After this, Clifford became like a child with Mrs. Bolton. He would hold her hand, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly kissed him, he said: “Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!” And when she sponged his great blond body, he would say the same: “Do kiss me!” and she would lightly kiss his body, anywhere, half in mockery.
And he lay with a queer, blank face like a child, with a bit of the wonderment of a child. And he would gaze on her with wide, childish eyes, in a relaxation of madonna-worship. It was sheer relaxation on his part, letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish position that was really perverse. And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exaltation, the exaltation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.
Mrs. Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him. And they drew into a closer physical intimacy, an intimacy of perversity, when he was a child stricken with an apparent candor and an apparent wonderment, that looked almost like a religious exaltation: the perverse and literal rendering of “except ye become again as a little child.”—While she was the Magna Mater, full of power and potency, having the great blond child-man under her will and her stroke entirely.
The curious thing was that when this child-man, which Clifford was now and which he had been becoming for years, emerged into the world, he was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be. This perverted child-man was now a real business man; when it was a question of affairs, was an absolute he-man, sharp as a needle, and impervious as a bit of steel. When he was out among men, seeking his own ends, and “making good” his colliery workings, he had an almost uncanny shrewdness, hardness, and a straight sharp punch. It was as if his very passivity and prostitution to the Magna Mater gave him insight into material business affairs, and lent him a certain remarkable inhuman force. The wallowing in private emotion, the utter abasement of his manly self, seemed to lend him a second nature, cold, almost visionary, business-clever. In business he was quite inhuman.
And in this Mrs. Bolton triumphed. “How he’s getting on!” she would say to herself in pride. “And that’s my doing! My word, he’d never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.”
At the same time, in some corner of her weird female soul, how she despised him and hated him! He was to her the fallen beast, the squirming monster. And while she aided and abetted him all she could, away in the remotest corner of her ancient healthy womanhood she despised him with a savage contempt that knew no bounds. The merest tramp was better than he.
His behavior with regard to Connie was curious. He insisted on seeing her again. He insisted, moreover, on her coming to Wragby. On this point he was finally and absolutely fixed. Connie had promised to come back to Wragby, faithfully.
“But is it any use?” said Mrs. Bolton. “Can’t you let her go, and be rid of her?”
“No! She said she was coming back, and she’s got to come.”
Mrs. Bolton opposed him no more. She knew what she was dealing with.
“I needn’t tell you what effect your letter has had on me,” he wrote to Connie to London. “Perhaps you can imagine it if you try, though no doubt you won’t trouble to use your imagination on my behalf.
“I can only say one thing in answer: I must see you personally, here at Wragby, before I can do anything. You promised faithfully to come back to Wragby, and I hold you to the promise. I don’t believe anything nor understand anything until I see you personally, here under normal circumstances. I needn’t tell you that nobody here suspects anything, so your return would be quite normal. Then if you feel, after we have talked things over, that you still remain in the same mind, no doubt we can come to terms.”
Connie showed this letter to Mellors.
“He wants to begin his revenge on you,” said he, handing the letter back.
Connie was silent. She was somewhat surprised to find that she was afraid of Clifford. She was afraid to go near him. She was afraid of him as if he were evil and dangerous.
“What shall I do?” she said.
“Nothing, if you don’t want to do anything.”
She replied, trying to put Clifford off. He answered: “If you don’t come back to Wragby now, I shall consider that you are coming back one day, and act accordingly. I shall just go on the same, and wait for you here, if I wait for fifty years.”
She was frightened. This was bullying of an insidious sort. She had no doubt he meant what he said. He would not divorce her, and the child would be his, unless she could find some means of establishing its illegitimacy.
After a time of worry and harassment, she decided to go to Wragby. Hilda would go with her. She wrote this to Clifford. He replied: “I shall not welcome your sister, but I shall not deny her the door. I have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her.”
They went to Wragby. Clifford was away when they arrived. Mrs. Bolton received them.
“Oh, your Ladyship, it isn’t the happy home-coming we hoped for, is it?” she said.
“Isn’t it!” said Connie.
So this woman knew! How much did the rest of the servants know or suspect?
She entered the house which now she hated with every fiber in her body. The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim.
“I can’t stay long here,” she whispered to Hilda, terrified.
And she suffered going into her own bedroom, reentering into possession as if nothing had happened. She hated every minute inside the Wragby walls.
They did not meet Clifford till they went down to dinner. He was dressed, and with a black tie: rather reserved, and very much the superior gentleman. He behaved perfectly politely during the meal, and kept a polite sort of conversation going: but it seemed all touched with insanity.
“How much do the servants know?” asked Connie when the woman was out of the room.
“Of your intentions? Nothing whatsoever.”
