never knew how to answer  him when he was in this condition of the
vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little ignominiously
home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously home.
     He would accompany  her to the  broad riding. His  young pheasants were
all right under the shelter.
     When  he  and she  came out on  to the  riding, there  was  Mrs  Bolton
faltering palely towards them.
     `Oh, my Lady, we wondered if anything had happened!'
     `No! Nothing has happened.'
     Mrs Bolton looked  into the man's face, that was smooth and new-looking
with love. She met his half-laughing,  half-mocking eyes. He  always laughed
at mischance. But he looked at her kindly.
     `Evening,  Mrs Bolton! Your  Ladyship will be all right now,  so I  can
leave you. Good-night to your Ladyship! Good-night, Mrs Bolton!'
     He saluted and turned away.

        Chapter 16

     Connie  arrived  home  to an ordeal of  cross-questioning. Clifford had
been out at  tea-time, had come  in just before the storm, and where was her
ladyship?  Nobody knew, only Mrs  Bolton  suggested  she had gone for a walk
into the wood. Into the wood, in such a storm! Clifford for once let himself
get into a state of nervous frenzy. He started  at every flash of lightning,
and blenched at every roll of  thunder. He looked at the icy thunder-rain as
if it dare the end of the world. He got more and more worked up.
     Mrs Bolton tried to soothe him.
     `She'll be sheltering  in  the  hut,  till  it's over. Don't worry, her
Ladyship is all right.'
     `I don't like her being in the wood in a  storm like this! I don't like
her being  in the wood at all! She's been gone now more than two hours. When
did she go out?'
     `A little while before you came in.'
     `I  didn't see her in the  park. God  knows  where she is and what  has
happened to her.'
     `Oh,  nothing's  happened  to  her. You'll see, she'll be home directly
after the rain stops. It's just the rain that's keeping her.'
     But her ladyship did not come  home directly  the rain stopped. In fact
time went by,  the sun came out for his last yellow glimpse, and there still
was  no  sign of  her. The sun was set,  it  was growing dark, and the first
dinner-gong had rung.
     `It's no good!' said Clifford in a frenzy. `I'm going to send out Field
and Betts to find her.'
     `Oh don't do that!'  cried Mrs Bolton. `They'll think there's a suicide
or something. Oh  don't  start a lot of talk going. Let me slip over  to the
hut and see if she's not there. I'll find her all right.'
     So, after some persuasion, Clifford allowed her to go.
     And  so  Connie  had  come  upon  her  in the  drive, alone and  palely
loitering.
     `You mustn't mind me coming to look for you, my  Lady! But Sir Clifford
worked  himself  up  into  such  a state.  He  made sure  you were struck by
lightning, or killed by a falling tree. And he was  determined to send Field
and Betts to the wood to find the body. So I thought I'd better come, rather
than set all the servants agog.
     She  spoke  nervously.  She  could  still  see  on  Connie's  face  the
smoothness and the half-dream  of passion, and she could feel the irritation
against herself.
     `Quite!' said Connie. And she could say no more.
     The two women plodded on through the wet world, in silence, while great
drops  splashed like explosions  in  the wood.  Ben they  came to the  park,
Connie strode  ahead, and  Mrs  Bolton  panted  a  little.  She  was getting
plumper.
     `How foolish  of  Clifford  to  make a  fuss!'  said Connie  at length,
angrily, really speaking to herself.
     `Oh, you know what  men are! They like working themselves up. But he'll
be all right as soon as he sees your Ladyship.'
     Connie  was very angry  that Mrs Bolton knew her secret: for  certainly
she knew it.
     Suddenly Constance stood still on the path.
     `It's monstrous that  I should have to be followed!' she said, her eyes
flashing.
     `Oh! your  Ladyship,  don't say that! He'd certainly have  sent the two
men, and they'd have  come straight to the  hut. I didn't know where it was,
really.'
     Connie  flushed darker  with rage, at  the suggestion. Yet,  while  her
passion was on her, she could not  lie. She could not even pretend there was
nothing between  herself and the keeper. She looked  at the other woman, who
stood so sly, with  her  head dropped: yet somehow,  in her  femaleness,  an
ally.
     `Oh well!' she said. `I fit is so it is so. I don't mind!'
     `Why, you're all right,  my Lady!  You've  only been sheltering  in the
hut. It's absolutely nothing.'
     They  went  on  to the house.  Connie  marched in  to Clifford's  room,
furious with him, furious  with his  pale, over-wrought  fee  and  prominent
eyes.
     `I must say, I don't  think you need send the servants  after  me,' she
burst out.
     `My  God!'  he exploded. `Where have  you been, woman, You've been gone
hours,  hours,  and in  a  storm like this! What  the  hell  do  you  go  to
that-bloody wood for? What  have you been up to?  It's  hours even since the
rain  stopped, hours! Do you know  what time it  is? You're enough  to drive
anybody  mad. Where have you been? What in the name  of hell  have  you been
doing?'
     `And  what if I don't choose  to tell you?' She pulled her hat from her
head and shook her hair.
     He lied  at her  with  his eyes  bulging, and  yellow  coming into  the
whites. It  was very bad  for him to get into these rages: Mrs Bolton had  a
weary time with him, for days after. Connie felt a sudden qualm.
     But really!' she said,  milder. `Anyone would think  I'd  been  I don't
know where! I just  sat in the hut during all  the storm, and  made myself a
little fire, and was happy.'
     She spoke now easily. After all, why work him up any more!
     He looked at her suspiciously.
     And look at your hair!' he said; `look at yourself!'
     `Yes!' she replied calmly. `I ran out in the rain with no clothes on.'
     He stared at her speechless.
     `You must be mad!' he said.
     `Why? To like a shower bath from the rain?'
     `And how did you dry yourself?'
     `On an old towel and at the fire.'
     He still stared at her in a dumbfounded way.
     `And supposing anybody came,' he said.
     `Who would come?'
     `Who? Why,  anybody! And  Mellors. Does  he come?  He must come in  the
evenings.'
     `Yes, he came later, when it had cleared up, to feed the pheasants with
corn.'
     She spoke  with amazing nonchalance. Mrs  Bolton, who was listening  in
the next room,  heard in sheer  admiration. To  think a woman could carry it
off so naturally!
     `And suppose he'd  come while  you were running  about in the rain with
nothing on, like a maniac?'
     `I suppose he'd  have had the fright of his life, and  cleared  out  as
fast as he could.'
     Clifford  still  stared  at her  transfixed.  What  he  thought  in his
under-consciousness he would never know.  And he was too much taken aback to
form  one clear thought  in his upper consciousness. He just simply accepted
what she  said, in a  sort of blank. And he admired  her. He could not  help
admiring her. She looked so flushed and handsome and smooth: love smooth.
     `At  least,'  he said,  subsiding, `you'll  be lucky if you've got  off
without a severe cold.'
     `Oh, I haven't got a cold,' she replied. She was thinking to herself of
the other  man's  words: Tha's got the nicest  woman's  arse of anybody! She
wished, she dearly wished she could tell  Clifford  that this  had been said
her, during  the famous thunderstorm. However! She bore  herself rather like
an offended queen, and went upstairs to change.
     That evening, Clifford wanted to be nice  to her. He was reading one of
the latest scientific-religious books: he had a streak of a spurious sort of
religion in him, and was egocentrically concerned with the future of his own
ego. It was like  his habit to make conversation to Connie about  some book,
since the conversation between them had to be made,  almost chemically. They
had almost chemically to concoct it in their heads.
     `What do  you  think  of this,  by the way?' he said,  reaching for his
book. `You'd  have no need to cool  your  ardent  body by running out in the
rain, if only we have a  few more aeons  of evolution behind us. Ah, here it
is!---"The  universe shows us  two  aspects: on  one  side it is  physically
wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending."'
     Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford  was  waiting. She looked
at him in surprise.
     `And  if it spiritually ascends,' she  said, `what does  it  leave down
below, in the place where its tail used to be?'
     `Ah!'  he  said. `Take the  man  for what  he means. Ascending  is  the
opposite of his wasting, I presume.'
     `Spiritually blown out, so to speak!'
     `No, but seriously, without joking: do  you think  there is anything in
it?'
     She looked at him again.
     `Physically wasting?' she said. `I see you  getting fatter, and I'm sot
wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He's not
to  me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered  Eve wasn't really much bigger,
if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?'
     `Well, hear how he goes on: "It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness
inconceivable  in our  measures of  time,  to new  creative conditions, amid
which the physical world, as we at present know it, will he represented by a
ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity."'
     She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts  of improper things
suggested themselves. But she only said:
     `What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could
know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means he's a physical
failure on the earth,  so  he wants to  make the whole universe  a  physical
failure. Priggish little impertinence!'
     `Oh, but listen! Don't  interrupt the great man's solemn  words!---"The
present type of order in  the world has risen from an unimaginable part, and
will   find  its  grave  in  an   unimaginable  future.  There  remains  the
inexhaustive realm  of  abstract  forms,  and creativity with  its  shifting
character ever  determined afresh by its own  creatures, and God, upon whose
wisdom all forms of order depend."---There, that's how he winds up!'
     Connie sat listening contemptuously.
     `He's  spiritually  blown  out,'  she  said.  `What  a  lot  of  stuff!
Unnimaginables, and types of  order in graves, and realms of abstract forms,
and creativity with a shifty character,  and  God  mixed up  with  forms  of
order! Why, it's idiotic!'
     `I must say, it is  a little vaguely  conglomerate, a mixture of gases,
so  to speak,' said Clifford. `Still, I think there is something in the idea
that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending.'
     `Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly
physically here below.'
     `Do you like your physique?' he asked.
     `I love it!' And  through her mind  went the words:  It's  the  nicest,
nicest woman's arse as is!
     `But that is really rather  extraordinary,  because there's  no denying
it's an  encumbrance.  But  then I suppose a woman doesn't  take  a  supreme
pleasure in the life of the mind.'
