Lady Chatterley's Lover

  “I expect she’ll have to be pushed,” said Clifford at last, with an affectation of sang froid.

  No answer. Mellors’ abstracted face looked as if he had heard nothing. Connie glanced anxiously at him. Clifford, too, glanced round.

  “Do you mind pushing her home, Mellors!” he said in a cold, superior tone. “I hope I have said nothing to offend you,” he added, in a tone of dislike.

  “Nothing at all, Sir Clifford! Do you want me to push that chair?”

  “If you please.”

  The man stepped up to it: but this time it was without effect. The brake was jammed. They poked and pulled, and the keeper took off his gun and his coat once more. And now Clifford said never a word. At last the keeper heaved the back of the chair off the ground, and with an instantaneous push of his foot, tried to loosen the wheels. He failed, the chair sank. Clifford was clutching the sides. The man gasped with the weight.

  “Don’t do it!” cried Connie to him.

  “If you’ll pull the wheel that way, so!” he said to her, showing her how.

  “No! You mustn’t lift it! You’ll strain yourself,” she said, flushed now with anger.

  But he looked into her eyes and nodded. And she had to go and take hold of the wheel, ready. He heaved and she tugged, and the chair reeled.

  “For God’s sake!” cried Clifford in terror.

  But it was all right, and the brake was off. The keeper put a stone under the wheel, and went to sit on the bank, his heart beating and his face white with the effort, semiconscious. Connie looked at him, and almost cried with anger. There was a pause and a dead silence. She saw his hands trembling on his thighs.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” she asked, going to him.

  “No. No!” he turned away almost angrily.

  There was dead silence. The back of Clifford’s fair head did not move. Even the dog stood motionless. The sky had clouded over.

  At last he sighed, and blew his nose on his red handkerchief.

  “That pneumonia took a lot out of me,” he said.

  No one answered. Connie calculated the amount of strength it must have taken to heave up that chair and the bulky Clifford: too much, far too much! If it hadn’t killed him!

  He rose, and again picked up his coat, slinging it through the handle of the chair.

  “Are you ready, then, Sir Clifford?”

  “When you are!”

  He stooped and took out the scotch, then put his weight against the chair. He was paler than Connie had ever seen him: and more absent. Clifford was a heavy man: and the hill was steep. Connie stepped to the keeper’s side.

  “I’m going to push too? she said.

  And she began to shove with a woman’s turbulent energy of anger. The chair went faster. Clifford looked round.

  “Is that necessary?” he said.

  “Very! Do you want to kill the man! If you’d let the motor work while it would—”

  But she did not finish. She was already panting. She slackened off a little, for it was surprisingly hard work.

  “Ay! slower!” said the man at her side, with a faint smile of the eyes.

  “Are you sure you’ve not hurt yourself?” she said fiercely.

  He shook his head. She looked at his smallish, short, alive hand, browned by the weather. It was the hand that caressed her. She had never even looked at it before. It seemed so still, like him, with a curious inward stillness that made her want to clutch it, as if she could not reach it. All her soul suddenly swept towards him: he was so silent, and out of reach! And he felt his limbs revive. Shoving with his left hand, he laid his right on her round white wrist, softly enfolding her wrist, with caress. And the flame of strength went down his back and his loins, reviving him. And she bent suddenly and kissed his hand. Meanwhile the back of Clifford’s head was held sleek and motionless, just in front of them.

  At the top of the hill they rested, and Connie was glad to let go. She had had fugitive dreams of friendship between these two men: one her husband, the other the father of her child. Now she saw the screaming absurdity of her dreams. The two males were as hostile as fire and water. They mutually exterminated one another. And she realized for the first time, what a queer subtle thing hate is. For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself.—”Now I’ve hated him, I shall never be able to go on living with him,” came the thought into her mind.

  On the level the keeper could push the chair alone. Clifford made a little conversation with her, to show his complete composure: about Aunt Eva, who was at Dieppe, and about Sir Malcolm, who had written to ask would Connie drive with him in his small car, to Venice, or would she and Hilda go by train.

  “I’d much rather go by train,” said Connie. “I don’t like long motor drives, especially when there’s dust. But I shall see what Hilda wants.”

  “She will want to drive her own car, and take you with her,” he said.

  “Probably!—I must help up here. You’ve no idea how heavy this chair is.”

  She went to the back of his chair, and plodded side by side with the keeper, shoving up the pink path. She did not care who saw.

