But of what she felt, the other two were now quite unconscious. It was enough that she was there. She had come back. And they had got her. They would not mind what she did, in private. And they trusted her not to make any public splash. For the rest, neither Clifford nor Mrs Bolton cared a rap, how ‘immoral’ she might be. They wanted her to be immoral. That would make them safer of her. But of course, she would keep up appearances.
And she knew, when Clifford asked her so particularly what. men had been at the Villa Natividad, and all about them individually, he was seeking to find out if she had had a lover, or lovers, and who. He wanted to know secretly. If he knew openly, he would have to get into a state about it, he wouldn’t know where he was. He wanted her to give him a hint. But she was cold as ice, and as far as the moon from letting him pick any suggestion from her.
In the same way, Mrs Bolton watched her and tried to spy her out, to find out if there was anything in her physical condition. Connie knew almost certainly that she was with child. now; that probably the child was conceived in her, in May, and it was now August. But knowing it made her the more desperately anxious to hide the fact from the others.
It was not so easy, because in the last weeks she had got a little fatter, and her flesh had taken that delicate softness and slightly animal, milky bloom that sometimes comes in the first months of pregnancy: a softness which is no longer fired by desire, a milkiness that is already touched with maternity. Of course Mrs Bolton noticed this, and watched for further signs. But Connie, as far as she could, hid them from her rigorously, and pretended rather the opposite. And she was furious when Mrs Bolton came up to her room in the morning, bringing the tray, instead of the maid Annie or the footman Ernest.
She would have to go! She would have to clear out of Wragby in good time, otherwise she would never get away. These two, Clifford and Ivy Bolton, by the very pressure of wanting her, seemed to weigh her down: by their very deference to her, their yielding before her, their apparent giving up everything to her, cast a net over her, fine and silken, almost invisible, but also, almost unbreakable. Ah, Parkin did not know what danger she was in! He thought she was so absolutely well off, in Wragby Hall. Whereas she herself knew she was in the most subtle danger, the danger of being dragged under water by these two uncanny creatures, and made to produce children to keep their uncanny game going on in the next generation. The grisly game of mammon, the game of the infernal ministers, possessed by material inspiration.
No, Parkin was not good to her! He ought to know that she must be taken away from Wragby! He ought to know that something dreadful would happen to her if she was left there. Instead of that, he thought she was in a sort of earthly Paradise of wealth and well-being, and he was the poor sufferer, having to work. But he did not know! No, he wasn’t good to her, he abandoned her to the subtlest danger. He was selfish, like all men, and only aware of himself.
She wept and fretted, for she was now really afraid of Clifford, of Wragby, of Mrs Bolton, of all these Midlands of England. She was afraid, and her horror was, lest she should never escape. She must escape.
Clifford asked her if she would put her money into his business. But her money consisted of property in Scotland, and certain good investments. Well, would she sell out, and invest in his business? He would pay her the same interest: nay, he would pay her a better interest. She would make seven hundred a year on it, instead of five.
She felt his voice going hot and strange, with the weird power in it that came when he talked of business. It had an almost mesmeric effect on her, as he sat there, talking, opposite her, with his eyes abstracted and excited, his voice like a hot wind blowing over her, his will pulling her down in a sort of net. How strange, how strange and ghoulish and cruel he was, when it came to that mystic rapture of ‘business’, of ‘money’. Money! Money! Money! The air whispered it.
But her money was all her own. .He had settled nothing on her at her marriage. He had given her only a few jewels. And she had brought nothing into the marriage settlement. Nevertheless, he would have won over her, if she had not felt a queer feeling, like retching, in her womb. And suddenly, like a heroine, in the eighteenth century, she swooned, and he yelled out for somebody to come, and was yellow with ghastly terror, when she recovered. Abject, almost gibbering with terror, he was.
‘It’s nothing, Clifford!’ she said. ‘Only liver! You know I get liver sometimes.’
But he was terrified in his soul, what soul he had. His life depended so abjectly on hers, for its coherence. And if anything happened to her!
Later she said to him: ‘Let me think about the money, Clifford, will you? You know how bad I am at understanding those things? I want you to have it, if you need it. But I’d like to understand. Do you mind waiting a bit, while I ask Hilda and Father?’
‘Oh, I don’t want it, I don’t want it! I can manage quite well without it,’ he said, in heavy haste.
But she knew, in her soul, that he had fixed his business mind on it.
And it was already August. Parkin had been ten days gone, and he had not written. She was feeling gnawed and anxious the terrible gnawing anxiety, the fear of everything, that came over her often in Wragby. How awful the future was! She could think of nothing, but just to go to Hilda.
Then came a letter from Sheffield. ‘Dear Lady Chatterley, Excuse me for writing to you. You will know who we are, from Mr Seivers. He has taken his own name now, and dropped the other. He said that perhaps you might like to come and see us one day, and we should be very pleased to see you on Monday, being Bank Holiday, and we’re not going anywhere this year, being just back from a fortnight by the sea, which has done us all a lot of good. So if you would care to come to tea, we should be very pleased, and, of course, highly honoured. You mustn’t take any notice of the poor little place we live in. Mr Seivers would have written himself, but his hands are in rather a poor shape, so he got me to do it. Please excuse my letter, and believe me, yours respectfully, Lilian Tewson.’
