‘I wanted not to say things in a letter. But if you don’t feel certain, I’ll tell you. I really don’t know what love means. I don’t feel like they do on the film. But I love you, whether or not. I don’t think much about you, because what is the good. But — ’ here were words scratched out. ‘Nay, what can I say? Don’t let us say things. You are home to me. I don’t care about houses. When I think of you — but I don’t think if I can help it, if a man starts thinking, the fat is in the fire. Everything is a prison, I know that. You are the only bit of freedom I’ve ever had. I never felt free. I’ve always felt cooped in and small, except with you, and with you I’m all right, you open all the world to me. When I think about how you opened to me, nay, I don’t care what happens. But I don’t think if I can help it. We’ve got to live our lives, you yours and me mine. Best never think, something’s bound to happen. And the day will come again, and happen the night, when we’ve got the world to ourselves. What do I care about anything else besides! I don’t really care about money, though I’ll earn my living somehow. But if you can set me up, next year, so that I can be my own boss, and keep to myself, I’ll take it from you, and be thankful, and I know there won’t be anything lost, because I trust you, and I’ll work for it. Which is about all I know about love. — If you don’t change it, I’ll wait by Hucknall Church, out of sight so Field shan’t see me. And tell him to meet you again at Annesley lodge gates, by the hall. But if you change it, I shall bide by what you say.’
She wrote very briefly:
‘I will be at Hucknall soon after two on Sunday. We can talk then. I am glad you sound better in health and spirits. I don’t think we should either of us be really happy in Canada. But we can talk it over. I have written to Hilda telling her I want to go to her in September, but not the details as yet. I can understand better how you feel about a divorce. One does long to be clear. It ought not to matter, yet it does. What a curious trap marriage is, if one ever wants to get out!
‘Be sure you are there on Sunday —’
Sunday was a grey but warm August day. Clifford wanted Field, because he had promised to call that afternoon on another mine-owner, to look over his new plant. So lunch was early, and Connie had a hired man from Uthwaite. That suited her very well.
Hucknall she found a very dreary, depressing little mining town, squalidly ugly, and sunk in a grey kind of doom. There was a sense of energy, nevertheless. The people had a weird sort of energy simmering and bubbling inside them. But it was the energy of a steam-boiler, a matter of internal pressure and desire for explosion. It was quite different from the calm, soft, swaying energy of a tree, that is full of life as soft as sleep, and in the end, more resistless than any pressure of steam or iron.
To Connie, the wood where she had known Parkin in the spring had become the image of another world. It was full of trees, silent individuals themselves full of life, but not talkative, and full of sap, but not friction. She realised there were two main sorts of energy, the frictional, seething, resistant, explosive, blind sort, like that of steam-engines and motor-cars and electricity, and of people such as Clifford and Bill Tewson and modern, insistent women, and these queer vacuous miners: then there was the other, forest energy, that was still and softly powerful, with tender, frail bud-tips and gentle finger-ends full of awareness. She herself was seized by both kinds of energy. With Clifford and Mrs Bolton, and at Bill Tewson’s house, and with her sister Hilda, even, strange frenzies of the explosive energy came over her, she felt herself full of force. Sometimes this seemed to her the utmost desirable. But lately, she felt a great desire to escape it. That sort of energy, that sense of force and power was accompanied by a craving restlessness and unsatisfaction, something seething and grinding deep within, that she longed with all her soul to escape. She had tasted the other, the fulness of life, which is so different from the frenzy of energy. ‘Then shall thy peace be as a river.’ She knew what it meant. It meant the wood where she had been in stillness with Parkin. It meant the fulness of life that trees have, which never want to wander away to somewhere else.
And Parkin stood to her for this peace. Then lately, in Sheffield, he too had lost it, and this had thrown her out of her reckoning. She was almost afraid of meeting him: that pinched, rather insignificant little working-man of Blagby Street.
She walked into the dreary sort of Square where the church of Hucknall stands so distinguished, holding the heart of the seething Byron, who had no peace. ‘There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away!’ Why do poets say these things, and then not be true to the joy the world can only destroy, if you let it?
Parkin came forward out of a squalid street, to meet her, taking off his hat. She looked at him almost in dread. His face was still pale and pinched looking, but it had come clear again. It had been as if a wire net was over it. Now it was clear, and had its own light, a little pallid, but not unjoyful, and its own courage again.
