‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Eva. ‘I don’t think so. — But you’re so much cleverer than I am.’
‘I’m not clever,’ said Constance. ‘Only I think I’ve got what I want —’ She tailed off rather vaguely, and Lady Eva glanced at her with remote eyes, knowing her niece was lying and hiding something. Then there was something to hide! She thought there must be.
Constance also was aware of her own lie. Why was she so barefaced? Her aunt would think all sorts of things.
The guests departed, the intimacy evaporated, and the sense that it had all been sham came down upon the lonely young couple. They had begun to live in a world apart, of their own. Then suddenly they had accepted the other, that outside world. Now they felt dejected and exhausted. They fell back in irritable exhaustion.
Clifford had a good deal of pain again and suffered in a sort of ashy silence. Constance did what she could for him. She gave her life for him for the time. If she could ever have made him better, she would not have minded. But what was broken, was broken. And a sense of uselessness began to deaden her soul.
Her own strength and bloom began to leave her. She thought of her lie to her aunt: ‘I’ve got what I want.’ What had she got? Misery, anger and a horrible blank life ahead.
Her courage and her strength began to fail. She kept her ruddy colour, which seemed inevitable to her. But she grew thinner and thinner. The pulse in her thin neck showed she was failing.
When her sister Hilda came to see her in March there was an immediate outcry.
‘Connie! Why whatever’s the matter with you? You’re as thin as a rail, your clothes hang on you like rags! You are ill! Whatever’s the matter?’
Hilda had only one sister in the world, and no brother. Instantly she became fierce. She went in to Clifford.
‘What’s the matter with Connie?’ she demanded of him. ‘Why is she wasting away?’
‘She is thinner,’ he said. ‘I wish you could do something for her.’
The strange egoism of his type appalled Hilda. He was such a gentleman! He had such good manners and was so extremely considerate. He tried all he could not to trouble his young wife. He bore his pains in silence, and his long hours of misery alone. He forbore to call her, tried never to disturb her, tried always to be cheerful, to make her know how indebted he was to her. He was the soul of a gentleman.
Yet he never felt Constance really as another flowing life, flowing its own stream. He idealised her, perhaps: she was a beautiful life flowering beside his own. But he never warmly felt her, not for a moment. The old, wild warmth which Hilda felt for Connie, and Connie for Hilda, was something out of his sphere: something to be suppressed.
With Hilda there came a new breath of revolt and passion into the house. Hilda had got tired of her ‘devoted’ husband, who pawed her and petted her but never for a moment came forth naked to her out of his amiable and would-be manly shell. So she had left him, departed bag and baggage with her two children, and was living in Scotland. She had come to spend a week with Connie.
Constance was examined by a doctor: nothing organically wrong with her. Constance was whisked off to London to a specialist, for she complained of pains at the heart. Nothing organically wrong with her: neuralgia of the nerves of the heart, brought on, like all neuralgia, by being run-down, by living off the nerves, under the pressure of the will. She needed relaxation from the state of tension into which she had fallen.
‘You must come with me to Scotland, Connie.’
But Connie refused. Already Hilda had brought a nurse into the house, a quiet, well-behaved, elderly woman, to attend to Sir Clifford. Clifford had acquiesced, with a little bitterness in his willingness to do the best for Constance. And so Constance would not leave him.
A nurse being in the house, however, she took her thoughts more off him. She did not cease to care for him. She would always care for him. But the strain of anxiety on his behalf was less.
It was a curious relationship, that of the husband and wife. In some respects they were exceedingly intimate, very near to one another. When he held her hand sometimes in the silence of the evening, there would seem a great peace between them and a wonderful togetherness. They were almost like two souls free from the body and all its weariness, two souls going hand in hand along the upper road that skirts the heaven of perfection.
Then they would talk quietly together about the soul and immortality. Clifford was deeply concerned with the question of immortality. His view was the old-fashioned Platonist view: the soul of the earnest seeker after truth, after that which is essence, pure and enduring, would reach the upper levels where absolute truth, absolute justice shines in the great eternal gleam that at last satisfies the hurt heart of man.