This too was rather annoying, as Connie had kept her Saturdays free, but on the Bank Holiday people were coming to Wragby. She had to write by return, to ask if she could come on Tuesday instead of Monday, to Blagby Street: it would not matter if she came after tea instead of before, for just an hour. — She had a reply from Mrs Tewson, who was sorry Lady Chatterley couldn’t come Monday, but if she would come on Tuesday at five o’clock, the men would get home from work as early as possible. To this Lady Chatterley agreed, finding all this arranging rather irritating.
On Tuesday afternoon, therefore, Connie set off with Field. She told Clifford not to mind if she were a little late home, as she was going to call on some acquaintances, elderly ladies fairly well known in the English-Buddhist circles, whom Constance had met abroad. And Clifford, in return, asked her to bring him something or other for his radio, and be sure to get just the right thing.
In town, she did her shopping, and drove to the Miss Conibears. They were at home: so she dismissed Field, and told him to wait for her at the garage between six and seven. — She stayed half-an-hour with the Miss Conibears, who were intelligent, really refined women, kindly and free from the lowness which one finds so often in the world. But their atmosphere was a little too rarified. She couldn’t stand it very well, and imagined Parkin saying ‘Balls!’ However, the ladies promised to call at Wragby. — And so one goes on tangling oneself in the net.
It was nearly five o’clock. She pleaded an appointment. The servant got her a taxi, and she gave the address, 57 Blagby Street. The driver looked a little mystified, but drove out of the substantial, middle-class street slowly. Then he stopped, and leaning back, opened the door of the car.
‘Do you happen to know just about where it is, Mm?’ he asked. ‘Blagby Street?’ He looked as if the place didn’t exist.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know at all,’ said Connie.
So the taxi edged slowly on, towards a stand.
There the man pulled up again, and asked discreetly:
‘Eli Jim! Know where Blagby Street is?’
‘What?’
‘Blagby Street?’
There was a blank, while the words ‘Blagby Street’ were re-echoed among the chauffeurs. Connie sat marooned. At last a seedy fellow shouted:
‘Blagby Street? ‘Ay! Up St Ann’s Well! Next after Kink Alfred — or next but one! D’yer know where the Cross Keys is—?’
The driver received the information curiously, as if he had been directed to the middle of Africa, and the taxi ran on through the grey August dismalness of the town, past huge hoardings and chocolate-coloured chapels and miserable black dwellings. Driving slowly round a corner, Connie saw on a church notice-board the huge words: No Reduction in Wages! In view of the strike that was then on, startled that a church should make such an announcement, she looked closer, and saw underneath the first words, in smaller letters: The Wages of Sin is Death. There it was, the Midlands in one breath!
NO REDUCTION IN WAGES
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
Thus spoke the voice of the church, in ghastly irony, considering the cruel tension of the strike. Blagby Street was one of those streets running steep uphill, almost like a precipice, paved with granite setts, and bordered by mean, rigid stone dwellings, blank on the pavement, with jutting-out door-steps. The car had a great struggle getting up the very steep incline, on the granite setts, and the children playing on the pavements all stopped to look. Up this street no traffic came, the ascent, or descent, was too precipitous. Connie was afraid the car would not make it. The children played about as if in some isolated region not yet touched by petrol or steam. And at the advent of a car, they held their huge slices of bread and jam to their mouths and stared transfixed, as no yokels stare any longer. Meanwhile the driver peered at the mean, rigid dwellings, the mean doors and mean windows that repeated themselves identically so rapidly, in the utter aridity of stone and black pavement. And the car ground painfully, slowly up.
At last it stopped, and went back on the brakes with a little jerk.
‘Number fifty-seven,’ said the driver, opening his door.
Connie glanced at the awful doors up two steps, and got out. She gave the driver a shilling tip, conscious of his utter resentment at having come up such a place. He looked uphill and down, to see which was worse and determined to go on uphill now, the little distance to the brow.
Connie stood on the stone doorway and knocked. She waited. Then she knocked again. And at last the door was being unbolted and unlocked from the inside. It opened, and Parkin stood there, in his shirt-sleeves, grimy as he had come from work. He looked queer and smallish and peaked, rather insignificant, a little workman.
‘You come to th’ front door!’ were his first words to her, as if in reproof.
‘And oughtn’t I?’ she said, as she climbed the step.
‘Ay! If you like! Only everybody goes to th’ back.’
He spoke a little drearily. She stepped into the room, and he closed and locked the street door again. She found herself in a small parlour crowded with a ‘suite’ in dark rosewood and green cotton-velvet brocade, a dark and glossy piano, various stands with ferns, a bronze fire-screen, and huge vases on the mantelpiece. Everything was very close to everything else. On the floor was a deep Wilton carpet — the room was so small, it only needed a tiny one — and near the bronze fender-curb was a huge-seeming hearthrug of, black, curly-silky sheepskin. She stood in this deep and embarrassing hearthrug, and looked in dismay at the four close little walls, papered in browny gold.
