of the
uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of  awe,
as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay
utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed,  and she lay
inert. And they  lay  and knew nothing,  not even of each  other, both lost.
Till at  last  he  began  to  rouse  and  become aware  of  his  defenceless
nakedness, and she was aware that his  body was loosening its  clasp on her.
He was coming apart;  but in her breast she felt  she could not bear  him to
leave her uncovered. He must cover her now for ever.
     But he drew away  at  last, and kissed  her and  covered her over,  and
began to cover himself She lay looking  up to the boughs of the tree, unable
as yet to move. He stood and fastened  up  his breeches,  looking round. All
was dense and silent,  save for the awed dog that lay with its paws  against
its  nose. He sat  down again on the  brushwood and  took Connie's  hand  in
silence.
     She  turned  and looked at  him. `We  came off together that  time,' he
said.
     She did not answer.
     `It's good when it's like that. Most folks live their lives through and
they never know it,' he said, speaking rather dreamily.
     She looked into his brooding face.
     `Do they?' she said. `Are you glad?'
     He looked back into her eyes. `Glad,' he said, `Ay, but never mind.' He
did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt,
so he must kiss her for ever.
     At last she sat up.
     `Don't people often come off together?' she asked with naive curiosity.
     `A good many of them  never.  You can see  by the raw look of them.' He
spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.
     `Have you come off like that with other women?'
     He looked at her amused.
     `I don't know,' he said, `I don't know.'
     And she knew he would never tell  her anything  he didn't want to  tell
her. She  watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She
resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.
     He put on his waistcoat and his  coat, and pushed  a way through to the
path again.
     The last  level  rays of  the sun touched the wood.  `I won't come with
you,' he said; `better not.'
     She looked  at him wistfully  before she turned. His dog was waiting so
anxiously  for him  to go,  and he  seemed to have  nothing whatever to say.
Nothing left.
     Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her.
Another self was  alive  in  her, burning  molten  and soft in  her womb and
bowels, and  with this self  she  adored  him. She adored him till her knees
were weak as she walked.  In her womb and  bowels she  was flowing and alive
now  and vulnerable,  and  helpless  in adoration of  him as  the most naive
woman. It feels  like a child, she said to herself it feels like a child  in
me. And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and
filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.
     `If I had  a child!' she thought to herself; `if I had him inside me as
a child!'---and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realized the
immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a
man whom  one's  bowels  yearned  towards.  The  former  seemed  in a  sense
ordinary: but to have a child to  a man whom  one adored in one's bowels and
one's womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self and as
if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre  of  all womanhood and the sleep
of creation.
     It  was  not the  passion that  was new  to her,  it was  the  yearning
adoration. She knew she had always  feared it, for it left her helpless; she
feared  it still,  lest  if she adored him  too  much, then  she  would lose
herself become effaced,  and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a
savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she
would not at  once fight against it. She knew she  could fight it. She had a
devil  of self-will  in her  breast that  could  have  fought the full  soft
heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it. She could even  now do it,  or
she thought so, and she could then take up her passion with her own will.
     Ah yes, to  be passionate like a  Bacchante, like  a Bacchanal  fleeing
through  the woods, to call  on  Iacchos,  the  bright  phallos that had  no
independent  personality  behind it, but was pure god-servant to  the woman!
The  man,  the  individual,  let  him  not  dare  intrude.   He  was  but  a
temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallos, her own.
     So,  in the flux of new awakening, the  old hard passion flamed in  her
for  a  time,  and  the  man dwindled  to  a  contemptible object,  the mere
phallos-bearer, to be torn  to pieces  when his service  was performed.  She
felt the force of  the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman gleaming
and  rapid,  beating down the male;  but  while she felt this, her heart was
heavy.  She  did not  want  it,  it  was known  and barren,  birthless;  the
adoration was her treasure.
     It  was so  fathomless, so soft, so  deep and so unknown.  No, no,  she
would give up her hard  bright female  power; she was weary of it, stiffened
with it; she would  sink in the new bath of life, in the  depths of her womb
and  her bowels that sang  the voiceless song of adoration. It was early yet
to begin to fear the man.
     `I walked over by Marehay, and  I  had tea with Mrs Flint,' she said to
Clifford. `I wanted to see the  baby. It's  so  adorable, with hair like red
cobwebs. Such a dear! Mr Flint had gone to market, so she and I and the baby
had tea together. Did you wonder where I was?'
     `Well, I wondered,  but I guessed you had dropped in somewhere to tea,'
said Clifford jealously. With a sort of second sight he sensed something new
in her, something to  him quite incomprehensible, hut  he ascribed it to the
baby.  He thought that  all that ailed  Connie  was that  she did not have a
baby, automatically bring one forth, so to speak.
     `I saw you  go  across the park to the iron  gate,  my Lady,' said  Mrs
Bolton; `so I thought perhaps you'd called at the Rectory.'
     `I nearly did, then I turned towards Marehay instead.'
     The  eyes of  the  two  women  met:  Mrs  Bolton's  grey and bright and
searching; Connie's blue and veiled and strangely  beautiful. Mrs Bolton was
almost sure she had a lover, yet how could it be, and who could it be? Where
was there a man?
     `Oh,  it's  so  good  for you, if you  go out and  see a bit of company
sometimes,' said Mrs Bolton. `I was saying to Sir Clifford,  it would do her
ladyship a world of good if she'd go out among people more.'
     `Yes, I'm glad  I went, and such a quaint dear cheeky  baby, Clifford,'
said  Connie. `It's got hair just like spider-webs, and  bright  orange, and
the  oddest, cheekiest,  pale-blue china eyes.  Of course it's a girl, or it
wouldn't be so bold, bolder than any little Sir Francis Drake.'
     `You're right, my  Lady---a regular little Flint.  They were  always  a
forward sandy-headed family,' said Mrs Bolton.
     `Wouldn't you like  to see it, Clifford? I've asked them to tea for you
to see it.'
     `Who?' he asked, looking at Connie in great uneasiness. `Mrs Flint  and
the baby, next Monday.'
     `You can have them to tea up in your room,' he said.
     `Why, don't you want to see the baby?' she cried.
     `Oh,  I'll see  it,  but I  don't  want to sit  through a tea-time with
them.'
     `Oh,' cried Connie, looking at him with wide veiled eyes.
     She did not really see him, he was somebody else.
     `You can have  a nice cosy tea up in your room, my Lady,  and Mrs Flint
will be more comfortable than if Sir Clifford was there,' said Mrs Bolton.
     She was sure Connie had a lover, and something in her soul e