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 or 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 night-dress, 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 damned 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 reconnoitering 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 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 Seventeen
“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 petsywetsy, 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 favorite 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-humored 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 legs! 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 flaneurs, these 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 mountains 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 differences. 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 holiday lot, anyhow.
But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn’t let her connection 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 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 odor 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 stayed under a 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 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 Constanza!” said Connie.
He nodded, repeating: “Milady Constanza!” 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, but boring: and the girls wanted husbands. The chaplain was not a bad fellow, but too deferential. Sir Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness in 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 humorosity, as Hilda called it.
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