‘Not to what?’
‘Not to want to go off with one of my lovers.’
He gave her a quick, cracked laugh.
‘That’s rich!’ he said, ‘rich! You’re already resisting his pleading, and telling him you must be true to your charge! Oh, but women are priceless!’ He spoke with profound sarcasm.
‘No!’ she said, flushing under his ridicule. ‘I mean I wouldn’t really want to leave you — if you didn’t want me to.’
He recovered with a quick little frown.
‘Maybe not!’ he said. ‘There are things much more powerful than sex, and that go much deeper. Sex is only an incident; just as dinner is only an incident, even if you can’t live without it. And because there is something much stronger between you and me, than sex, probably you wouldn’t want to leave me for a sexual lover.’
She heard it very distinctly, and kept herself secret. She did not betray anything.
‘You’d keep the arm of your will round me all the time?’ she said, with quiet acceptance that might contain a sting of irony.
‘The arm of my will, if you like to call it such,’ he said.
They were both silent, both very much moved: and moved worlds apart from one another. Out of a cross riding just below where they sat, a brown spaniel came nosing excitedly towards them, as if it had smelled their emotion from afar, and were tracking it down. It ran towards them, uttering a soft, suppressed little bark.
‘Come then!’ said Constance, releasing her hand from Clifford’s, and holding it out to the dog. But the spaniel stood back, softly waving its tail.
Out of the side riding came the gamekeeper, dressed in greenish velveteen corduroy. He looked at the two intruders, and touched his old brown hat in a salute, then was going on, evasive, down the hill, making a soft noise to call his dog. He was striding away.
‘Oh I say, Parkin!’ said Sir Clifford.
The man stopped and swung round suddenly, showing his red face and enquiring eyes, as if he expected some attack.
‘Sir?’
‘Turn my chair round for me, and get me started, will you? It makes it easier for me.’
Parkin came striding up the slope, with a quick, small movement slinging his gun over his shoulder. He was a man of medium build. His face almost vermilion-ruddy with the weather, wearing a rather sticking-out brown moustache. His bearing had a military erectness and resistance, that was natural to him, and at the same time he was silent, his movements were soft, silent, almost secretive or evasive.
Constance moved from the side of the chair. The man touched his hat to her with a swift, unwilling movement, in silence, and gave her a quick look with his reddish-brown eyes, as he came to the back of the chair to take the push-bar. Constance, absorbed in a confusion of thoughts and emotions, met his glance almost without knowing it. She was hardly aware of him, being so much disturbed in herself by what Clifford had said. But the man’s watchful, hard eyes caught the unresolved trouble in the wide blue eyes of the young woman and the unconscious spark of appeal. He felt the queer spark of appeal touch him somewhere, but he stiffened, and hardened his spine in resistance and in unconsciousness. He did not choose to be aware.
He turned the chair easily, and set it in the tracks, where it would quietly run down the gentle slope.
‘Shall yer manage for yerself, or should I wheel you?’ he asked, in a harsh, neutral voice, with the local accent.
‘Perhaps you’d better come along, and give her a bit of a push up the park incline,’ said Clifford, in the voice of an officer speaking to a soldier.
The gamekeeper did not answer, but took the chair by the bar, and started it quietly down the slope. They went in silence, not speaking nor even looking at one another. Clifford and Constance were too much absorbed in what had just passed between them, and the gamekeeper was absorbed shutting the two gentry out of his consciousness, and keeping himself intact from them.
At the gate, Constance hurried forward a few steps and opened. Both the men looked at her: Clifford in remonstrance, the gamekeeper aloof. She held the gate open, and waited. She had always done things for herself: it was an instinct with her. She was aware of the eyes of the two men on her, of Clifford’s casual reproach, and the other man’s distant scrutiny. Clifford started his little engine, the keeper kept one hand on the chair-bar, as the chair ran through the gate. Then the man turned to close the gate, and Constance let him. She bent and patted the dog, which wagged its tail for a second, before it ran away from her. Parkin strode after the chair, and caught it up. She came on a little in the rear, aware of Clifford’s face glancing round to see where she was.