‘Shall yer sit here a minute while I go an’ wash me?’ he said gloomily. ‘I’ve only just got in.’
‘You sit down too, a moment,’ she said.
She took one of the big green-velvet arm-chairs, and he sat on a smaller chair at the small, dark rosewood table or ‘stand’, resting his arms on the edge of the polished wood, careful not to touch the velveteen poker-work cloth it was adorned with. And even sitting down, she dislodged one of the imitation bronze fire-irons, which rolled with a clatter on the hearth of small shiny, peacock-blue tiles. Poor Connie started, afraid that all the huge vases and knick-knacks would come tumbling round her ears, if she moved another inch in that dressed-up little hole. It was awful!
He sat there, diminished and in silence, seemed more conscious in his hands than in his brain. She saw his hands, and it was a shock. They were swollen, deeply grimed, and gashed with ragged, dark-red slits with, blackish edges. She would never have known they were his at all! He had had such sensitive, live human paws, rather small and lovable.
‘Your hands!’ she said, shocked.
He opened them, and looked at the swollen, inflamed calluses.
‘Ay! That’s where it catches you,’ he said dully.
He was dulled, stupefied, almost extinguished. She would never have believed he was the same man.
‘Has it been very horrid?’ she asked in dismay.
But he would not look at her. He stared dully at his hands.
‘It takes a bit of getting used to,’ he admitted, drearily.
She gazed at him. Where was he? He was not there. This was not the man she had known.
‘But why should you get used to it?’ she asked, in her soft, breathless voice.
He looked up into her face now, as if in resentment.
‘It’s what other men has to — pretty nigh every other man.’
She was puzzled. Every other man! In her experience, no man got used to such things. What did she care about the millions of working-class men!
‘But you’re not other men,’ she said. ‘Why do you do it?’
He did not answer, only dully picked at a half-healed wound in his thumb. He was scarcely conscious. And she became aware that his hands trembled with aching and with pain, that his arms and his shoulders hammered his brain with their overtaxed aching. She remembered his white, silky, rather slender arms, and the delicate white male shoulders, and the man’s belly, so sensitive and white and slightly rounded. Now, stupefied with brutal fatigue, he picked blankly at the wound in his thumb.
‘Don’t do that!’ she said softly, and he suddenly lifted his head, startled like a schoolboy caught in a misdemeanour.
‘Why should you do this awful work?’ she said.
He glanced at her, in the aching stupor.
‘I’m a working-man, like a’ th’ rest,’ he said.
‘Why are you? You’re not! Why should you do heavy work that is beyond your strength? You’re not big enough.’
Even this only made him feel inadequate.
‘I s’ll be all right when I get a driver’s job,’ he said.
‘When will that be?’
Again he was very slow in answering.
‘You never know. ’Appen in th’ New Year. There’s plenty after a’ th’ jobs now.’
She did not know what to make of him. He seemed so sunk, so deadened. He had fallen to picking his thumb again, with over-wrought, helpless irritation.
‘I went to the doctor here,’ she said.
He glanced up at her sharply.
‘You did?’ he said. And by the intonation, she realised that he too had been to the doctor, or had thought of it.
‘Yes! He says he thinks the child will be due in February.’
He stared at her fixedly, half-comprehending.
‘You mean your child?’ he said, stupidly.
‘Ours!’ she said. And she watched the strange cloud, like something far off, go over his face.
‘Ay!’ he said at last.
It already seemed so remote and unreal to him, that.
‘Have you told Sir Clifford?’ he asked, as an afterthought.
‘No, I shan’t tell him.’
He was silent, not knowing what to say. Then he remarked:
‘I have to go up again about my divorce next week.’
‘Will it be heard before September, then?’
‘No! It’s on’y th’ lawyer who wants to see me — or something o�
� that sort.’
She realised how this business preyed on his mind.
‘I wish it were all over!’ she said fretfully.
‘A-y!’ he said slowly.
Well, it was no good. She could do nothing with him. A voice said insinuatingly, behind the inner door:
‘I’ve mashed th’ tea, if you’ll come.’
He rose to his feet in silence. Then he looked back at Connie.
‘Are yer comin’?’ he said.
She too got up from her chair, a little nettled by his immediate obedience to the voice behind the door.
‘Are you sure they want me?’ she said.
‘Ay! It’s all ready.’
She followed him into the small passageway, where it was dark, and the stairs went up steep and dim as Calvary, and from another dark doorway a few steps went down to the pantry under the stairs. To sheer away from the gulf of this doorway, Connie found herself running into the coats that hung from the pegs on the wall of the passage, and a hat, a bowler hat, fell with a rattle. She picked it shame-facedly up, hung it on the peg again, over the coats, and emerged into the living-room.
This was slightly larger than the parlour, but it was full, not only of furniture, but of a large, brilliantly spread tea-table and what seemed like a crowd of people, though it was only family.
Connie found herself in front of a thin, freckled, pale woman in a fashionable putty-coloured silk dress.
‘You are Mrs Tewson,’ said Connie, holding out her hand. ‘How do you do! I’m afraid I give you a lot of trouble.’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 40