‘Shall you go in?’ she asked, nodding towards the church.
They went into the dark church together. It was empty. And she looked at the little slab behind which rests the pinch of dust which was Byron’s heart: in that thrice-dismal Hucknall Torkard. The sense of the greatness of human mistakes made her want to cry.
She sat in a pew, and Parkin sat beside her. He was very still, and she did not know what he was thinking. She herself felt a little raw and lost. She groped for his hand, and it closed over hers for a moment with that sudden soft, strong grasp of trust, then relaxed and lay still, while she held it in both her hands, clinging to it for safety. She felt the roughness the calluses, the shapelessness, and the ugly little jagged cuts on it. And yet it was warm and still and softly heavy. And from his body came the physical effluence of life which has its own peace, of passion which identifies itself with life, faith in life itself, in the soft splendour of the flesh, in the bigness of destiny, which is so much beyond the carping of human knowledge. In the stillness of his body, she felt again the unconscious faith in life, faith in his own living sex, faith in his own purity. He had got it back again, whereas she was still jangled.
‘You mustn’t go away from me!’ she .whispered pathetically.
But he said nothing, and was quite still. She felt she could not really find him. She would have to touch him, or she was lost. She put her fingers to his face, and he turned his head and kissed them softly, laying his hand with sure instinct on her belly where the fret was, and the coming child. Softly he seemed to gather her belly and her womb into the safe warmth of his hand, that pressed so still across her navel. And it was like the sudden warmth of the sun, after a bitter winter. She put both her hands over his hand, and peace began to come into her again, in the dark church, where is the pinch of dust that was Byron’s heart
‘Don’t leave me!’ she murmured. ‘It makes me so unhappy.’
His hand still lay warm and cup-like, over her navel, below which the child that would come lay unseen like a pinch of life;
‘Ay! It does me!’ he said.
‘It is harder for me than for you,’ she said. ‘It is easier for you to get out of the old life, you haven’t so many things holding you down. You must help me to get out. You don’t know how miserable I’ve been this week.’
He edged a little closer to her, and his fingers pressed comfortingly down, to close the crying lips of her sex.
‘What would you like me to do?’ he said.
‘I want to be with you,’ she said.
He was perfectly still. She never knew what he thought.
‘You don’t want to go to Canada, do you?’ he said.
‘No! The thought of it is cold to me.’
‘Nor Africa nor Australia?’
She thought about it. She had an unconquerable aversion from leaving Europe. She had been overseas. He had not. She knew what it meant. She did not want to break with the past, even for her child’s sake. She had no faith in the newness of new countries. It was exile, always exile.
‘No!�
� she said. ‘Not to the colonies. You wouldn’t be happy, either.’
He was silent, waiting for her. She rose suddenly.
‘Let us go into the light,’ she said. ‘Let us get out.’
She hurried from the gloomy church, and they walked towards Annesley, in the Sunday afternoon with all the colliery population in their smart Sunday clothes, among the unspeakable ugliness of the streets and railway-lines and pit-hills. What was the point of dressing up, in such squalor! Yet everybody was dressed up, dressed to kill, latest fashions.
‘Take me somewhere where you can hold me in your arms!’ she said.
And he took a footpath that led round past the deserted kennels, towards Felley Mill. It was more lonely here. And in spite of the risk of gamekeepers sending them away, they went into a little hollow of a wood, and sat under the trees, hidden behind the great bramble and rose-bushes, in the tall bracken.
‘I must touch you! I must touch you, or I shall die!’ she die!’ she said.
‘Ay! Touch me then!’ he said quietly, unfastening the front of his trousers and pulling away the shirt from his body. She slipped her arms round his naked waist, curling her face against his belly, and he put his hands under her dress, till he patiently found her naked body. Then he stroked her with infinite soothing, to himself and her.
‘Oh hold me! hold me!’ she moaned. And he drew her a little closer. Till his hands seemed to go to sleep on her naked body, and she dozed into peace against his flesh. And once more her womb was soft with peace and that queer, sap-like happiness over which one has no control, save to kill it.
His quick ears were startled by a sound. He looked up, and saw a keeper, a big-faced, middle-aged man, striding round the brambles and dog-rose thickets. Quickly he put down her dress, and as she began to lift her face he murmured:
‘Keep still! There’s keeper! Dunna move!’ And he held closer.
