“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 that 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 very much?”
“I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.”
“Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said you felt like that.”
He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had suffered bitterly.
“I suppose I did,” he said.
She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.
There was a long pause.
“And did you miss me?” she asked.
“I was glad you were out of it.”
Again there was a pause.
“But did people believe about you and me?” she asked.
“No! I don’t think so for a moment.”
“Did Clifford?”
“I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But naturally it made him want to see the last of me.”
“I’m going to have a child.”
The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.
“Say you’re glad!” she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she could not understand.
“It’s the future,” he said.
“But aren’t you glad?” she persisted.
“I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.”
“But you needn’t be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have it as his own, he’d be glad.”
She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.
“Shall I go back to Clifford and put a little baronet into Wragby?” she asked.
He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered on his face.
“You wouldn’t have to tell him who the father was.”
“Oh!” she said; “he’d take it even then, if I wanted him to.”
He thought for a time.
“Ay!” he said at last, to himself. “I suppose he would.”
There was silence. A big gulf was between them.
“But you don’t want me to go back to Clifford, do you?” she asked him.
“What do you want yourself?” he replied.
“I want to live with you,” she said simply.
In spite of himself, little flames ran over his belly as he heard her say it, and he dropped his head. Then he looked up at her again, with those haunted eyes.
“If it’s worth it to you,” he said. “I’ve got nothing.”
“You’ve got more than most men. Come, you know it,” she said.
“In one way, I know it.” He was silent for a time, thinking. Then he resumed: “They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it’s not that. I’m not a woman because I don’t want to shoot birds, neither because I don’t want to make money, or get on. I could have got on in the army, easily, but I didn’t like the army. Though I could manage the men all right: they liked me and they had a bit of a holy fear of me when I got mad. No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead: absolutely fool-dead. I like men, and men like me. But I can’t stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That’s why I can’t get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?”
“But why offer anything? It’s not a bargain. It’s just that we love one another,” she said.
“Nay, nay! It’s more than that. Living is moving and moving on. My life won’t get down the proper gutters, it just won’t. So I’m a bit of a waste ticket by myself. And I’ve no business to take a woman into my life, unless my life does something and gets somewhere, inwardly at least, to keep us both fresh. A man must offer a woman some meaning in his life, if it’s going to be an isolated life, and if she’s a genuine woman. I can’t be just your male concubine.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Why, because I can’t. And you would soon hate it.”
“As if you couldn’t trust me,” she said.
The grin flickered on his face.
“The money is yours, the position is yours, the decisions will lie with you. I’m not just my lady’s fucker, after all.”
“What else are you?”
“You may well ask. It no doubt is invisible. Yet I’m something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else’s seeing it.”
“And will your existence have less point, if you live with me?”
He paused a long time before replying:
“It might.”
She, too, stayed to think about it.
“And what is the point of your existence?”
“I tell you, it’s invisible. I don’t believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there’s got to be a future for humanity, there’ll have to he a very big change from what now is.”
“And what will the real future have to be like?”
“God knows! I can feel something inside me, all mixed up with a lot of rage. But what it really amounts to, I don’t know.”
“Shall I tell you?” she said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don’t have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?”
“Tell me, then,” he replied.
“It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is, like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”
The grin came flickering on his face.
“That!” he said.
Then he sat thinking.
“Ay!” he said. “You’re right. It’s that really. It’s that all the way through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put ’em through hell. It’s a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes ’em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! It’s tenderness, really; it’s cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.”
She looked at him.
“Then why are you afraid of me?” she said.
He looked at her a long time before he answered.
“It’s the money, really, and the position. It’s the world in you.”
“But isn’t there tenderness in me?” she said wistfully.
He looked down at her, with darkened, abstract eyes.
“Ay! It comes an’ goes, like in me.”
“But can’t you trust it between you and me?” she asked, gazing anxiously at him.
She saw his face all softening down, losing its armor.
“Maybe!” h
e said.
They were both silent.
“I want you to hold me in your arms,” she said. “I want you to tell me you are glad we are having a child.”
She looked so lovely and warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards her.
“I suppose we can go to my room,” he said. “Though it’s scandalous again.”
But she saw the forgetfulness of the world coming over him again, his face taking the soft, pure look of tender passion.
They walked by the remoter streets to Coburg Square, where he had a room at the top of the house, an attic room where he cooked for himself on a gas range. It was small, but decent and tidy.
She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in the soft first flush of her pregnancy.
“I ought to leave you alone,” he said.
“No!” she said. “Love me! Love me, and say you’ll keep me. Say you’ll keep me! Say you’ll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody!”
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked body, the only home she had ever known.
“Then I’ll keep thee,” he said. “If tha wants it, then I’ll keep thee.”
He held her round and fast.
“And say you’re glad about the child,” she repeated. “Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you’re glad it’s there.”
But that was more difficult for him.
“I’ve a dread of puttin’ children i’ th’ world,” he said. “I’ve such a dread o’ th’ future for ’em.”
“But you’ve put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its future already. Kiss it!”