     `Supreme  pleasure?' she said,  looking  up at him.  `Is that  sort  of
idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the  mind? No thank you!  Give me
the body. I believe the life of the body  is a greater reality than the life
of  the mind: when the body  is really wakened to  life. But so many people,
like  your  famous  wind-machine,  have  only got minds tacked  on to  their
physical corpses.'
     He looked at her in wonder.
     `The life of the body,' he said, `is just the life of the animals.'
     `And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But  it's not
true!  the human body is only  just coming  to real life. With the Greeks it
gave  a  lovely flicker, then  Plato  and  Aristotle  killed  it, and  Jesus
finished it off.  But now  the body  is coming really to life,  it is really
rising from  the tomb. And It will be  a lovely, lovely  life in  the lovely
universe, the life of the human body.'
     `My  dear, you speak as if  you were  ushering it all in! True, you  am
going away  on  a  holiday: but don't please  be quite  so indecently elated
about it.  Believe me, whatever  God there is is slowly eliminating the guts
and  alimentary  system  from the  human being, to  evolve  a  higher,  more
spiritual being.'
     `Why  should  I believe you, Clifford, when I  feel that  whatever  God
there  is  has at  last  wakened  up  in my guts,  as you  call them, and is
rippling so happily there, like dawn. Why should I believe you, when I  feel
so very much the contrary?'
     `Oh,  exactly! And  what has caused this  extraordinary  change in you?
running out  stark  naked in  the rain, and  playing  Bacchante? desire  for
sensation, or the anticipation of going to Venice?'
     `Both! Do you think it is horrid of me to be so thrilled at going off?'
she said.
     `Rather horrid to show it so plainly.'
     `Then I'll hide it.'
     `Oh,  don't  trouble! You almost  communicate  a thrill to me. I almost
feel that it is I who am going off.'
     `Well, why don't you come?'
     `We've gone over  all that. And as  a matter of fact,  I  suppose  your
greatest thrill  comes from being able to  say  a temporary farewell to  all
this. Nothing  so thrilling, for the moment, as Good-bye-to-all!---But every
parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.'
     `I'm not going to enter any new bondages.'
     `Don't boast, while the gods are listening,' he said.
     She pulled up short.
     `No! I won't boast!' she said.
     But she was  thrilled, none the less, to be  going off:  to feel  bonds
snap. She couldn't help it.
     Clifford, who  couldn't sleep, gambled all night with Mrs Bolton,  till
she was too sleepy almost to live.
     And the day came round  for Hilda to arrive. Connie  had arranged  with
Mellors that if everything promised well for their night together, she would
hang a green shawl out of the window. If there were frustration, a red one.
     Mrs Bolton helped Connie to pack.
     `It will be so good for your Ladyship to have a change.'
     `I think it  will. You  don't mind having  Sir  Clifford on your  hands
alone for a time, do you?'
     `Oh no! I can manage him quite all right. I mean, I can do all he needs
me to do. Don't you think he's better than he used to be?'
     `Oh much! You do wonders with him.'
     `Do  I though! But men are  all  alike:  just  babies, and you have  to
flatter them and wheedle them  and let  them think  they're having their own
way. Don't you find it so, my Lady?'
     `I'm afraid I haven't much experience.'
     Connie paused in her occupation.
     `Even your husband, did you have to manage  him, and wheedle him like a
baby?' she asked, looking at the other woman.
     Mrs Bolton paused too.
     `Well!' she said. `I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But
he always knew  what I was after, I must say that. But he generally  gave in
to me.'
     `He was never the lord and master thing?'
     `No! At least there'd be  a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew
I'd got to give in. But  usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and
master. But  neither  was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and
then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.'
     `And what if you had held out against him?'
     `Oh, I don't know, I  never  did. Even when  he was in the wrong, if he
was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted  to break what was between us.
And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you care
for a man, you have  to give in to him  once he's really determined; whether
you're  in the right or  not, you have to give in. Else you break something.
But I must say, Ted 'ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on  a thing,
and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.'
     `And that's how you are with all your patients?' asked Connie.
     `Oh, That's different. I don't care at all,  in  the same  way. I  know
what's good for  them, or I try to, and then I  just contrive to manage them
for  their own good.  It's  not like anybody as you're really fond  of. It's
quite  different.  Once  you've  been  really  fond  of  a man,  you can  be
affectionate to  almost any man, if he needs  you at  all. But it's not  the
same thing. You don't really care. I doubt, once you've really cared, if you
can ever really care again.'
     These words frightened Connie.
     `Do you think one can only care once?' she asked.
     `Or never. Most women never care,  never begin to. They don't know what
it means.  Nor men either. But when I  see a woman as cares, my heart stands
still for her.'
     `And do you think men easily take offence?'
     `Yes! If you wound them on their pride. But aren't women the same? Only
our two prides are a bit different.'
     Connie pondered this. She began  again to have some misgiving about her
gag away. After  all, was  she not giving her  man the go-by,  if only for a
short time? And he knew it. That's why he was so queer and sarcastic.
     Still! the human existence is  a good deal controlled by the machine of
external  circumstance. She was in  the power of  this machine. She couldn't
extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn't even want to.
     Hilda arrived in  good time on Thursday morning, in a nimble two-seater
car,  with  her suit-case strapped  firmly behind. She looked as  demure and
maidenly as  ever, but she had  the  same will of her own. She  had the very
hell of a will of her own, as her husband had found out. But the husband was
now divorcing her.
     Yes, she even made it easy for him to do that, though she had no lover.
For the time being, she was `off' men. She was very well content to be quite
her own mistress: and mistress of her  two children, whom she was  going  to
bring up `properly', whatever that may mean.
     Connie was only allowed a suit-case, also. But  she had sent on a trunk
to  her father, who was  going by train. No use taking a  car to Venice. And
Italy much  too hot to motor in, in July. He was going comfortably by train.
He had just come down from Scotland.
     So, like a demure arcadian  field-marshal, Hilda arranged  the material
part of the journey. She and Connie sat in the upstairs room, chatting.
     `But Hilda!' said  Connie,  a little frightened.  `I want to stay  near
here tonight. Not here: near here!'
     Hilda fixed her sister with grey, inscrutable eyes. She seemed so calm:
and she was so often furious.
     `Where, near here?' she asked softly.
     `Well, you know I love somebody, don't you?'
     `I gathered there was something.'
     `Well he  lives near here, and I want to spend this last night with him
must! I've promised.'
     Connie became insistent.
     Hilda bent her Minerva-like head in silence. Then she looked up.
     `Do you want to tell me who he is?' she said.
     `He's our game-keeper,' faltered  Connie, and she flushed vividly, like
a shamed child.
     `Connie!' said Hilda, lifting her nose slightly with disgust: a she had
from her mother.
     `I  know: but  he's lovely  really.  He really understands tenderness,'
said Connie, trying to apologize for him.
     Hilda, like a ruddy, rich-coloured  Athena, bowed her head and pondered
She was  really violently angry. But she dared not  show it, because Connie,
taking  after  her  father,  would  straight  away  become obstreperous  and
unmanageable.
     It  was true, Hilda did  not like Clifford: his cool  assurance that he
was somebody! She thought  he made use of Connie  shamefully and impudently.
She had hoped  her  sister would  leave him. But, being solid  Scotch middle
class, she loathed any `lowering' of oneself or the family. She looked up at
last.
     `You'll regret it,' she said,
     `I  shan't,' cried  Connie, flushed red.  `He's quite the exception.  I
really love him. He's lovely as a lover.'
     Hilda still pondered.
     `You'll get over him quite  soon,' she said, `and live to be ashamed of
yourself because of him.'
     `I shan't! I hope I'm going to have a child of his.'
     `Connie!' said Hilda, hard as a hammer-stroke, and pale with anger.
     `I  shall if  I possibly can.  I  should  be fearfully proud if I had a
child by him.'
     It was no use talking to her. Hilda pondered.
     `And doesn't Clifford suspect?' she said.
     `Oh no! Why should he?'
     `I've no doubt you've given him plenty of occasion for suspicion,' said
Hilda.
     `Not it all.'
     `And tonight's business seems quite  gratuitous folly.  Where does  the
man live?'
     `In the cottage at the other end of the wood.'
     `Is he a bachelor?'
     `No! His wife left him.'
     `How old?'
     `I don't know. Older than me.'
     Hilda became more angry at every reply, angry as her mother used to be,
in a kind of paroxysm. But still she hid it.
     `I would give up tonight's escapade if I were you,' she advised calmly.
     `I can't! I must stay with him tonight, or I can't go to Venice at all.
I just can't.'
     Hilda heard  her father  over  again,  and she  gave way,  out  of mere
diplomacy. And she consented to drive to Mansfield, both of them, to dinner,
to  bring  Connie back to the lane-end after dark, and to fetch her from the
lane-end the next morning,  herself sleeping in Mansfield, only half an hour
away, good going.
     But she was furious. She stored it up against  her sister, this balk in
her plans.
     Connie flung an emerald-green shawl over her window-sill.
     On the strength of her anger, Hilda warmed toward Clifford.
     After  all,  he had a mind. And if he had no sex, functionally, all the
better:  so much the less to quarrel about! Hilda wanted no more of that sex
business, where men became  nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had
less to put up with than many women if she did but know it.
     And Clifford decided that Hilda, after all, was a decidedly intelligent
woman, and would make a man a first-rate  helpmate, if he  were going in for
politics for example. Yes, she had none  of Connie's  silliness,  Connie was
more  a  child:  you had to  make  excuses  for  her,  because she  was  not
altogether dependable.
     There was an early cup of tea in the hall, where doors were open to let
in the sun. Everybody seemed to be panting a little.
     `Good-bye, Connie girl! Come back to me safely.'
     `Good-bye, Clifford! Yes, I shan't be long.' Connie was almost tender.
     `Good-bye, Hilda! You will keep an eye on her, won't you?'
