“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 would 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 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 to 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 had 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 not 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 be 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 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 past, 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! Unimaginables, 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 awakened 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 are 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-it-all!—But every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.”
“I am 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 around 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 hand
s 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 offense?”
“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 going 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 suitcase 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 her 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 suitcase, 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 was 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. I 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 gamekeeper,” faltered Connie, and she flushed vividly, like a shamed child.
“Connie!” said Hilda, lifting her nose slightly with disgust: a motion 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-colored Athena, bowed her head and pondered. She was really violently angry. But she dared not show it, because Connie, taking after her father, would straightway 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, flushing 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 at 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 she still 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 Cormie 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 windowsill.
On the strength of her anger, Hilda warmed towards 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 help-meet, 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.”
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