The two horses that draw the chariot of the soul, the savage, rough-eared, unmanageable black one, and the delicate, beautiful white one, these two occupied the imagination of Clifford. ‘It seems to me,’ he said to her, ‘that my hairy-eared savage horse got his death blow in the war, and if I struggle up to the shiny levels of heaven it will be with only one horse to my chariot.’
‘I don’t think you’re right, dear,’ she said, after she had pondered what he said. ‘Think what savage tempers you still go into, though you do control them.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Yes! I suppose you’re about right, Con. It’s the black horse, sure enough. Yes, I suppose it is. Gone a bit vicious, very likely.’
He went off into a muse. He was so anxious for immortality, so anxious to feel that he would at last plunge and struggle on to that wide lane which is heaven’s rampart, whence one can look down again on to earth before one turns into the full glow of the innermost heaven. He accepted the imagery of the Phaedrus myth. And he was so much afraid that with only his white horse of pure yearning, the black horse of lust dead in him, he would never come to the heights. One horse would never get him up the steep.
‘Only one horse to my chariot,’ his thoughts ran in bitterness.
But perhaps Constance was right. The black horse was there after all, less obvious and rampageous, maybe, but perhaps more vicious. He remembered the terrible moods that would come upon him, when he would like to destroy the world, to crush mankind to death. Yes, that was lust! That was the black horse, all right.
He was relieved. He had been so much afraid that his hairy-eared horse was dead.
And he was surprised. Did he then love the black brute of the soul, that he was ready to howl like a lost soul at the thought that the brute was dead in him?
‘I should have missed my black horse if I’d thought he was dead in me, Con,’ he said, looking at her with hard, shining eyes that frightened her.
‘You need only remember how you feel about your uncle Everett,’ said Constance calmly.
Clifford’s uncle Everett was one of the old-fashioned arrogant sort, with all the tough insolence of his class superiority. Clifford couldn’t stand him.
‘You’re a thorough-paced mystic, I’m afraid, my boy. Well well, perhaps just as well! You’ve got a sensible little woman for a wife.’
This sort of thing roused serpents and tigers in Clifford’s soul, and he had to lie silent, for he knew it was useless.
‘I’m glad my horse with the blood-shot eyes isn’t dead, though,’ he said meditatively to her. ‘By Jove, I think he could bite off the top of Uncle Everett’s cranium with one snap! — I’m glad he’s not dead.’
‘The gods still have a black horse and a white horse to their chariots, don’t they, as they drive round the heavens?’ she asked.
‘By jove they do! And got ’em both in perfect running order! Only we poor mortals can’t manage Blackie,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Don’t you think it’s rather cruel, the way Socrates drives his black horse — jerking him back till his mouth and tongue are full of blood, and bruising his haunches? Don’t you think one could manage a horse better than that?’
Clifford looked at her keenly. She had found the taint of bullying, even
in Socrates. Even Socrates was a bully! And in her heart of hearts Constance was quite determined against any sort of bullying.
‘Perhaps not a vicious horse,’ he said.
‘But perhaps Blackie isn’t so vicious. Don’t you think, if one asked him what he truly wanted, he’s as much right to it as the white horse or the driver? Only Socrates thinks he must only have his mouth cut and be thwarted.’
Clifford pondered this. Constance was quite good at thinking in symbols. The symbols of Plato’s myths were perfectly familiar to her. She and Clifford used them as ordinary interchange. But Constance, instead of thinking Socrates perfect, was always taking another line.
‘What do you mean exactly by the black horse in this case?’ he asked her.
‘Doesn’t it mean the bodily satisfactions?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it mean the body straining after the goal of its own gratifications? Whether it’s biting the top of Uncle Everett’s head off, or anything else?’
‘I suppose it does,’ he said. ‘But you can’t say that it would be right to bite off the top of Uncle Everett’s cranium, as a vicious horse might do it, can you?’
She put down her sewing, and looked at him.