     `I'll even keep two!' said Hilda. `She shan't go very far astray.'
     `It's a promise!'
     `Good-bye, Mrs Bolton! I know you'll look after Sir Clifford nobly.'
     `I'll do what I can, your Ladyship.'
     `And write to me if there  is any news, and tell me about Sir Clifford,
how he is.'
     `Very good, your Ladyship, I will. And have a good  time, and come back
and cheer us up.'
     Everybody waved. The car went off  Connie looked back and saw Clifford,
sitting  at the top of the steps  in his  house-chair. After all, he was her
husband: Wragby was her home: circumstance had done it.
     Mrs Chambers held the gate and wished her ladyship a happy holiday. The
car slipped out of the dark spinney that masked the park, on to the highroad
where  the colliers were trailing home. Hilda turned to  the Crosshill Road,
that was not a main road, but ran to Mansfield. Connie put on goggles.  They
ran beside the railway, which was in a cutting below them. Then they crossed
the cutting on a bridge.
     `That's the lane to the cottage!' said Connie.
     Hilda glanced at it impatiently.
     `It's a frightful  pity we can't go straight  off!'  she said. We could
have been in Pall Mall by nine o'clock.'
     `I'm sorry for your sake,' said Connie, from behind her goggles.
     They  were   soon  at   Mansfield,  that  once-romantic,   now  utterly
disheartening  colliery  town.  Hilda  stopped  at  the  hotel named in  the
motor-car book, and took  a room. The whole thing was utterly uninteresting,
and  she was  almost too  angry to talk.  However,  Connie had to  tell  her
something of the man's history.
     `He! He! What name do you call him by? You only say he,' said Hilda.
     `I've never called  him by any name: nor he  me: which is curious, when
you come  to think of it. Unless we say Lady  Jane and  John Thomas. But his
name is Oliver Mellors.'
     `And  how would  you  like  to be Mrs  Oliver Mellors, instead  of Lady
Chatterley?'
     `I'd love it.'
     There was nothing to  be  done with Connie. And anyhow, if the man  had
been a lieutenant in the  army in India for four or  five years, he  must be
more or less presentable. Apparently he had character. Hilda began to relent
a little.
     `But you'll be through with him in awhile,' she said, `and  then you'll
be  ashamed of having been connected  with him.  One  can't mix up with  the
working people.'
     `But you are such a socialist! you're always on the side of the working
classes.'
     `I may be on their side in a political crisis,  but being on their side
makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of
snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.'
     Hilda  had lived  among the real  political  intellectuals,  so she was
disastrously unanswerable.
     The nondescript evening in the hotel dragged out, and  at last they had
a nondescript dinner. Then Connie slipped a  few things  into  a little silk
bag, and combed her hair once more.
     `After all, Hilda,' she said, `love can be wonderful: when you feel you
live, and are in the very middle  of creation.' It was almost like  bragging
on her part.
     `I suppose every mosquito feels the same,' said Hilda. `Do you think it
does? How nice for it!'
     The evening was wonderfully clear and long-lingering, even in the small
town.  It  would  be half-light all night.  With  a face  like  a mask, from
resentment,  Hilda started  her  car again,  and the two sped back on  their
traces, taking the other road, through Bolsover.
     Connie wore  her  goggles and disguising cap, and she sat  in  silence.
Because of Hilda's Opposition, she was fiercely on the sidle of the man, she
would stand by him through thick and thin.
     They had their head-lights  on, by the time they  passed Crosshill, and
the small lit-up  train that chuffed past in the cutting made it  seem  like
real night. Hilda had  calculated the turn into  the lane at the bridge-end.
She slowed up rather  suddenly  and swerved off the road, the lights glaring
white into the grassy, overgrown lane. Connie looked out. She saw  a shadowy
figure, and she opened the door.
     `Here we are!' she said softly.
     But Hilda had switched off the lights, and was absorbed backing, making
the turn.
     `Nothing on the bridge?'  she asked shortly. `You're all  right,'  said
the mall's voice. She  backed on  to  the  bridge, reversed, let the car run
forwards a few  yards along the  road,  then  backed into the lane, under  a
wych-elm tree, crushing the grass and bracken. Then all the lights went out.
Connie stepped down. The man stood under the trees.
     `Did you wait long?' Connie asked.
     `Not so very,' he replied.
     They both waited  for Hilda  to get out. But Hilda shut the door of the
car and sat tight.
     `This is my sister Hilda. Won't you come and  speak to her? Hilda! This
is Mr Mellors.'
     The keeper lifted his hat, but went no nearer.
     `Do walk down to the cottage with us, Hilda,' Connie pleaded. `It's not
far.'
     `What about the car?'
     `People do leave them on the lanes. You have the key.'
     Hilda was  silent, deliberating.  Then  she  looked backwards  down the
lane.
     `Can I back round the bush?' she said.
     `Oh yes!' said the keeper.
     She backed slowly round the curve, out of sight of the road, locked the
car, and got down. It was night, but luminous dark. The hedges rose high and
wild,  by the unused  lane, and very dark  seeming. There was a  fresh sweet
scent  on  the air. The keeper went ahead, then came Connie, then Hilda, and
in silence. He lit up  the difficult places  with  a flash-light  torch, and
they went on again, while  an owl softly hooted over the oaks,  and  Flossie
padded silently around. Nobody could speak. There was nothing to say.
     At length Connie saw the yellow light  of the house, and her heart beat
fast. She was a little frightened. They trailed on, still in Indian file.
     He unlocked  the door and preceded  them into the warm but bare  little
room. The fire  burned low and  red in the grate. The table was set with two
plates and two glasses on a proper white table-cloth for  Once.  Hilda shook
her hair and looked round  the  bare, cheerless room. Then she  summoned her
courage and looked at the man.
     He was moderately tall, and thin,  and she thought him good-looking. He
kept a quiet distance of his own, and seemed absolutely unwilling to speak.
     `Do sit down, Hilda,' said Connie.
     `Do!'  he said. `Can I make you  tea or  anything, or will you  drink a
glass of beer? It's moderately cool.'
     `Beer!' said Connie.
     `Beer  for  me, please!' said Hilda, with a mock  sort of  shyness.  He
looked at her and blinked.
     He took a blue jug and tramped to the scullery.  When he came back with
the beer, his face had changed again.
     Connie sat down by the door, and  Hilda sat  in his seat, with the back
to the wall, against the window corner.
     `That is his chair,' said  Connie softly.' And  Hilda rose as if it had
burnt her.
     `Sit yer still, sit yer still! Ta'e ony cheer as yo'n a  mind  to, none
of us is th' big bear,' he said, with complete equanimity.
     And he brought Hilda a glass,  and poured her beer  first from the blue
jug.
     `As  for cigarettes,' he  said, `I've  got none, but 'appen you've  got
your own. I dunna smoke,  mysen. Shall y' eat summat?'  He turned  direct to
Connie. `Shall t'eat a smite o' summat, if I bring it thee? Tha can  usually
do wi' a bite.' He spoke the vernacular with a curious calm assurance, as if
he were the landlord of the Inn.
     `What is there?' asked Connie, flushing.
     `Boiled ham, cheese, pickled wa'nuts, if yer like.---Nowt much.'
     `Yes,' said Connie. `Won't you, Hilda?'
     Hilda looked up at him.
     `Why do you speak Yorkshire?' she said softly.
     `That! That's non Yorkshire, that's Derby.'
     He looked back at her with that faint, distant grin.
     `Derby, then!  Why  do you speak  Derby? You spoke natural  English  at
first.'
     `Did Ah though? An' canna Ah change if Ah'm a mind to 't? Nay, nay, let
me talk Derby if it suits me. If yo'n nowt against it.'
     `It sounds a little affected,' said Hilda.
     `Ay,  'appen  so! An' up i' Tevershall yo'd sound affected.'  He looked
again at her, with a queer calculating distance, along his cheek-bone: as if
to say: Yi, an' who are you?
     He tramped away to the pantry for the food.
     The sisters sat in  silence. He  brought another  plate,  and knife and
fork. The he said:
     `An' if  it's the  same to you, I s'll ta'e my  coat  off like I allers
do.'
     And  he took  off his  coat,  and hung it on the peg, then  sat down to
table in his shirt-sleeves: a shirt of thin, cream-coloured flannel.
     `'Elp yerselves!' he said. `'Elp yerselves! Dunna  wait f'r axin'!'  He
cut the bread, then sat motionless. Hilda felt, as Connie once used to,  his
power  of silence and distance. She saw his  smallish, sensitive, loose hand
on the table. He was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! acting!
     `Still!'  she said,  as  she  took a little  cheese.  `It would be more
natural if you spoke to us in normal English, not in vernacular.'
     He looked at her, feeling her devil of a will.
     `Would  it?' he said in the normal English.  `Would it?  Would anything
that was  said  between  you and  me be quite  natural, unless you said  you
wished me to hell  before  your sister ever saw me  again: and unless I said
something almost as unpleasant back again? Would anything else be natural?'
     `Oh yes!' said Hilda. `Just good manners would be quite natural.'
     `Second nature, so  to speak!' he said: then he began to laugh.  `Nay,'
he said. `I'm weary o' manners. Let me be!'
     Hilda was frankly baffled and  furiously annoyed. After all,  he  might
show  that he  realized he was  being honoured.  Instead of  which, with his
play-acting and lordly airs, he seemed to think it was he who was conferring
the honour. Just impudence! Poor misguided Connie, in the man's clutches!
     The three  ate  in silence. Hilda  looked to see what his table-manners
were like. She could not  help realizing that he was instinctively much more
delicate and well-bred  than herself. She had a certain Scottish clumsiness.
And moreover, he had all the quiet self-contained assurance of the  English,
no loose edges. It would be very difficult to get the better of him.
     But neither would he get the better of her.
     `And do you really think,' she said, a little more humanly, `it's worth
the risk.'
     `Is what worth what risk?'