  “Why not let me wait, and fetch Field. He is strong enough for the job,” said Clifford.

  “It’s so near,” she panted.

  But both she and Mellors wiped the sweat from their faces when they came to the top. It was curious, but this bit of work together had brought them much closer than they had been before.

  “Thanks so much, Mellors,” said Clifford, when they were at the house door. “I must get a different sort of motor, that’s all. Won’t you go to the kitchen and have a meal? it must be about time.”

  “Thank you, Sir Clifford. I was going to my mother for dinner today, Sunday.”

  “As you like.”

  Mellors slung into his coat, looked at Connie, saluted, and was gone. Connie, furious, went upstairs.

  At lunch she could not contain her feelings.

  “Why are you so abominably inconsiderate, Clifford?” she said to him.

  “Of whom?”

  “Of the keeper! If that is what you call the ruling classes, I’m sorry for you.”

  “Why?”

  “A man who’s been ill, and isn’t strong! My word, if I were the serving classes, I’d let you wait for service. I’d let you whistle.”

  “I quite believe it.”

  “If he’d been sitting in a chair with paralyzed legs, and behaved as you behaved, what would you have done for him?”

  “My dear evangelist, this confusing of persons and personalities is in bad taste.”

  “And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. Noblesse oblige! You and your ruling class?”

  “And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my gamekeeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.”

  “As if he weren’t a man as much as you are, my word!”

  “My gamekeeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.”

  “Pay him! What do you think you pay him for, with two pounds a week and a house?”

  “His services.”

  “Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.”

  “Probably he would like to; but can’t afford the luxury!”

  “You, and rule!” she said. “You don’t rule, don’t flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you’re dried up! You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber!”

  “You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!”

  “I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why, my fathe
r is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!”

  He reached and rang the bell for Mrs. Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.

  She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: “Him and buying people! Well, he doesn’t buy me, and therefore there’s no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They’ve got about as much feeling as celluloid has.”

  She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn’t want to hate him. She didn’t want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and india rubbery where other people were concerned.

  She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinner time. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer.—He was reading a French book.

  “Have you ever read Proust?” he asked her.

  “I’ve tried, but he bores me.”

  “He’s really very extraordinary.”

  “Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I’m tired of self-important mentalities.”

  “Would you prefer self-important animalities?”

  “Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn’t self-important.”

  “Well, I like Proust’s subtlety and his well-bred anarchy.”

  “It makes you very dead, really.”

  “There speaks my evangelical little wife.”

  They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn’t help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton’s cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He, too, was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him.

  She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half-past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs. Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.

  Connie returned to her room, threw her pajamas on the tossed bed, put on a thin tennis-dress and over that a woolen day-dress, put on rubber tennis-shoes, and then a light coat. And she was ready. If she met anybody, she was just going out for a few minutes. And in the morning, when she came in again, she would just have been for a little walk in the dew, as she fairly often did before breakfast. For the rest, the only danger was that someone should go into her room during the night. But that was most unlikely: not one chance in a hundred.

  Betts had not yet locked up. He fastened up the house at ten o’clock, and unfastened it again at seven in the morning. She slipped out silently and unseen. There was a half-moon shining, enough to make a little light in the world, not enough to show her up in her dark-grey coat. She walked quickly across the park, not really in the thrill of the assignation, but with a certain anger and rebellion burning in her heart. It was not the right sort of heart to take to a love-meeting. But à la guerre comme à la guerre!

  Chapter Fourteen

  When she got near the park gate, she heard the click of the latch. He was there, then, in the darkness of the wood, and had seen her!

  “You are good and early,” he said out of the dark. “Was everything all right?”

  “Perfectly easy.”

  He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open in the night. They went on apart, in silence.

  “Are you sure you didn’t hurt yourself this morning with that chair?” she asked.

  “No, no!”

  “When you had that pneumonia, what did it do to you?”

  “Oh nothing! It left my heart not so strong and the lungs not so elastic. But it always does that.”

  “And you ought not to make violent physical efforts?”

  “Not often.”

  She plodded on in an angry silence.

  “Did you hate Clifford?” she said at last.

  “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”

  “What is his sort?”

  “Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman, a bit like a lady, and no balls.”

  “What balls?”

  “Balls! A man’s balls?

  She pondered this.

  “But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.