He quivered, because it was true. “Be tender to it, and that will be its future.”—At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed her belly and her mount of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the fetus within the womb.
“Oh, you love me! You love me!” she said, in a little cry like one of her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to do, to come into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his integrity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none, he should be too proud and honorable to hold back his tenderness from her on that account. “I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings,” he said to himself, “and the touch of tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me there. Thank God I’ve got a woman! Thank God I’ve got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she’s not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she’s a tender, aware woman.” And as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than procreative.
She was quite determined now that there should be no parting between him and her. But the ways and means were still to settle.
“Did you hate Bertha Coutts?” she asked him.
“Don’t talk to me about her.”
“Yes! You must let me. Because once you liked her. And once you were as intimate with her as you are with me. So you have to tell me. Isn’t it rather terrible, when you’ve been intimate with her, to hate her so? Why is it?”
“I don’t know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always, always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman’s ghastly freedom that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against me, like vitriol in my face.”
“But she’s not free of you even now. Does she still love you?”
“No, no! If she’s not free of me, it’s because she’s got that mad rage, she must try to bully me.”
“But she must have loved you.”
“No! Well, in specks, she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no altering her. Her will was wrong, from the first.”
“But perhaps she felt you didn’t really love her, and she wanted to make you.”
“My God, it was bloody making.”
“But you didn’t really love her, did you? You did her that wrong.”
“How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always ripped me up. No, don’t let’s talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she was a doomed woman. This last time, I’d have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I’d but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it’s fearful, and she should be shot at last.”
“And shouldn’t men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?”
“Ay!—the same! But I must get free of her, or she’ll be at me again. I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be careful. We mustn’t really be seen together, you and I. I never, never could stand it if she came down on me and you.”
Connie pondered this.
“Then we can’t be together?” she said.
“Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September, then till March.”
“But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,” she said.
He was silent.
“I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,” he said.
“It’s not being very tender to them,” she said.
“Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can’t live. They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.”
“But you wouldn’t do it,” she said.
“I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I’d shoot them.”
“Then perhaps it is just as well you daren’t.”
“Well.”
Connie had now plenty to think of. It was evident he wanted absolutely to be free of Bertha Coutts. And she felt he was right. The last attack had been too grim.—This meant her living alone, till spring. Perhaps she could get divorced from Clifford. But how? If Mellors were named, then there was an end to his divorce. How loathsome! Couldn’t one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the world are not five minutes from Charing Cross, nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New York.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Connie confided in her father.
“You see, father, he was Clifford’s gamekeeper: but he was an officer in the army in India. Only he is like Colonel C. E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier again.”
Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism of the famous C. E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the humility. It looked just the sort of conceit the knight most loathed, the conceit of self-abasement.
“Where did your gamekeeper spring from?” asked Sir Malcolm irritably.
“He was a collier’s son in Tevershall. But he’s absolutely presentable.”
The knight artist became more angry.
“Looks to me like a gold-digger,” he said. “And you’re a pretty easy gold-mine, apparently.”
“No, father, it’s not like that. You’d know if you saw him. He’s a man. Clifford always detested him for not being humble.”
“Apparently he had a good instinct, for once.”
What Sir Malcolm could not bea
r, was the scandal of his daughter’s having an intrigue with a gamekeeper. He did not mind the intrigue: he minded the scandal.
“I care nothing about the fellow. He’s evidently been able to get around you all right. But by God, think of all the talk. Think of your stepmother, how she’ll take it!”
“I know,” said Connie. “talk is beastly: especially if you live in society. And he wants so much to get his own divorce. I thought we might perhaps say it was another man’s child, and not mention Mellors’ name at all.”
“Another man’s! What other man’s?”
“Perhaps Duncan Forbes. He has been our friend all his life. And he’s a fairly well-known artist. And he’s fond of me.”
“Well I’m damned! Poor Duncan. And what’s he going to get out of it?”
“I don’t know. But he might rather like it, even.”
“He might, might he? Well, he’s a funny man, if he does. Why, you’ve never had an affair with him, have you?”
“No! But he doesn’t really want it. He only loves me to be near him, but not to touch him.”
“My God, what a generation!”
“He would like me most of all to be a model for him to paint from. Only I never wanted to.”
“God help him! But he looks down-trodden enough for anything.”
“Still, you wouldn’t mind so much the talk about him?”
“My God, Connie, all the bloody contriving!”
“I know! It’s sickening! But what can I do?”
“Contriving, conniving; conniving, contriving! Makes a man think he’s lived too long.”
“Come, father, if you haven’t done a good deal of contriving and conniving in your time, you may talk.”
“But it was different, I assure you.”
“It’s always different.”
Hilda arrived, also furious when she heard of the new developments. And she also simply could not stand the thought of a public scandal about her sister and a gamekeeper. Too, too humiliating!
“Why should we not just disappear, separately, to British Columbia, and have no scandal?” said Connie.
But that was no good. The scandal would come out just the same. And if Connie was going with the man, she’d better be able to marry him. This was Hilda’s opinion. Sir Malcolm wasn’t sure. The affair might still blow over.
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