     `This escapade with my sister.'
     He flickered his irritating grin.
     `Yo' maun ax 'er!' Then he looked at Connie.
     `Tha  comes o'  thine  own accord, lass, doesn't  ter?  It's non  me as
forces thee?'
     Connie looked at Hilda.
     `I wish you wouldn't cavil, Hilda.'
     `Naturally I don't  want  to. But someone  has to  think about  things.
You've got to  have some sort of continuity in your life. You can't  just go
making a mess.'
     There was a moment's pause.
     `Eh,  continuity!' he said. `An' what by that? What  continuity ave yer
got i'  your  life? I  thought  you was  gettin' divorced. What continuity's
that?  Continuity  o'  yer own stubbornness. I  can see that much. An'  what
good's it goin' to do yer? You'll be sick o' yer continuity  afore yer a fat
sight  older. A stubborn  woman  an er own self-will: ay,  they  make a fast
continuity, they do. Thank heaven,  it isn't me as `as got th'  'andlin'  of
yer!'
     `What right have you to speak like that to me?' said Hilda.
     `Right!  What right ha' yo'  ter start  harnessin' other  folks i' your
continuity? Leave folks to their own continuities.'
     `My dear man, do you think I am concerned with you?' said Hilda softly.
     `Ay,'  he  said. `Yo' are.  For it's a force-put. Yo'  more  or less my
sister-in-law.'
     `Still far from it, I assure you.
     `Not  a' that far,  I assure  you. I've got my own sort o'  continuity,
back your life! Good as  yours, any day. An' if your sister  there comes ter
me for a bit o' cunt an' tenderness, she knows what she's after. She's  been
in my bed afore: which you 'aven't, thank the  Lord, with your  continuity.'
There was  a  dead pause,  before he added: `---Eh, I don't wear me breeches
arse-forrards. An' if I  get a windfall, I thank my stars.  A man gets a lot
of enjoyment out o' that  lass theer, which is more than anybody gets out o'
th'  likes o' you. Which is a pity, for you might appen a' bin a good apple,
'stead of a handsome crab. Women like you needs proper graftin'.'
     He was looking at her with  an odd, flickering smile,  faintly  sensual
and appreciative.
     `And men like you,' she said, `ought to be segregated: justifying their
own vulgarity and selfish lust.'
     `Ay,  ma'am!  It's  a  mercy there's a few men  left like  me. But  you
deserve what you get: to be left severely alone.'
     Hilda  had risen and gone to the door. He rose  and took his coat  from
the peg.
     `I can find my way quite well alone,' she said.
     `I doubt you can't,' he replied easily.
     They tramped in ridiculous file down the lane again, in silence. An owl
still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it.
     The car stood untouched, a  little  dewy.  Hilda got in and started the
engine. The other two waited.
     `All  I  mean,' she  said from  her entrenchment, `is  that I  doubt if
you'll find it's been worth it, either of you!'
     `One man's meat is another man's poison,' he said, out of the darkness.
`But it's meat an' drink to me.
     The lights flared out.
     `Don't make me wait in the morning,'
     `No, I won't. Goodnight!'
     The car rose slowly on to the highroad, then slid swiftly away, leaving
the night silent.
     Connie  timidly took his  arm, and they went down the lane.  He did not
speak. At length she drew him to a standstill.
     `Kiss me!' she murmured.
     `Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down,' he said.
     That amused her. She still kept  hold of his arm, and they went quickly
down the lane, in silence.  She was  so  glad to be with him, just now.  She
shivered,  knowing  that  Hilda  might  have  snatched   her  away.  He  was
inscrutably silent.
     When they were in  the cottage again, she almost  jumped with pleasure,
that she should be free of her sister.
     `But you were horrid to Hilda,' she said to him.
     `She should ha' been slapped in time.'
     `But why? and she's so nice.'
     He  didn't  answer, went round doing the evening chores,  with a quiet,
inevitable  sort  of motion.  He was  outwardly  angry, but not with her. So
Connie felt.  And his  anger gave him a peculiar handsomeness, an inwardness
and glisten that thrilled her and made her limbs go molten.
     Still he took no notice of her.
     Till he sat down and began to  unlace  his boots.  Then he looked up at
her from under his brows, on which the anger still sat firm.
     `Shan't you go up?' he said. `There's a candle!'
     He jerked his head swiftly to indicate the candle burning on the table.
She took it  obediently,  and he watched the  full  curve of her hips as she
went up the first stairs.
     It was a night of  sensual passion, in which  she was a little startled
and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality,
different,  sharper, more  terrible than the thrills  of tenderness, but, at
the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his
way, and the reckless, shameless  sensuality shook  her  to her foundations,
stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not
really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and  searing
as fire, burning the soul to tinder.
     Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the  most secret
places. It cost her an effort to let  him have his way  and his will of her.
She  had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave,  a physical slave.
Yet the passion  licked round her, consuming, and  when the sensual flame of
it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was  dying:
yet a poignant, marvellous death.
     She had often wondered what  AbÉlard meant, when he  said that in their
year  of  love  he  and  HÉloÏse  had  passed  through  all the  stages  and
refinements of passion. The same  thing, a  thousand years ago: ten thousand
years  ago!  The  same  on the Greek  vases, everywhere! The  refinements of
passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary,  forever necessary,
to burn out false shames  and  smelt out the heaviest ore of  the  body into
purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.
     In the  short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a
woman would have died  of shame. Instead of which, the  shame  died.  Shame,
which  is  fear: the  deep Organic shame,  the old, old  physical fear which
crouches in the  bodily roots  of us, and can only  be  chased  away by  the
sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the
man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now,
she  had  come  to  the  real bed-rock  of her nature,  and  was essentially
shameless.  She  was  her  sensual  self, naked  and unashamed.  She felt  a
triumph, almost a vainglory. So!  That was how it  was! That was  life! That
was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed
of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.
     And what  a reckless devil the man was! really like a devil! One had to
be strong to bear him. But it took some getting at, the core of the physical
jungle, the  last  and deepest recess of  organic shame. The  phallos  alone
could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her!
     And how, in fear, she had hated  it. But how  she had really wanted it!
She knew now. At the bottom  of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this
phallic hunting  Out, she had secretly  wanted it, and she had believed that
she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her
last and final nakedness, she was shameless.
     What  liars  poets and  everybody  were! They made one think one wanted
sentiment.  When what one supremely wanted  was  this  piercing,  consuming,
rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin
or  final  misgiving!  If he had  been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel
ashamed, how awful!  What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like
Clifford!  Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and  humiliating.
The supreme pleasure  of the mind! And what is that  to a woman? What is it,
really, to  the  man either! He becomes merely  messy and doggy, even in his
mind. It  needs  sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer
fiery sensuality, not messiness.
     Ah, God,  how  rare a thing a man  is! They are all dogs that  trot and
sniff and copulate. To  have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed!
She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone,  gone in
the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.
     Till his  rousing  waked  her  completely. He was  sitting up  in  bed,
looking  down  at  her.  She saw her own  nakedness  in his  eyes, immediate
knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to
her from his  eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how  voluptuous and lovely
it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.
     `Is it time to wake up?' she said.
     `Half past six.'
     She had to be  at the  lane-end at  eight. Always, always, always  this
compulsion on one!
     `I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?' he said.
     `Oh yes!'
     Flossie whimpered gently below. He  got  up and  threw off his pyjamas,
and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and
full  of life, how beautiful it  is!  So she thought,  as she watched him in
silence.
     `Draw the curtain, will you?'
     The sun was  shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and
the  wood stood bluey-fresh,  in the nearness. She sat  up  in  bed, looking
dreamily  out through the dormer  window, her naked arms pushing  her  naked
breasts together. He was dressing himself.  She was half-dreaming of life, a
life together with him: just a life.
     He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.
     `Have I lost my nightie altogether?' she said.
     He pushed his  hand down  in the bed, and pulled  out the bit of flimsy
silk.
     `I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,' he said.
     But the night-dress was slit almost in two.
     `Never mind!' she said. `It belongs here, really. I'll leave it.'
     `Ay, leave it,  I can  put it between my legs at  night,  for  company.
There's no name nor mark on it, is there?'
     She slipped on  the  torn  thing, and sat dreamily looking  out of  the
window. The window was Open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of
birds.  Birds  flew continuously past. Then  she saw Flossie roaming out. It
was morning.
     Downstairs she  heard him making the  fire, pumping water, going out at
the back door. By  and by came the smell of  bacon,  and at  length he  came
upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He
set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn
nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his
plate on his knees.
     `How good it is!' she said. `How nice to have breakfast together.'
     He  ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That
made her remember.
     `Oh, how  I wish I could stay here with you,  and Wragby were a million
miles away! It's  Wragby I'm going away  from  really. You know that,  don't
you?'
     `Ay!'
     `And you  promise we will live together and have  a  life together, you
and me! You promise me, don't you?'
     `Ay! When we can.'
     `Yes! And we will! we will, won't we?' she leaned  over, making the tea
spill, catching his wrist.
     `Ay!' he said, tidying up the tea.
     `We  can't  possibly  not  live  together  now,  can   we?'   she  said
appealingly.
     He looked up at her with his flickering grin.
     `No!' he said. `Only you've got to start in twenty-five minutes.'
     `Have I?' she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and  rose to
his feet.
     Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.
     Silent,  he  put his plate  on  the tray and went downstairs. Constance
heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.
     `Morning, Mr Mellors! Registered letter!'
     `Oh ay! Got a pencil?'
     `Here y'are!'
     There was a pause.
     `Canada!' said the stranger's voice.
     `Ay! That's a mate o'  mine out there in  British  Columbia. Dunno what
he's got to register.'
     `'Appen sent y'a fortune, like.'
     `More like wants summat.'
     Pause.
     `Well! Lovely day again!'
     `Ay!'
     `Morning!'
     `Morning!'
     After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.
     `Postman,' he said.