Abstractedly, she watched the keeper as he slowly pushed the chair, helping it up the rather steep incline of the park. Its small engine puffed laboriously, even though it was not doing much work. And the keeper went with a slow, deliberate step, taking his foot lingeringly from the ground. Constance liked the colour of his greenish velveteen corduroys, with the fawn cloth leggings. It was the old colour for gamekeepers, but one rarely saw it nowadays. What a strong back the man had!
It occurred to her that he lived a very lonely life: seeing him from behind, one realized it, how alone he was, and how he resisted everything. She knew his wife had left him, gone off with a collier from Stacks Gate, a mining settlement just beyond the south gate of the park. That must be more than two years ago. Constance had seen the woman: a florid, big, common creature, not a native of the district, because she spoke with a queer twang that Constance did not like. As soon as she had got used to the Derbyshire-Yorkshire dialect of the people round Wragby, she found other dialects distasteful, and much more noticeable than they had been before she was accustomed to any dialect at all.
Since his wife left him, Parkin had lived quite alone in the pretty but dark cottage across the wood, at the end of Mickleover Lane. Clifford liked him, because he was a good keeper, and did not drink, and had no pals. During the war, the colliers had roamed everywhere, and had poached at will. Parkin had only been gamekeeper for a year, before he was called up. Till that time he had been a blacksmith at the colliery. But he had had a violent quarrel with the Overhead manager, and there had been a fuss. So Sir Geoffrey had offered him the gamekeeper’s job, and as he had turned out a success, Clifford was glad to get him back when the war was over.
Now he was a man nearing forty. It was during the war his wife had gone loose. She would entertain men down in the cottage across the wood, to the great disgust of Sir Geoffrey. Constance had heard all the scandal, when she first came to Wragby. She had thought the delinquent wife must be rather a sporting character, till she had seen her, when she disliked her. She was insolent and suggestive, as if she jeered behind one’s back. Then she had gone off to Stacks Gate, and there was an end of her.
Parkin was apparently a rather cruel man. He was hated in the village, for frightening children and getting lads locked up, if he found them in the wood with a dog. Constance herself did not care for his harsh, rather tenor voice, that had a peculiar clang in it, in a countryside that spoke broad and rather heavy. Neither did she like the hard, objective way he stared at one, as if to say: What’s amiss with you! — when one had to give him an order. Nor the too-evident relief with which he backed out of one’s presence. Nor the soft furtiveness of his movements, as if he were hiding himself.
But now, as she watched the slow, sensitive way he lifted his feet and put them on the earth again, she realized something —that he was alone, it was his instinct, his necessity, to be alone: that he wanted to avoid his fellow-men, rather than pounce on them when he caught them trespassing. He was alone like some animal that has escaped, and he seemed to feel his fellow-men as the enemy and the danger.
Constance appreciated his solitary quality. She felt that need in herself — to keep herself solitary from mankind. It was no good Clifford talking to her about lovers. She could no more have a score of lovers than a tiger-cat can. And it was useless for her father to want her to ‘enjoy he
rself’. Even he had to do it on principle. And for her, it was too late. She didn’t want people — especially lots of people. She wanted to draw away from them — more and more away. She didn’t want contact with them— on the contrary. ‘Living her life’ meant avoiding people, not rushing into their arms. And yet — and yet — some contact she did want — as even a tiger-cat wants a mate, though the mate will probably devour his own offspring.
Clifford waited for her at the top of the slope. The day was already drawing to a close, the damp mist was beginning to close up. An infinite saddened melancholy seemed to settle over the park, in the damp, worn-out air that smelled of sulphur. Clifford’s little motor puffed with a forlorn, waiting puff.
‘You’re not feeling tired, are you?’ he asked.
‘Oh no!’ she replied, and said no more.
She was aware of the keeper looking at her, and she glanced at him, and met his unconscious, searching stare. His eyes were light brown, the hard, reddish colour of nuts, with tiny black pupils. You would never know what he was thinking. She,’ glanced away, and let him search.
As a matter of fact, she had vaguely flickered in his consciousness all the time, since he had first looked at her that afternoon, and had met her wide, blue eyes that were full of indescribable trouble, so full of their own trouble, that she had not been aware of him at all. He had realized for the first time that even she, her ladyship, didn’t have things all her own way. He always crudely took it for granted, that the gentry had things all their own way: even poor Clifford. Even now, it didn’t occur to him that Clifford really suffered from his disaster, as a poor man would. No, he was a gentleman, therefore he was above it, the anguish of real suffering.