‘Now then!’ said the burly keeper, in ugly challenge, Parkin felt all her body jolt in his arms. He pressed her closer. The keeper was smiling an ugly smile.
‘Let us be, man, can’t you!’ said Parkin, in a soft, quiet voice, looking into the light-blue, half-triumphant eyes of the other fellow. ‘We’re harmin’ nothing. Have yer niver ’ad a woman in your arms yourself!’ The perfect quiet rebuke of his voice was in key with the steady, unabashed rebuke in his eyes. But he remained still and defenceless, his clothing all undone, the woman hiding her face against his naked body, under his turned-back shirt.
The keeper looked at the clinging woman hiding her face, and at her legs in their silk stockings. Parkin had pulled her dress tidily down. Only himself was all undone. The fat keeper slowly looked away, and the nasty smile went off his face. He took a few steps past the great bushes, and looked out of the copse, down the wild slope of tussocky grass. Then he looked again, fascinated, at the woman clinging motionless to the other man.
‘Ay!’ he said, in a changed voice. ‘But Squire an’ some of ’is folks is walkin’ a bit down the ’coppy,’ He spoke dully, with a dull resentment against the squire and his folks.
‘They aren’t comin’ this road, are they? Nobody can see us in here,’ said Parkin.
‘I seed yer come, though. An’ if Squire sawn you, he’d let you know! He ’ates couples,’ replied the man.
‘Ay! let ’im!’ said Parkin. ‘I’s ’appen not a man ’isself.’
‘Nay! On’y yo’ colliers, yo’ all ower t’ place!’ The man was neutral, really bored by his job.
‘I’m not a collier, anyhow. — Eh well! — Let us be, eh?’ said Parkin softly, and for the first time Connie heard his soft cajoling to another person, not herself.
‘You won’t stop long, though?’ said the keeper, looking curiously at Connie, who lay with her face hidden against Parkin, her arms round his body, under his shirt, motionless. A queer sight, as she clung to him, covering his nakedness. The keeper was fascinated. He wanted to see her.
‘No! There’s no chance o’ bein’ in peace anywhere, for long!’ Parkin said formally.
Still looking sideways at the clinging figure of the woman, with its hidden face, the keeper moved slowly away. He wanted so much to see her.
Parkin softly stroked Connie’s hair, and murmured, in broad dialect:
‘Niver mind, ’e’s gone! Dunna bother about it, it’s nawt, ’e’s not a bad sort of chap. What’s it matter! What’s it matter! There’s folks ivrywhere!’
She lifted her face to him blindly. She was really almost blinded, pressing against his body, and her face was red and sightless.
‘Kiss me!’ she whispered. ‘Kiss me. — I know the old squire here —’
He kissed her many times, she was so queer and sightless.
‘Ay well — he won’t see you,’ he said.
Then she softly rearranged his clothing, kissing the last glimpse of white flesh below his breast, and pushing down the cotton shirt. For once it was not flannelette. And she rose, and they went slowly back to the path where long ago Byron must have limped in his unhappy inability to feel sure in his love. The path, the whole hillside is a desert now, given over to rabbits and strolling colliers. In a sense, it is dead. The kennels are grown deep in nettles. Dead as Nineveh! The Chaworth girl — perhaps she was wise not to love that fat lad. — And they were all long dead. ‘There be none of beauty’s daughters with a magic like thee—’
Connie and Parkin went slowly down the tussocky hill, above the grey-green country. Across was Haggs Farm, and beyond, Underwood, the mining village, and the mines. The old, old countryside where Byron walked so often, and Mary Chaworth. Now colliers straying with their lasses, from ugly Underwood, from Eastwood, from Hucknall. And the mill-ponds at Felley lying so still, abandoned, abandoned like everything that is not coal or iron, away below. The dead countryside! and the grisly live spots, the mining settlements!
‘If I really want you to do anything, will you do it?’ Connie asked him. ‘You mustn’t think you can just leave me. Will you come to me if I need you, even if you never get your divorce? If I can’t bear it, will you come and live with me — even next month? We can go to Italy if you like.’
‘If you feel it’s the best, I will. I’ll do anything you like, for the best. I don’t reckon it’s any good layin’ the law down, not for myself or anybody — But I can go on lookin’ for some farmin’ work, like, an’ then —’
‘You’ll come to me if I can’t bear it?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
THE END
The Complete Works of D H Lawrence are available at www.blackthornpress.com
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 43