     `Very early!' she replied.
     `Rural round; he's mostly here by seven, when he does come.
     `Did your mate send you a fortune?'
     `No!  Only some  photographs  and papers about a  place  out  there  in
British Columbia.'
     `Would you go there?'
     `I thought perhaps we might.'
     `Oh yes! I believe it's lovely!' But he was put out  by  the  postman's
coming.
     `Them  damn bikes, they're on you afore you know where you are.  I hope
he twigged nothing.'
     `After all, what could he twig!'
     `You must  get up  now, and get  ready. I'm just  goin' ter  look round
outside.'
     She saw him go  reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went
downstairs and washed, and was ready by  the time he came back, with the few
things in the little silk bag.
     He  locked up, and they  set off, but through  the  wood, not down  the
lane. He was being wary.
     `Don't you think one lives for times like last night?' she said to him.
     `Ay!  But there's  the rest  o'times  to think  on,' he replied, rather
short.
     They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.
     `And  we  will live  together and make a life together, won't  we?' she
pleaded.
     `Ay!' he replied,  striding on without  looking  round.  `When  t' time
comes! Just now you're off to Venice or somewhere.'
     She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!
     At last he stopped.
     `I'll just strike across here,' he said, pointing to the right.
     But she flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him.
     `But  you'll keep the tenderness for me,  won't you?' she whispered. `I
loved last night. But you'll keep the tenderness for me, won't you?'
     He  kissed  her and  held her close for a moment. Then he  sighed,  and
kissed her again.
     `I must go an' look if th' car's there.'
     He strode over the  low brambles and  bracken, leaving a  trail through
the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back.
     `Car's  not there yet,'  he  said. `But there's the  baker's cart on t'
road.'
     He seemed anxious and troubled.
     `Hark!'
     They heard  a car softly hoot as  it  came nearer. It slowed up  on the
bridge.
     She plunged with  utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and
came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her.
     `Here! Go through there!' he said,  pointing to  a gap. `I shan't  come
out.
     She  looked at him in despair. But he  kissed her  and made her go. She
crept  in sheer  misery  through  the holly  and through  the  wooden fence,
stumbled down  the little ditch  and up  into the lane, where Hilda was just
getting out of the car in vexation.
     `Why you're there!' said Hilda. `Where's he?'
     `He's not coming.'
     Connie's face was  running with tears as she got into the  car with her
little bag.  Hilda snatched  up  the motoring  helmet  with the  disfiguring
goggles.
     `Put it on!' she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long
motoring  coat,  and  she  sat  down,  a  goggling  inhuman,  unrecognizable
creature. Hilda  started the car with a businesslike motion. They heaved out
of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there
was no  sight of him.  Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting  had
come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death.
     `Thank goodness you'll  be away  from him for  some  time!' said Hilda,
turning to avoid Crosshill village.

        Chapter 17

     `You  see,  Hilda,'  said Connie after  lunch, when  they  were nearing
London, `you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and
if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'
     `For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. `I've
never  met  the man  yet who  was capable of intimacy with  a  woman, giving
himself  up  to  her.  That  was  what  I  wanted.  I'm  not keen  on  their
self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality.  I'm not  content to be any
man's  little  petsy-wetsy,  nor  his  chair À plaisir  either.  I  wanted a
complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.
     Connie  pondered  this.  Complete  intimacy! She  supposed  that  meant
revealing everything  concerning  yourself to  the  other  person,  and  his
revealing everything concerning himself. But that was  a bore.  And all that
weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!
     `I  think  you're  too  conscious  of  yourself  all   the  time,  with
everybody,' she said to her sister.
     `I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.
     `But  perhaps you have! Perhaps  you  are  a slave to your own  idea of
yourself.'
     Hilda  drove  in  silence for some time after this piece  of unheard of
insolence from that chit Connie.
     `At  least  I'm  not a slave  to  somebody  else's idea of me:  and the
somebody  else a servant of my  husband's,'  she  retorted at last, in crude
anger.
     `You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.
     She  had  always let herself be  dominated  by  her elder sister.  Now,
though somewhere inside  herself  she  was  weeping,  she was  free  of  the
dominion of other  women. Ah! that in itself was  a relief, like being given
another  life: to be free  of  the strange  dominion and  obsession of other
women. How awful they were, women!
     She  was glad  to  be with her  father, whose favourite she  had always
been. She and Hilda stayed in a little  hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir Malcolm
was in his club. But  he took  his  daughters  out in  the evening, and they
liked going with him.
     He was still handsome and robust, though just  a little  afraid of  the
new world  that  had sprung up  around  him.  He  had  got a  second wife in
Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But  he had as many holidays away
from her as possible: just as with his first wife.
     Connie sat  next to him at the opera. He was moderately  stout, and had
stout thighs,  but they  were  still strong and  well-knit, the  thighs of a
healthy  man  who  had   taken  his  pleasure  in  life.  His  good-humoured
selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality, it
seemed to Connie  she could see them  all  in his well-knit straight thighs.
Just  a  man!  And  now becoming  an old man, which is sad.  Because in  his
strong, thick  male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness and power
of  tenderness which is the very essence  of youth, that  which  never dies,
once it is there.
     Connie woke up to  the existence of legs. They became more important to
her  than faces,  which  are no longer very real. How few  people  had live,
alert  legs! She looked at  the men in the stalls. Great puddingy thighs  in
black  pudding-cloth,  or  lean  wooden sticks in  black funeral  stuff,  or
well-shaped young legs  without any meaning  whatever, either  sensuality or
tenderness  or sensitiveness,  just  mere  leggy  ordinariness that  pranced
around.  Not  even any sensuality like her father's. They  were all daunted,
daunted out of existence.
     But  the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most  females!
really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or  the poor thin pegs! or
the trim neat  things in silk stockings, without the slightest look of life!
Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly around!
     But  she was not  happy in  London.  The people  seemed so spectral and
blank. They had no  alive  happiness, no  matter how brisk  and good-looking
they  were.  It  was all barren. And Connie had a woman's  blind craving for
happiness, to be assured of happiness.
     In  Paris  at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality  still. But what  a
weary, tired,  worn-out sensuality.  Worn-out for  lack  of  tenderness. Oh!
Paris was  sad.  One  of  the  saddest  towns: weary of  its  now-mechanical
sensuality,  weary  of  the tension of money, money,  money,  weary even  of
resentment  and  conceit, just weary  to death, and still  not  sufficiently
Americanized  or  Londonized  to  hide  the  weariness  under  a  mechanical
jig-jig-jig! Ah,  these  manly  he-men,  these  flÂneurs, the oglers,  these
eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary,  worn-out for lack  of a
little tenderness, given  and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming women
knew  a  thing or two  about the  sensual realities: they had that pull over
their jigging English  sisters. But they knew  even less of tenderness. Dry,
with  the endless dry tension of will, they too were wearing  out. The human
world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would turn fiercely destructive.
A sort of  anarchy!  Clifford  and  his  conservative  anarchy!  Perhaps  it
wouldn't be  conservative much  longer. Perhaps it would develop into a very
radical anarchy.
     Connie found herself shrinking and afraid  of the world. Sometimes  she
was happy  for a  little while in  the Boulevards  or  in  the  Bois  or the
Luxembourg Gardens. But  already Paris was full  of  Americans and  English,
strange Americans in the  oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English that
are so hopeless abroad.
     She was glad to drive  on.  It was suddenly  hot weather, so  Hilda was
going through Switzerland and over  the Brenner, then  through the Dolomites
down  to Venice.  Hilda  loved all the managing and the  driving  and  being
mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.
     And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself:
Why don't I  really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that  I
don't really care about  the landscape any  more! But I  don't. It's  rather
awful.  I'm like Saint  Bernard,  who could  sail down the lake  of  Lucerne
without ever noticing that  there were even mountain and green water. I just
don't care  for landscape any more.  Why should one stare at it?  Why should
one? I refuse to.
     No,  she found nothing vital in France  or  Switzerland or the Tyrol or
Italy. She just was carted  through  it all.  And it was  all less real than
Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby!  She felt  she  didn't care  if she
never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep. Wragby was more
real.
     As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference. They
all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted
to get  enjoyment, perforce,  like  squeezing  blood out  of  a stone.  Poor
mountains!  poor  landscape! it all had  to  be  squeezed  and  squeezed and
squeezed  again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment.  What did people
mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?
     No! said  Connie  to herself  I'd rather be at Wragby,  where I can  go
about and be still,  and  not stare at anything or do any performing of  any
sort.  This  tourist  performance of  enjoying  oneself  is  too  hopelessly
humiliating: it's such a failure.
     She  wanted  to  go  back  to Wragby, even  to  Clifford, even to  poor
crippled Clifford. He wasn't  such a fool as this  swarming holidaying  lot,
anyhow.
     But in her inner  consciousness she  was keeping  touch  with the other
man. She mustn't let her  connexion with him  go: oh, she mustn't let it go,
or she was lost, lost  utterly in this world of riff-raffy  expensive people
and  joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh `enjoying oneself'! Another  modern form
of sickness.
     They left the car  in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer
over  to  Venice.  It  was  a lovely summer  afternoon,  the  shallow lagoon
rippled,  the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the
water, look dim.
     At  the station  quay they changed to  a  gondola, giving the  man  the
address.  He was a regular  gondolier in  a white-and-blue blouse,  not very
good-looking, not at all impressive.
     `Yes! The Villa  Esmeralda! Yes! I know it!  I have  been the gondolier
for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'
     He seemed a rather childish,  impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain
exaggerated  impetuosity,  through  the dark side-canals  with the horrible,
slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the
washing hangs high up  on ropes, and there is a  slight, or strong, odour of
sewage.
     But at last he came to one  of the  open canals with pavement on either
side, and  looping bridges, that run  straight, at right-angles to the Grand
Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above,
behind them.