  “You say a man’s got no brain, when he’s a fool: and no heart, when he’s mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls. When he’s sort of tame.”

  She pondered this.

  “And is Clifford tame?” she asked.

  “Tame, and nasty with it: like most such fellows, when you come up against ’em.”

  “And do you think you’re not tame?”

  “Maybe not quite!”

  At length she saw in the distance a yellow light.

  She stood still.

  “There is a light!” she said.

  “I always leave a light in the house,” he said.

  She went on again at his side, but not touching him, wondering why she was going with him at all.

  He unlocked, and they went in, he bolting the door behind them. As if it were a prison, she thought! The kettle was singing by the red fire, there were cups on the table.

  She sat in the wooden armchair by the fire. It was warm after the chill outside.

  “I’ll take off my shoes, they are wet,” she said.

  She sat with her stockinged feet on the bright steel fender. He went to the pantry, bringing food: bread and butter and pressed tongue. She was warm: she took off her coat. He hung it on the door.

  “Shall you have cocoa or tea or coffee to drink?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I want anything,” she said, looking at the table. “But you eat.”

  “Nay, I don’t care about it. I’ll just feed the dog.”

  He tramped with a quiet inevitability over the brick floor, putting food for the dog in a brown bowl. The spaniel looked up at him anxiously.

  “Ay, this is thy supper, tha nedna look as if tha wouldna get it!” he said.

  He set the bowl on the stairfoot mat, and sat himself on a chair by the wall, to take off his leggings and boots. The dog, instead of eating, came to him again, and sat looking up at him, troubled.

  He slowly unbuckled his leggings. The dog edged a little nearer.

  “What’s amiss wi’ thee then? Art upset because there’s somebody else here? Tha’rt a female, tha art! Go an’ eat thy supper.”

  He put his hand on her head, and the bitch leaned her head sideways against him. He slowly, softly pulled the long silky ear.

  “There!” he said. “There! Go an’ eat thy supper! Go!”

  He tilted his chair towards the pot on the mat, and the dog meekly went, and fell to eating.

  “Do you like dogs?” Connie asked him.

  “No, not really. They’re too tame and clinging.”

  He had taken off his leggings and was unlacing his heavy boots. Connie had turned from the fire. How bare the little room was! Yet over his head on the wall hung a hideous enlarged photograph of a young married couple, apparently him and a bold-faced young woman, no doubt his wife.

  “Is that you?” Connie asked him.

  He twisted and looked at the enlargement above his head.

  “Ay! Taken just afore we was married, when I was twenty-one.” He looked at it impassively.

  “Do you like it?”
Connie asked him.

  “Like it? No! I never liked the thing. But she fixed it all up to have it done, like.”

  He returned to pulling off his boots.

  “If you don’t like it, why do you keep it hanging there? Perhaps your wife would like to have it,” she said.

  He looked up at her with a sudden grin.

  “She carted off iverything as was worth taking from th’ouse,” he said. “But she left that!”

  “Then why do you keep it? For sentimental reasons?”

  “Nay, I niver look at it. I hardly knowed it wor theer. It’s been theer sin’ we come to this place.”

  “Why don’t you burn it?” she said.

  He twisted round again and looked at the enlarged photograph. It was framed in a brown-and-gilt frame, hideous. It showed a clean shaven, alert, very young looking man in a rather high collar, and a somewhat plump, bold young woman with hair fluffed out and crimped, and wearing a dark satin blouse.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?” he said.

  He pulled off his boots, and put on a pair of slippers. He stood up on the chair, and lifted down the photograph. It left a big pale place on the greenish wallpaper.

  “No use dusting it now,” he said, setting the thing against the wall.

  He went to the scullery, and returned with hammer and pincers. Sitting where he had sat before, he started to tear off the back-paper from the big frame and to pull out the sprigs that held the backboard in position, working with the immediate quiet absorption that was characteristic of him.

  He soon had the nails out: then he pulled out the backboards, then the enlargement itself, in its solid white mount. He looked at the photograph with amusement.

  “Shows me for what I was, a young curate, and her for what she was, a bully,” he said. “The prig and the bully!”

  “Let me look!” said Connie.

  He did look indeed very clean shaven and very clean altogether, one of the clean young men of twenty years ago. But even in the photograph his eyes were alert, and dauntless. And the woman was not altogether a bully, though her jowl was heavy. There was a touch of appeal in her.

  “One never should keep these things,” said Connie.