Now, suddenly Parkin realized that the woman suffered that she was, so to speak, drowning. That was the effect it had on him. — Yet what cause had she to suffer? She was My-Lady, she was well-off. When you were well-off, you didn’t suffer. He resisted having to feel for her, or having to be aware of her at all.
Why should she suffer? She had everything she wanted, except for Sir Clifford’s being paralysed. And what was that? She had money and everything to make up for it. It wasn’t as if she was a poor man’s wife, and would have to go out to work for them both. They had servants, and all they wanted.
None the less, when she came up, he looked at her again, to see if it was true, that she was really in trouble, if she really gave him that feeling, of a young woman who was alone and out of her depth, drowning. A woman, perhaps, who wants something from a man without knowing it. That was what his hard stare meant, the stare of an animal that lives by the hunt, and watches every danger, every stir among the leaves.
And again he met the strange, dark turmoil of her eyes, the look of one who is drowning, with the spark of appeal unconsciously flying. He drew back, but he thought: ‘She’s got it stiff, she has! Summat ails her!’ And again his hostile mind went over the circumstances, and refused to allow she had any justification for taking things hard. She was well off, she had everything she wanted, servants and all; everything, except her husband was paralysed. Well, other women had to live with their men when they were paralysed. Plenty of women had lost their husbands altogether — sons as well. Let her be thankful for what she had got! He had no use for dissatisfied women.
Nevertheless, something kept stirring. He had kept himself without feeling for a long time now. Feeling was finished with him, with the war, and with his wife. Why should anybody care about other people? Let everybody keep their feelings to themselves, as he would keep his. Especially about women! The war had been bad. But women were worse. Nothing was so bad, to him, as women. They made his heart shut like the jaws of a steel trap. If there’d been no women in the world, no disaster that ever happened would have been half as bad as it was. Women made things so much worse. He was determined to keep himself clear now, for ever, and into eternity: his heart shut clean and clear.
Yet still, though his heart had not been touched, a spark had fallen on his sanguine imagination. Yes, he would admit, it was hard on a young creature. She seemed as decent as she could be, being a deceitful woman. Probably it was her trouble made her nice. If she had all she wanted, she’d be as brazen as the rest. So let her bear her trouble. Pity all men’s wives didn’t have a trouble that kept them down a bit! Anyhow, he had nothing to do with her! He closed again into insentience.
After all, she’d drawn rather a blank in the marriage lottery. Parkin couldn’t understand any woman wanting to marry Sir Clifford, anyhow. Sir Clifford was all right, as a gentleman: a very good gentleman, you might say. But not the sort that he, Parkin, would have imagined women wanting to marry. Not enough balls to him. But that was apparently what women liked best — that slippy-mouthed sort. So let ’em abide by what they got. Sir Clifford Chatterley was all right for a gentleman. What else did his wife want? Paralysed or not, didn’t seem to make much matter.
They came to the house, and at the door in the garden at the back, where there were no steps, Clifford was helped into his indoor chair by Marshall, who was gardener and husband of the housekeeper, an old servant.
‘Thanks for the help, Parkin!’ said Clifford. ‘Good night!’
‘Yer welcome, Sir Clifford?’ came the harsh, hard voice.
‘Oh good night!’ said Constance’s voice, soft and startled.
‘Good night to your ladyship!’ came distant and colourless.
That was how it was! Sir Clifford was always so polite, so thoughtful. The very distance between him and his retainers made him so. But she, she was always forgetting the retainers’, altogether. She had gone indoors now, completely forgetting that Parkin had ever existed. But when Clifford’s courtesy recalled her to the fact, then she forgot the distance, and, startled, called good night to him as if she were just a woman speaking, to him. His Good night to your ladyship! was almost stately. He turned away into the twilight, to get away from them.
CHAPTER IV
The last days of autumn fell into the gloom of winter. Constance took as little heed as possible. She had trained herself to be unconscious even of the English weather: she hated it so deeply. In the old days, they had always gone ‘abroad for the worst months, and even at home, it is not quite so bad near the downs and the sea. But at Wragby, black day followed black day, and black smuts fell in the winter fog, like the end of the world.