     `Are  the signorine  staying long  at the Villa  Esmeralda?'  he asked,
rowing  easy,  and  `wiping  his  perspiring  face  with  a   white-and-blue
handkerchief.
     `Some twenty  days: we  are  both  married ladies,'  said Hilda, in her
curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.
     `Ah! Twenty days!'  said the man.  There was  a  pause. After which  he
asked: `Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so  that they
will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'
     Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have
one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land.
     `What is there at the Villa? what boats?'
     `There is  a motor-launch, also a  gondola. But---' The but meant: they
won't be your property.
     `How much do you charge?'
     It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.
     `Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.
     `Less, Signora, less. The regular price---'
     The sisters considered.
     `Well,'  said  Hilda,  `come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange  it.
What is your name?'
     His name was  Giovanni, and  he wanted to know at  what time he  should
come, and  then for  whom should he say he was waiting.  Hilda had  no card.
Connie gave  him one  of  hers.  He  glanced  at it  swiftly, with his  hot,
southern blue eyes, then glanced again.
     `Ah!' he said, lighting up. `Milady! Milady, isn't it?'
     `Milady Costanza!' said Connie.
     He nodded, repeating: `Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully
away in his blouse.
     The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon
looking  towards Chioggia.  It was not a very old house, and  pleasant, with
the terraces looking  seawards,  and  below, quite  a big  garden  with dark
trees, walled in from the lagoon.
     Their host was a  heavy, rather coarse  Scotchman who had made  a  good
fortune   in   Italy  before  the  war,  and  had  been  knighted   for  his
ultrapatriotism during the war. His wife  was a  thin, pale,  sharp kind  of
person with no fortune of  her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate
her husband's  rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with
the  servants.  But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was now
more manageable.
     The house was pretty full. Besides  Sir Malcolm and his  two daughters,
there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with  two  daughters; a
young  Italian Contessa,  a widow; a young  Georgian prince,  and a youngish
English  clergyman  who  had had pneumonia and  was  being  chaplain  to Sir
Alexander for his health's  sake. The  prince  was penniless,  good-looking,
would make  an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and basta!
The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere. The clergyman
was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily  he had left his wife
and  two  children  at home. And the Guthries, the family of four, were good
solid  Edinburgh middle class, enjoying  everything in a solid  fashion, and
daring everything while risking nothing.
     Connie and  Hilda  ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more
or less  their  own  sort,  substantial, hut boring:  and the  girls  wanted
husbands.  The chaplain  was not  a had  fellow,  but too  deferential.  Sir
Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his  joviality,
but he was still  thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young  women.
Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of it, poor thing,
and who  watched  every other woman with a cold watchfulness that had become
her second nature, and who said  cold, nasty little things which showed what
an  utterly low  opinion she had  of  all human nature. She  was  also quite
venomously overbearing  with the servants, Connie found: but in a quiet way.
And  she skilfully  behaved so that Sir  Alexander  should think that he was
lord and monarch  of the  whole caboosh,  with  his  stout,  would-be-genial
paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his humourosity, as Hilda called it.
     Sir   Malcolm  was  painting.  Yes,  he  still  would  do   a  Venetian
lagoonscape, now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the
morning he was rowed off  with a huge canvas, to his `site'. A little later,
Lady  Cooper  would  he  rowed  off  into  the  heart  of  the  city,   with
sketching-block and colours. She was an inveterate  watercolour painter, and
the  house was full  of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges,
medieval facades, and  so on. A little later the Guthries, the  prince,  the
countess, Sir Alexander,  and sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would  go off
to the Lido, where they would bathe; coming  home to  a late  lunch  at half
past one.
     The house-party, as a house-party,  was distinctly boring. But this did
not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time.  Their father took them
to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings.  He took  them to all
the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat  with them on warm evenings
in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's: he took them to the theatre,
to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated water-fÊtes, there were dances.
This was a holiday-place of all  holiday-places. The Lido, with its acres of
sun-pinked  or pyjamaed  bodies, was like  a strand  with an endless heap of
seals come up for mating. Too many people in the piazza,  too many limbs and
trunks of humanity on the Lido,  too many gondolas, too many motor-launches,
too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails,  too
many menservants wanting tips, too many  languages  rattling, too much,  too
much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many  cargoes of  strawberries,  too
many silk shawls, too many huge,  raw-beef  slices of watermelon on  stalls:
too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment!
     Connie  and Hilda went around in  their sunny frocks. There were dozens
of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up like  a
bad penny.  `Hullo!  Where  you  staying?  Come  and  have an  ice-cream  or
something! Come with me somewhere  in  my  gondola.'  Even Michaelis  almost
sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look of the mass of
human flesh.
     It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all
the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand  in
hot  sun,  jazzing  with  your stomach up  against  some  fellow in the warm
nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what
they  all wanted, a  drug: the slow water, a drug; the  sun, a drug; jazz, a
drug;  cigarettes,  cocktails,  ices,  vermouth.  To  be drugged! Enjoyment!
Enjoyment!
     Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked  looking  at  all  the women,
speculating about  them. The women were absorbingly interested in the women.
How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she getting out of
it?---The men were like great dogs in  white flannel trousers, waiting to be
patted, waiting  to wallow,  waiting to plaster some woman's stomach against
their own, in jazz.
     Hilda liked  jazz, because she  could plaster her stomach  against  the
stomach of some so-called man, and  let him  control her movement  from  the
visceral  centre,  here and there across the floor, and then she could break
loose and ignore `the creature'. He had been merely made use of. Poor Connie
was rather  unhappy. She wouldn't jazz,  because she simply couldn't plaster
her stomach  against  some  `creature's' stomach. She hated the conglomerate
mass of nearly nude flesh on  the Lido: there was hardly enough water to wet
them all. She disliked  Sir  Alexander  and  Lady Cooper. She  did not  want
Michaelis or anybody else trailing her.
     The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with  her away  across
the lagoon, far across to  some lonely shingle-bank, where they  could bathe
quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.
     Then Giovanni got another  gondolier to help him, because it was a long
way  and  he  sweated terrifically  in  the  sun.  Giovanni was  very  nice:
affectionate, as  the Italians are, and quite passionless.  The Italians are
not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily  moved, and often
affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
     So Giovanni was already devoted to  his ladies, as  he had been devoted
to cargoes  of ladies  in the past. He  was  perfectly  ready to  prostitute
himself to them, if they wanted hint: he secretly hoped they would want him.
They would give  him a handsome present, and it would come in very handy, as
he was just  going to be married. He told them about his  marriage, and they
were suitably interested.
     He thought  this trip  to  some lonely bank across the lagoon  probably
meant business: business being  l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help him,
for it was a long way; and after all, they were two  ladies. Two ladies, two
mackerels! Good  arithmetic! Beautiful  ladies, too! He was justly proud  of
them. And though it  was the Signora who  paid  him and  gave him orders, he
rather hoped it would be the young milady who would select hint for l'amore.
She would give more money too.
     The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier,
so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola man,
a sandola  being  a  big  boat  that brings  in  fruit and produce from  the
islands.
     Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head of
little, close, pale-blond  curls, and  a  good-looking man's face,  a little
like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not  effusive,  loquacious,
and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and  he rowed with a  strength and
ease  as if he were alone on  the water. The ladies were ladies, remote from
him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.
     He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine and
rowed  awkwardly, with  effusive shoves of  the great oar. He was  a  man as
Mellors  was  a   man,   unprostituted.  Connie  pitied  the  wife  of   the
easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would  be one of those sweet
Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and  flower-like in
the back of that labyrinth of a town.
     Ah,  how sad  that man first prostitutes woman,  then woman prostitutes
man.  Giovanni  was  pining to  prostitute  himself, dribbling like  a  dog,
wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!
     Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon  the water.
Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness!
Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.
     Yet Daniele was still a man capable  of a man's free allegiance. He did
not  wear  the gondolier's blouse:  only the knitted blue  jersey. He  was a
little  wild,  uncouth and proud.  So  he was  hireling to  the rather doggy
Giovanni  who  was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus refused
the  devil's money, he left the  devil like a Jewish banker, master  of  the
whole situation.
     Connie would  come  home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind
of  stupor, to lind  letters from home.  Clifford  wrote regularly. He wrote
very  good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for this
reason Connie found them not very interesting.
     She lived  in  the  stupor  of  the  light  of the lagoon,  the lapping
saltiness of the water,  the  space,  the  emptiness, the  nothingness:  but
health,  health, complete  stupor  of health. It was gratifying, and she was
lulled away in it, not  caring for anything. Besides, she was  pregnant. She
knew  now.  So  the stupor of sunlight and  lagoon salt and  sea-bathing and
lying on  shingle and finding  shells  and drifting away, away in a gondola,
was completed  by the  pregnancy inside  her,  another fullness  of  health,
satisfying and stupefying.
     She  had been at  Venice  a fortnight, and she was to stay  another ten
days or a fortnight. The  sunshine blazed over any count  of time,  and  the
fullness  of physical  health made forgetfulness complete. She was in a sort
of stupor of well-being.
     From which a letter of Clifford roused her.
     We  too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant  wife
of  Mellors,  the  keeper,  turned  up  at  the  cottage  and  found herself
unwelcome. He packed her  off, and locked the door. Report  has it, however,
that when he returned from the wood he found the no longer  fair lady firmly
established in his bed, in puris naturalibus; or one  should say, in impuris
naturalibus. She had broken a  window  and got  in that way. Unable to evict
the  somewhat man-handled  Venus  from his  couch,  he  beat a  retreat  and
retired,  it is said,  to his  mother's  house in Tevershall. Meanwhile  the
Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims  is her
home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.
     I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally. I
had this particular  bit  of local garbage  from our garbage bird, our ibis,
our scavenging  turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have repeated it had
she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the wood  if that woman's
going to be about!