“Mrs. Bolton knows.”
He changed color.
“Mrs. Bolton is not exactly one of the servants,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
There was tension till after coffee, when Hilda said she would go up to her room.
Clifford and Connie sat in silence when she had gone. Neither would begin to speak. Connie was so glad that he wasn’t taking the pathetic line, she kept him up to as much haughtiness as possible. She just sat silent and looked down at her hands.
“I suppose you don’t at all mind having gone back on your word?” he said at last.
“I can’t help it,” she murmured.
“But if you can’t, who can?”
“I suppose nobody.”
He looked at her with curious cold rage. He was used to her. She was as it were embedded in his will. How dared she now go back on him, and destroy the fabric of his daily existence? How dared she try to cause this derangement of his personality!
“And for what do you want to go back on everything?” he insisted.
“Love!” she said. It was best to be hackneyed.
“Love of Duncan Forbes? But you didn’t think that worth having, when you met me. Do you mean to say you now love him better than anything else in life?”
“One changes,” she said.
“Possibly! Possibly you may have whims. But you still have to convince me of the importance of the change. I merely don’t believe in your love of Duncan Forbes.”
“But why should you believe in it? You have only to divorce me, not to believe in my feelings.”
“And why should I divorce you?”
“Because I don’t want to live here any more. And you really don’t want me.”
“Pardon me! I don’t change. For my part, since you are my wife, I should prefer that
you should stay under my roof in dignity and quiet. Leaving aside personal feelings, and I assure you, on my part it is leaving aside a great deal, it is bitter as death to me to have this order of life broken up, here in Wragby, and the decent round of daily life smashed, just for some whim of yours.”
After a time of silence she said:
“I can’t help it. I’ve got to go. I expect I shall have a child.” He, too, was silent for a time.
“And is it for the child’s sake you must go?” he asked at length.
She nodded.
“And why? Is Duncan Forbes so keen on his spawn?”
“Surely keener than you would be,” she said.
“But really? I want my wife, and I see no reason for letting her go. If she likes to bear a child under my roof, she is welcome, and the child is welcome, provided that the decency and order of life is preserved. Do you mean to tell me that Duncan Forbes has a greater hold over you? I don’t believe it.”
There was a pause.
“But don’t you see,” said Connie. “I must go away from you, and I must live with the man I love.”
“No, I don’t see it! I don’t give tuppence for your love, nor for the man you love. I don’t believe in that sort of cant.”
“But, you see, I do.”
“Do you? My dear Madam, you are too intelligent, I assure you, to believe in your own love for Duncan Forbes. Believe me, even now you really care more for me. So why should I give in to such nonsense!”
She felt he was right there. And she felt she could keep silent no longer.
“Because it isn’t Duncan that I do love,” she said, looking up at him. “We only said it was Duncan, to spare your feelings.”
“To spare my feelings?”
“Yes! Because who I really love, and it’ll make you hate me, is Mr. Mellors, who was our gamekeeper here.”
If he could have sprung out of his chair, he would have done so. His face went yellow, and his eyes bulged with disaster as he glared at her.
Then he dropped back in the chair, gasping and looking up at the ceiling.
At length he sat up.
“Do you mean to say you’re telling me the truth?” he asked, looking gruesome.
“Yes! You know I am.”
“And when did you begin with him?”
“In the spring.”
He was silent like some beast in a trap.
“And it was you, then, in the bedroom at the cottage?”
So he had really inwardly known all the time.
“Yes!”
He still leaned forward in his chair, gazing at her like a cornered beast.
“My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!”
“Why?” she ejaculated faintly.
But he seemed not to hear her.
“That scum! That bumptious lout! That miserable cad! And carrying on with him all the time, while you were here and he was one of my servants! My God, my God, is there any limit to the beastly lowness of women?”
He was beside himself with rage, as she knew he would be.
“And you mean to say you want to have a child to a cad like that?”
“Yes! I’m going to.”
“You’re going to! You mean you’re sure! How long have you been sure?”
“Since June.”
He was speechless, and the queer blank look of a child came over him again.
“You’d wonder,” he said at last, “that such beings were ever allowed to be born.”
“What beings?” she asked.
He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious he couldn’t even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connection with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate.
“And do you mean to say you’d marry him?—and bear his foul name?” he asked at length.
“Yes, that’s what I want.”
He was again as if dumbfounded.
“Yes!” he said at last. “That proves what I’ve always thought about you is correct: you’re not normal, you’re not in your right senses. You’re one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.”
Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus.
“So don’t you think you’d better divorce me and have done with it?” she said.
“No! You can go where you like, but I shan’t divorce you,” he said idiotically.
“Why not?”
He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy.
“Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?” she said.