She kept herself disciplined, had a thousand small duties to attend to. Clifford gave all the important orders. But the more intimate household affairs, Constance attended to. And she followed the woman’s old rule, of keeping herself in order, by maintaining a strict rhythm in the house. She had her days for the linen, for the furniture, for the silver, she superintended the making of preserves, she kept a watch on the vegetable garden, and on the fruit, and she worked herself a good deal among the flowers. Then she sewed, making dresses for herself, and for her sister Hilda’s little girls. Then she drove into Uthwaite to do the shopping, such as was not done in Tevershall.
As a rule, the greater part of the morning was taken up by the house and the household necessities. In the afternoon she walked or went shopping or paid some duty call. In the evening, she sewed and listened to Clifford, who often read aloud to her. So that really she had very little time for herself, no time at all, in fact, for the piano, and hardly any for her drawing. If it hadn’t been for Hilda or her father, who got her commissions for illustrating some children’s book or some quaint little volume of verse, she would have let her drawing and painting lapse like the rest, though she really had a certain gift.
So that she was always occupied. Yet she had no real joy in anything. What she did, she did out of discipline: in the routine of life, and as a house-wife, she disciplined herself without relenting. So that everything went well. And yet, she knew it herself, it was dead. Instead of lying dead, she was walking about and doing things, dead.
She wouldn’t have minded even that, if her nature had let her remain dead. In a sense, situated as she was
, to walk about dead and do things day after day, dead, was as near the ideal as she could get. It is an ideal to many people, and many people, men and women, achieve their ideal. Corpses that are active, they go on in activity from year to year.
But even if you are a corpse, you are subject to the mysterious processes and explosive reactions of decomposition. And if you are not a corpse, if the passion of life still stirs in you, it will cause violent disturbances and bitter revolts from the corpse’s discipline, from time to time.
This was Constance’s condition. She said to herself: I am a corpse, and since there is no chance of life, I ought to be a corpse, I want to be a corpse! — Nevertheless, some second, deeper voice in her rebelled fiercely. And sometimes she would cry to herself: I want my heart to open! Oh, I want my heart to open! I don’t want it shut up like this, like a coffin! Oh, if only God, or Satan, or a man or a woman or a child, or anybody, would help me to open my heart, because I can’t do it myself! I love Clifford, but it doesn’t open my heart. He doesn’t want it. He’s afraid of my heart, if it opened. And I can’t be religious and charitable: people like the Duchess of Oaklands have used it all up. And I’m not really an artist, I’m only a dilettante, so I can’t open my heart, I’ve nothing to open it to! Oh, if only there was a God I could open my heart to! But I can’t open it to Jesus! he’s too dead! he’s too much of death! He’s too like Clifford He s all suffering! — Oh, if I could open my heart to something! If I can’t, I shall die or go mad—
But there was nothing she could open her heart to, so following the blind yearning came a deep, deafened anger and hate. Sometimes it stormed in, through her sleep, and she would wake feeling strange and livid, semi-conscious, burdened with an anger like a sailing ship lurching and flying madly in a hurricane. Save that the hurricane was inside her, not outside. But just the same, she was possessed. And as she looked round the room, she longed to destroy it all, smash the whole thing to smithereens: smash up Wragby, burn it down, anything, anything to erase it and wipe it out of existence. She hated it with a mad and at the same time exquisite hatred. The exquisite relief it would be if she saw it in flames, and then in ashes; and then even the blackened stones torn apart; and at last, nothing but nettles, just nettles in the place where it had been. The Romans sowed salt on the place that was accursed, but she, with deeper hate, would sow nettles. And the park! — if one could set fire to all the trees, so that it was a bare desert, save for a few black stumps! And burn down the colliery works, and destroy Tevershall, and wipe out all the people! Ah a grand, grand destruction! How her soul gloated on the thought! If something would happen that would really destroy the world and make it into a desert, with a few charred remains and the salty bitterness of ashes blowing on its surface! If that could happen, then, then at last one would feel relieved. Even if one were dead oneself in the holocaust, it would still be a relief. It would be good to be dead, if one knew the world was destroyed. But what would be the good of dying, as all the men had died in the war, and leaving the world still wagging, as foul and even fouler than before! Growing fouler every minute! Bah! Fools, to be dead, and not even able to hate it!
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 4