     I like your picture  of Sir Malcolm  striding into the sea  with  white
hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains. But
I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate  mortal carnality. However, it suits
his  age.  Apparently one grows  more carnal and  more  mortal as one  grows
older. Only youth has a taste of immortality---
     This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied ell being with
vexation amounting to  exasperation. Now she ad got  to be bothered by  that
beast  of  a  woman! Now  she  must start and fret!  She had  no letter from
Mellors.  They had agreed not to write  at all, but now  she wanted  to hear
from  him  personally.  After all, he was  the father  of the child that was
coming. Let him write!
     But how  hateful!  Now  everything  was messed up. How  foul  those low
people  were!  How  nice  it  was here,  in the  sunshine and the indolence,
compared  to that  dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a  clear
sky was almost the most important thing in life.
     She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote
to Mrs Bolton for exact information.
     Duncan Forbes, an  artist friend of theirs, had  arrived  at  the Villa
Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made  a third in the gondola,  and
he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet, almost
taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.
     She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:
     You  will  be  pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when  you see Sir Clifford.
He's  looking quite blooming and  working very hard, and  very  hopeful.  Of
course  he is looking forward  to seeing you  among us again.  It is  a dull
house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her  presence  among us once
more.
     About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems
his wife came back all of a sudden  one afternoon, and  he found her sitting
on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was come back to
him and wanted to live  with  him again, as  she  was his legal wife, and he
wasn't going to divorce her.  But  he wouldn't have anything to do with her,
and wouldn't let her in the house,  and did not go in  himself; he went back
into the wood without ever opening the door.
     But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so he
went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without  a rag
on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and he must take
her back. I don't know what sort of a  scene they  had.  His mother told  me
about it, she's terribly upset. Well,  he told her he'd die rather than ever
live with her again, so he took his things and went straight to his mother's
on Tevershall hill.  He stopped  the night and  went to  the  wood next  day
through the  park,  never going near the cottage. It  seems he never saw his
wife that day. But  the day after she was at her brother Pan's at Beggarlee,
swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd beers
having  women  at the cottage, because she'd found  a  scent-bottle  in  his
drawer, and  gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the  ash-heap, and I  don't  know
what all. Then it seems the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking
in Mr  Mellors' bedroom early one  morning,  and a motor-car had been in the
lane.
     Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and  went to the wood through the
park, and it seems she stayed on  at the cottage. Well, there was no  end of
talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage and fetched
away most  of the furniture and bedding, and  unscrewed  the  handle of  the
pump, so she was forced to go. But instead  of going back to Stacks Gate she
went and lodged with that Mrs  Swain at Beggarlee, because her brother Dan's
wife  wouldn't have  her. And she kept going  to old  Mrs Mellors' house, to
catch him, and she began  swearing he'd got  in  bed with her in the cottage
and  she went to  a lawyer to make  him pay her  an  allowance. She's  grown
heavy, and more  common than ever, and as  strong  as a  bull. And she  goes
about saying  the most  awful things  about him,  how  he has  women  at the
cottage, and how he  behaved to her when they were married, the low, beastly
things he did to her, and  I don't know  what all.  I'm sure it's awful, the
mischief a woman can do, once she starts talking. And no matter how low  she
may be, there'll be  some as  will believe her, and  some  of the dirt  will
stick. I'm sure the way she makes out  that Mr Mellors was one of those low,
beastly men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to
believe things  against anybody, especially things  like  that. She declared
she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if he was
so beastly to her, why  is  she so  anxious to go back to him? But of course
she's coming near her change of life, for she's years  older than he is. And
these common, violent women always go partly insane whets the change of life
comes upon them---
     This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was,  sure as life, coming in
for her  share  of the lowness  and dirt. She felt angry with  him  for  not
having  got  clear of a Bertha  Coutts: nay, for  ever  having married  her.
Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered the last
night  she  had  spent  with  him,  and  shivered.  He  had  known  all that
sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really  rather disgusting.  It
would  be  well  to  be rid  of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps
really common, really low.
     She had a  revulsion  against the  whole affair,  and almost envied the
Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness.  And  she now
dreaded the thought  that  anybody would know about herself and the  keeper.
How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and  felt  a craving for
utter  respectability, even  for the  vulgar and deadening respectability of
the Guthrie  girls.  If  Clifford  knew  about her  affair,  how unspeakably
humiliating! She was afraid, terrified  of society and its unclean bite. She
almost wished she could get rid of the child  again, and be  quite clear. In
short, she fell into a state of funk.
     As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had  not been able
to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the
drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty's
Wood-violet  perfume,  half  empty,  among his things.  She  wanted  him  to
remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they were Hilda's.
     She could not help confiding a little  in Duncan Forbes. She didn't say
she  had been  the  keeper's lover,  she  only said she liked him,  and told
Forbes the history of the man.
     `Oh,' said Forbes, `you'll see, they'll never  rest till they've pulled
the man down and done him its. If he has refused to creep up into the middle
classes,  when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up  for his own
sex, then they'll do him  in.  It's  the  one thing they won't let  you  be,
straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as  you like. In fact the
more dirt you do on sex the better they like it.  But if you believe in your
own sex,  and won't have  it done  dirt to:  they'll down you. It's the  one
insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and
they'll  kill you before they'll let you  have it. You'll see, they'll hound
that man down. And what's he done,  after all? If he's made love to his wife
all ends on, hasn't he a right to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see,
even a low bitch like that turns on him, and  uses the hyena instinct of the
mob  against  sex, to pull him down. You  have  a snivel and  feel sinful or
awful  about your  sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound
the poor devil down.'
     Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done,
after all? what  had he done to herself, Connie, but give  her an  exquisite
pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm,  natural
sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
     No  no, it should not  be.  She saw the image of  him, naked white with
tanned  face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it
were another being, the odd  grin  flickering on his face. And she heard his
voice again: Tha's got  the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his
hand warmly and softly closing over her  tail again, over her secret places,
like  a  benediction. And the warmth ran through  her womb,  and the  little
flames  flickered in her knees,  and she said:  Oh, no! I mustn't go back on
it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him,
through  everything.  I had no warm,  flamy life till  he gave it me.  And I
won't go back on it.
     She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note
to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote to him:
     I  am very  much distressed to  hear of  all  the trouble your  wife is
making for you, but don't mind it, it is  only  a sort of hysteria.  It will
all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it,  and I
do hope you are not  minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is
only  a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days'
time, and I do hope everything will be all right.
     A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.
     I  am  delighted  to hear  you  are  prepared to leave  Venice  on  the
sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby
misses  you. But it is essential  that  you  should get  your full amount of
sunshine, sunshine  and pyjamas, as  the advertisements of  the Lido say. So
please do stay on a little longer,  if it is cheering  you  up and preparing
you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.
     I am assiduously, admirably  looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer
specimen. The more  I live, the more I realize what strange creatures  human
beings are.  Some of them  might Just  as well have  a hundred legs,  like a
centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has
been led  to  expect  from  one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent.  One
doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is oneself.
     The scandal of the keeper continues  and  gets bigger like  a snowball.
Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which,  though  dumb,
seems to be breathing silent gossip  through its gills, while ever it lives.
All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as
if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.
     She  is preoccupied  with tie  Mellors scandal, and if I  will let  her
begin, she takes me down to the  depths. Her  great  indignation, which even
then is  like the  indignation of an actress playing  a role, is against the
wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts. I have  been to
the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this world, and when,
released from  the current of  gossip, I slowly rise to the surface again, I
look at the daylight its wonder that it ever should be.
     It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the
surface  of all  things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees
are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding
ourselves on offal like shrimps.  Only  occasionally the  soul rises gasping
through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of
the ether, where there is true  air. I am convinced that the air we normally
breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
     But  sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into  the
light, with ecstasy, after having  preyed on the submarine depths. It is our
mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly  subaqueous  life of our
fellow-men,  in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our immortal destiny is
to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch, up again into the bright
ether, bursting out  from the surface of Old Ocean into real light. Then one
realizes one's eternal nature.
     When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down,  to the
depths  where the fish of  human secrets wriggle and  swim. Carnal  appetite
makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of the dense  into
the  ethereal,  from  the wet into  the dry. To  you  I  can tell  the whole
process.  But  with  Mrs Bolton I  only  feel  the  downward  plunge,  down,
horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters of the very bottom.
     I am afraid  we are going to lose our  game-keeper. The scandal  of the
truant wife, instead of dying down, has  reverberated to greater and greater
dimensions. He is  accused of all unspeakable  things and curiously  enough,
the woman has  managed to  get the bulk  of the colliers' wives behind  her,
gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.
     I  hear  this Bertha  Coutts  besieges Mellors  in his mother's  house,
having ransacked  the cottage and the hut.  She seized one  day upon her own
daughter,  as  that chip  of the female block was returning from school; but
the little one, instead of  kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly,
and so received  from  the other  hand  a smack in the  face which  sent her
reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed
grandmother.
     The  woman has blown  off an amazing  quantity  of poison-gas.  She has
aired in detail all  those incidents of her conjugal life which  are usually
buried  down  in the deepest  grave of matrimonial  silence, between married
couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten  years of burial, she has a
weird  array.  I hear these details  from Linley and  the doctor: the latter
being amused.  Of course there is  really nothing in it. Humanity has always
had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use
his wife,  as Benvenuto Cellini says,  `in the Italian way', well that is  a
matter  of taste. But  I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to  so
many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any
case, it is a matter  of their own personal  squalor, and nothing to do with
anybody else.
     However, everybody listens: as  I do myself. A dozen years  ago, common
decency  would have hushed the thing. But common  decency  no longer exists,
and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would
think every child  in  Tevershall,  for the last  fifty  years, had  been an
immaculate conception,  and  every  one of  our nonconformist females was  a
shining Joan  of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a
touch of Rabelais  seems to  make him more  monstrous  and shocking  than  a
murderer  like Crippen. Yet these people  in Tevershall are a  loose lot, if
one is to believe all accounts.