‘Well!’ she said slowly. ‘If I were you I should one day bite the top of Uncle Everett’s head right off. I mean, make him look the brainless fool he is. I should do it deliberately. I should consider my black horse had a right to the bite.’
She returned to her sewing, and he, all in a flutter, pondered the new attitude to the black horse.
‘You would say the black horse has a right to all his desires?’ he asked.
‘Well, wouldn’t you? Only at the right time and in the right order. Don’t you think, instead of the white horse and the driver both struggling to thwart the black one, they should say to him: Gently! Gently! Go gently, and we’ll go with you! Go quietly, without overturning the chariot, and we’ll drive right into the place you want.’
He looked at her shrewdly.
‘Do you think it would answer?’ he said.
‘Why shouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘Either the black horse has a perfect right to his own existence and his own desires and gratifications, or he shouldn’t exist. And you say yourself, you feel you can’t get through with a one-horse team. You are terrified if you think your black horse is dead. Yet you only want him to live so that you can thwart him.’
His spirits, which had been elated, sank again. He felt something hostile to him in this assertion.
‘Don’t you thwart your black horse, Con?’ he said.
‘I don’t want to,’ she replied, keeping her head lowered over her sewing. ‘I don’t mean to. I mean to let him run right to his goal once he finds the way.’
He felt in himself a hostility to what she was saying. Yet he replied:
‘I believe you’re perfectly right, dear.’
They drifted apart again. There was a strange connection, a strange intimacy between them. It was a subtle intimacy whose pure contact was in speech, in words. It was an intimacy of contest. It was as if some bright, bruised serpent of her soul crept forth to wrestle with the jealous dogs of his spirit every time the intimacy between them was broached. At the end of each talk they withdrew as if from a wrestling contest.
And for a long time she had been losing. She had felt the fight dying out of her, the power leaving her. Weakness and lassitude came over her, and she dragged around aimlessly. Her Aunt Eva had made everything seem cheap. She had felt in herself a deep indifference to Clifford’s immortality and Clifford’s heaven of the pure abstraction, however bright it might seem to him. His heaven was only of secondary or second-hand interest to her. And latterly it had begun to seem a certain prison: like the white-hot steel walls of a Poe story. She hated it, his heaven of pure justice and pure truth. She felt herself being insidiously, insufferably bullied by him in the name of this pure heaven of justice. She felt that Plato, exalting the heaven of pure justice, did it by committing all the time one horrible injustice. He was unjust to the black horse and unjust to the bright, bruised serpent, with remorselessly cruel injustice.
Ah yes! it was still another heaven established on bullying! A negative bullying! Clifford bullied her, not by obvious compulsion, but by insidious negation. Some part of her soul he just absolutely ignored, he killed it by not allowing its existence. As one might kill a person by withdrawing all the air from her. So Clifford was killing her. Killing that part of her soul which was her true body.
He would have done just the same if he had never been wounded in the war. Only then she would not have seen so clearly. The terrible catastrophe had made her clairvoyant.
The poor black horse of her body! He had been lying now for months as if he were dead, with his neck twisted sideways as if it had been broken by some specially vicious twist of the reins. She had felt him dead, a corpse inside her.
But now, poor beast, he was struggling to his feet again. And now she felt she must defend him, defend him from Clifford and from all the world. She must be silent and secret about him. She must hide him, she must keep him hidden.
She had, however, one ally, and this was her nurse, Mrs Bolton. Mrs Bolton was a widow. Her husband, a collier, had been killed in the mines twenty years ago, leaving her with two small children. She had worked hard, and become a nurse, and had had the post of district visiting nurse for many years. Now she had withdrawn from that work, it was too strenuous.
She had loved her husband. He was only twenty-eight when he was killed in an explosion underground. The butty ahead had called to the other men to lie down, and they had done so. But Ted Bolton was round the corner and did not hear. The explosion passed over the other men and killed him.
At the inquiry it was asserted on the masters’ side that Bolton had been frightened and had started to run away instead of lying flat. That was the reason of his death, his own cowardice: or, at the best, his own funk. Therefore the compensation was not really due but would be a charity gift to the widow.