“I care nothing about the child.”
“But if it’s a boy it will be legally your son, and it will inherit your title, and have Wragby.”
“I care nothing about that,” he said.
“But you must! I shall prevent the child from being legally yours, if I can. I’d so much rather it were illegitimate and mine: if it can’t be Mellors’.”
“Do as you like about that.”
He was immovable.
“And won’t you divorce me?” she said. “You can use Duncan as a pretext! There’d be no need to bring in the real name. Duncan doesn’t mind.”
“I shall never divorce you,” he said, as if a nail had been driven in.
“But why? Because I want you to?”
“Because I follow my own inclination, and I’m not inclined to.”
It was useless. She went upstairs, and told Hilda the upshot.
“Better get away tomorrow,” said Hilda, “and let him come to his senses.”
So Connie spent half the night packing her really private and personal effects. In the morning she had her trunks sent to the station, without telling Clifford. She decided to see him only to say good-bye, before lunch.
But she spoke to Mrs. Bolton.
“I must say good-bye to you, Mrs. Bolton. You know why, but I can trust you not to talk.”
“Oh, you can trust me, your Ladyship, though it’s a sad blow for us here, indeed. But I hope you’ll be happy with the other gentleman.”
“The other gentleman! It’s Mr. Mellors, and I care for him. Sir Clifford knows. But don’t say anything to anybody. And if one day you think Sir Clifford may be willing to divorce me, let me know, will you? I should like to be properly married to the man I care for.”
“I’m sure you would, my Lady. Oh, you can trust me. I’ll be faithful to Sir Clifford, and I’ll be faithful to you, for I can see you’re both right in your own ways.”
“Thank you! And look! I want to give you this—may I?—” So Connie left Wragby once more, and went on with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors went into the country and got work on a farm. The idea was, he should get his divorce, if possible, whether Connie got hers or not. And for six months he should work at farming, so that eventually he and Connie could have some small farm of their own, into which he could put his energy. For he would have to have some work, even hard work, to do, and he would have to make his own living, even if her capital started him.
So they would have to wait till spring was in, till the baby was born, till the early summer came round again.
The Grange Farm,
Old Heanor, 29 September.
“I got on here with a bit of contriving, because I knew Richards, the company engineer, in the army. It is a farm belonging to Butler & Smitham Colliery Company, they use it for raising hay and oats for the pit-ponies; not a private concern. But they’ve got cows and pigs and all the rest of it, and I get thirty shillings a week as laborer. Rowley, the farmer, puts me on to as many jobs as he can, so that I can learn as much as possible between now and next Easter. I’ve not heard a thing about Bertha. I’ve no idea why she didn’t show up at the divorce, nor where she is nor what she’s up to. But if I keep quiet till March I suppose I shall be free. And don’t you bother abo
ut Sir Clifford. He’ll want to get rid of you one of these days. If he leaves you alone, it’s a lot.
“I’ve got lodgings in a bit of an old cottage in Engine Row, very decent. The man is engine-driver at High Park, tall, with a beard, and very chapel. The woman is a birdy bit of a thing who loves anything superior, King’s English and allow-me! all the time. But they lost their only son in the war, and it’s sort of knocked a hole in them. There’s a long gawky lass of a daughter training for a school teacher, and I help her with her lessons sometimes, so we’re quite the family. But they’re very decent people, and only too kind to me. I expect I’m more coddled than you are.
“I like farming all right. It’s not inspiring, but then I don’t ask to be inspired. I’m used to horses, and cows, though they are very female, have a soothing effect on me. When I sit with my head in her side, milking, I feel very solaced. They have six rather fine Herefords. Oat-harvest is just over and I enjoyed it, in spite of sore hands and a lot of rain. I don’t take much notice of people, but get on with them all right. Most things one just ignores.
“The pits are working badly; this is a colliery district like Tevershall, only prettier. I sometimes sit in the Wellington and talk to the men. They grumble a lot, but they’re not going to alter anything. As everybody says, the Notts-Derby miners have got their hearts in the right place. But the rest of their anatomy must be in the wrong place, in a world that has no use for them. I like them, but they don’t cheer me much: not enough of the old fighting-cock in them. They talk a lot about nationalism, nationalization of royalties, nationalization of the whole industry. But you can’t nationalize coal and leave all the other industries as they are. They talk about putting coal to new uses, like Sir Clifford is trying to do. It may work here and there, but not as a general thing, I doubt. Whatever you make you’ve got to sell it. The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. And they are doomed along with it. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there’s not much conviction in them. There’s no sort of conviction about anything, except that it’s all a muddle and a hole. Even under a Soviet you’ve still got to sell coal: and that’s the difficulty.
Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 39