     The trouble  is, however, the execrable  Bertha Coutts has not confined
herself to her  own experiences and  sufferings. She has discovered,  at the
top of  her  voice, that her  husband has been `keeping'  women down at  the
cottage,  and has  made a few random  shots at  naming  the  women. This has
brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing  has gone
quite considerably  too far. An injunction has been  taken out  against  the
woman.
     I  have  had  to  interview  Mellors  about  the  business,  as  it was
impossible to keep the  woman away  from the wood. He goes  about  as usual,
with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody,  no not I, if nobody care
for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like  a dog with a tin can
tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can
isn't there.  But  I heard that in  the village  the  women call away  their
children if he is passing,  as if he were the Marquis de Sade  in person. He
goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied
to his tail,  and that inwardly he repeats,  like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish
ballad: `Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!'
     I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the
wood, and he said he did  not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a
nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which  he replied  that he had no
power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course.
`Ay,' he said. `folks should do their own  fuckin', then they wouldn't  want
to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.'
     He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ
of  truth.  The  mode  of  putting  it,  however,  is neither  delicate  nor
respectful. I hinted as much,  and then  I heard the tin  can rattle  again.
`It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin'
a cod atween my legs.'
     These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not
help him  at all,  and the  rector, and  Finley, and Burroughs all think  it
would be as well if the man left the place.
     I  asked  him  fit was  true that  he  entertained  ladies down  at the
cottage, and all  he said  was:  `Why,  what's that to you, Sir Clifford?' I
told  him I  intended  to have decency  observed on my  estate, to  which he
replied: `Then you mun button the  mouths o' a' th' women.'---When I pressed
him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: `Surely you might ma'e
a  scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.' As a
matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be hard to beat.
     I asked him fit would be easy for him to find another job. He said: `If
you're hintin' that you'd like to  shunt me out of this job, it'd be easy as
wink.' So he made no trouble at  all  about leaving at the end of next week,
and apparently is willing to initiate  a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as
many  mysteries  of the  craft as possible. I told  him  I  would give him a
month's wages  extra, when he  left. He said he'd rather I kept my money, as
I'd no occasion to ease my conscience.  I  asked him what he meant,  and  he
said: `You don't owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing
extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me.'
     Well, there  is the end of  it for the time being. The  woman  has gone
away:  we don't know where to: but she  is liable to arrest if she shows her
face in Tevershall. And I  heard she is mortally afraid of gaol, because she
merits  it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will
soon become normal again.
     Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you  would enjoy to stay in Venice or  in
Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were
out of  all this buzz of nastiness, which  will have died  quite away by the
end of the month.
     So you see, we arc deep-sea  monsters,  and  when the lobster walks  on
mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.
     The  irritation, and  the  lack  of any  sympathy in  any direction, of
Clifford's letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood  it better
when she received the following from Mellors:
     The cat is out of the  bag, along with various other  pussies. You have
heard that  my wife Bertha came back to my  unloving arms, and  took  up her
abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in
the shape  of a little  bottle of Coty. Other evidence she  did not find, at
least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt  photograph. She
noticed  the  glass and the back-board in the square bedroom. Unfortunately,
on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches,  and the initials,
several times repeated: C. S. R.  This, however, afforded no clue  until she
broke  into the  hut, and found  one  of your books, an autobiography of the
actress Judith,  with your name, Constance  Stewart Reid, on the front page.
After this, for some days she went  round loudly saying that my paramour was
no less a person than  Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the
rector, Mr Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal
steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had
a mortal fear of the police.
     Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things
and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's
name had  been  mentioned. I  said I never  listened  to  scandal,  and  was
surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said,  of course it
was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the
scullery,  no  doubt  because Her  Majesty  formed part of my harem.  But he
didn't appreciate  the  sarcasm. He as good as  told me I was a disreputable
character also walked about  with my breeches' buttons undone, and I as good
as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he  gave me the sack, and  I
leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.
     I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square,
will either give me a room or will find one for me.
     Be sure your  sins will find you out,  especially if you're married and
her name's Bertha---
     There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He
might have said some few words of  consolation or  reassurance. But she knew
he  was  leaving her  free, free to  go back to  Wragby and to Clifford. She
resented that  too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had
said to  Clifford: `Yes,  she is  my lover and my mistress and I am proud of
it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.
     So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that
would soon die down.
     She was  angry, with the complicated and confused  anger that made  her
inert. She did  not know  what to do nor  what  to say,  so she said and did
nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with
Duncan Forbes,  bathing, letting  the  days  slip  by. Duncan, who  had been
rather depressingly in love  with her ten years ago,  was  in love with  her
again. But she said to him: `I only want one thing of men, and that is, that
they should leave me alone.'
     So Duncan left her  alone: really quite pleased to be able to.  All the
same,  he  offered  her a soft stream of a queer, inverted  sort of love. He
wanted to be with her.
     `Have  you  ever thought,'  he said to her  one  day, `how  very little
people are connected with one  another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a
son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he
has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'
     `Ask him,' said Connie.
     Duncan did  so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both
male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.
     `Perhaps  only people  who are capable  of  real togetherness have that
look  of  being alone in  the  universe,'  said Connie. `The  others have  a
certain stickiness,  they  stick to  the  mass, like  Giovanni.'  `And,' she
thought to herself, `like you, Duncan.'

        Chapter 18

     She had  to  make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the
Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days' time. This would bring her
to London  on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to
him to  the  London address, asking him to  send her a  letter to Hartland's
hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.
     Inside  herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all  her
responses were  numb.  She refused  to  confide  even  in  Hilda, and Hilda,
offended by  her steady silence,  had  become rather intimate  with a  Dutch
woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy
into which Hilda always entered ponderously.
     Sir Malcolm decided to travel with  Connie, and Duncan  could  come  on
with  Hilda.  The  old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the
Orient  Express,  in  spite  of  Connie's  dislike of  trains  de  luxe, the
atmosphere  of  vulgar  depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it
would make the journey to Paris shorter.
     Sir Malcolm  was always uneasy going back  to  his  wife.  It was habit
carried over  from the first wife. But there would be a house-party  for the
grouse, and  he wanted  to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat
in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.
     `A  little  dull  for  you,  going  back to  Wragby,' said  her father,
noticing her glumness.
     `I'm not  sure  I  shall go back to  Wragby,' she said, with  startling
abruptness, looking into his eyes with her  big blue eyes. His big blue eyes
took  on the frightened look of a man whose  social conscience is  not quite
clear.
     `You mean you'll stay on in Paris a while?'
     `No! I mean never go back to Wragby.'
     He was bothered by his own little problems,  and sincerely hoped he was
getting none of hers to shoulder.
     `How's that, all at once?' he asked.
     `I'm going to have a child.'
     It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living soul, and
it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life.
     `How do you know?' said her father.
     She smiled.
     `How should I know?'
     `But not Clifford's child, of course?'
     `No! Another man's.'
     She rather enjoyed tormenting him.
     `Do I know the man?' asked Sir Malcolm.
     `No! You've never seen him.'
     There was a long pause.
     `And what are your plans?'
     `I don't know. That's the point.'
     `No patching it up with Clifford?'
     `I suppose  Clifford would  take it,' said Connie. `He  told  me, after
last time you talked to him, he wouldn't mind if I had a child, so long as I
went about it discreetly.'
     `Only  sensible  thing  he could say,  under the  circumstances. Then I
suppose it'll be all right.'
     `In  what way?' said Connie, looking  into her father's eyes. They were
big blue eyes rather like her own, but  with a certain uneasiness in them, a
look  sometimes  of  an  uneasy  little  boy,  sometimes  a look  of  sullen
selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.
     `You can present Clifford with  an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put
another baronet in Wragby.'
     Sir Malcolm's face smiled with a half-sensual smile.
     `But I don't think I want to,' she said.
     `Why  not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If  you want the
truth  from me, my child,  it's this. The  world goes on. Wragby  stands and
will  go  on standing.  The  world  is  more  or  less  a fixed  thing  and,
externally, we have  to  adapt ourselves  to it. Privately,  in  my  private
opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this
year  and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by  Wragby as far  as
Wragby sticks by you. Then please  yourself. But you'll get very little  out
of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent
income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won't get much  out
of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It's an amusing thing to do.'
     And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.
     `I hope you  had a  real man at last,' he said  to  her  after a while,
sensually alert.
     `I did. That's the trouble. There aren't many of them about,' she said.
     `No, by God!' he mused. `There aren't!  Well, my  dear, to look at you,
he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn't make trouble for you?'
     `Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.'
     `Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.'
     Sir  Malcolm  was pleased.  Connie  was his  favourite daughter, he had
always  liked  the  female  in her. Not so much of her mother in  her as  in
Hilda. And  he  had always disliked  Clifford. So he was pleased,  and  very
tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.
     He drove with her to Hartland's hotel, and saw her installed: then went
round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.
     She found a letter from Mellors.
     I  won't come round to your hotel,  but  I'll wait for  you outside the
Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.
     There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of
thin  dark  cloth.  He  had  a  natural  distinction,  but he  had  not  the
cut-to-pattern  look of her  class.  Yet,  she  saw  at  once,  he could  go
anywhere.  He  had a  native  breeding which was really much nicer  than the
cut-to-pattern class thing.
     `Ah, there you are! How well you look!'
     `Yes! But not you.'
     She looked in  his  face  anxiously. It  was  thin,  and the cheekbones
showed. But his eyes smiled at  her, and she felt at home with him. There it
was:  suddenly,  the  tension of keeping up her  appearances fell from  her.
Something flowed out of him  physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease
and happy, at  home. With  a  woman's now alert instinct  for happiness, she
registered it at once. `I'm happy when he's there!' Not all  the sunshine of
Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.
     `Was it horrid for you?' she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He
was too thin;  she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious
loose forgottenness  of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and
kiss it. But she did not quite dare.
     `People are always horrid,' he said.
     `And did you mind ver