The compensation was three hundred pounds. But Ivy Bolton, the widow, was not allowed to have the money down. No, she would drink it, or otherwise waste it. She must wait in a crowd for an hour or so every Monday morning for thirty shillings a week.
But what rankled most in her was that they had said Ted was a coward, that he was running away. When she knew herself that Ted was too careless, too reckless.
She felt in her heart of hearts that they had killed her man and then insulted him. She never forgave them. But she hid it in her heart and became a very quiet woman, curiously still and dignified, curiously ladylike. She was very much respected in the district, every collier’s house was open to her. They thought her a lady.
But in her own silent way she hated all the masters. All the great class of owners and bosses, she silently hated. They had been so insulting to her, so bitterly insulting to her and her dead man, with their three hundred pounds at thirty shillings a week. Thirty shillings a week! Thirty shillings a week for a little less than four years! — But never mind, she could fend for herself.
She felt sorry for Sir Clifford in his great misfortune; and in her capacity of nurse she was very gentle to him, as she would have been to her dead husband. But far in the remote, unchanging corners of her soul she disliked him. She disliked his superficial friendliness that was so polite and considerate of her, and so inhuman from her point of view. It was in this well-bred, polite, considerate treatment of her that she had learnt to recognise the cold inhumanity, the lack of heart throb, the mere curiosity, and the inward arrogance of the class-superior. She had schooled herself so well, that she herself had acquired the cool, self-assured, would-you-mind! and thank-you-so-much! manner. But underneath, her heart burned.
Something in the puzzled, lost look of Constance’s eyes had gone straight to her soul. Poor child! Poor child, she had never known what it was for a man to hold her warm, real warm against his breast and comfort her with his heart! As she, Ivy Bolton, had known! That Sir Cliffor
d didn’t have a real heart to start with. He only had a lot of talk and a lot of feelings that were no good to anybody.
‘You need to get out into the air! You need to get away from the house, my lady!’ she would urge.
Anything, to get Constance away from Sir Clifford! Mrs Bolton used all her authority as a nurse and threw in ‘my ladys’ as a palliative. And she said to herself: ‘She’s wasting away, simply eaten up! I wish there was some nice young man to make love to her.’
But at least in the blowy March weather she persuaded Constance to walk again, to get away from the house.
‘Just walk over and see the daffs in the gamekeeper’s garden. They’re a sight, they are really, you ought to see them!’
The gamekeeper’s garden! Something stirred in Constance’s soul. She had long ago reasoned herself out of any nonsense. He was just a commonplace man among millions of men. Just nothing! Just a part of the dreary nothingness!
But now something stirred in her. Even the cottage — even the cottage — it would be nice to see it. It had a certain fairy-tale atmosphere about it.
She went slowly across the park to the wood. It was a blowy day with intermittent sunshine. The trees in the park were bare, there was a rushing of wind in the wood, pale wild-flowers, in groups, bent and bobbed. Along the little paths the primroses showed their pale, happy candour. And Constance felt thrilled and happy to be in the wood, in the sound of the wind. She gathered a few violets and held them in the palm of her hand for the scent. Ah! To escape, to escape the level monotony of doom, to break through into magic once more! To pass into the life of the woods!
She went slowly across the mile of wood to the cottage. The little orchard at the back was all sparkling and shivering in a burst of sunshine with wild daffodils that grew up the slope. This was the last place where they were left. Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree that swayed against her like an animate creature, subtly, and she watched the daffodils and caught their faintly tarry scent. And she thought again of Clifford’s dictum: ‘Nature is a settled routine of crude old laws. One has to go beyond nature, break beyond. And that is one’s destiny that makes one break beyond the settled, arbitrary laws of nature.’ She herself saw it differently. She couldn’t feel the laws of nature so arbitrary. It was the laws of man that bothered her. She couldn’t feel anything very arbitrary about the tossing daffodils, dipping now in shade. If only one could be simpler and more natural! If only one could be really simple! Men were so complicated and full of laws.
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 3