The First Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D. H. Lawrence

  All her life Constance had been known for her quiet good sense. She had seemed to be the one really reasonable woman on earth. Now she knew this was gone. She had burst out as if from a chrysalis shell, and she had emerged a new creature, in feeling at least. Why did nobody ever prepare one for these metamorphoses? Why was one never told that the great facts of life, and the great danger, was this starting of the whole being, body and soul and mind, in a new flux that would change one away from the old self as a landscape is transfigured by earthquake and lava floods, or by spring and the coming of summer.

  She had been so sensible up to now. And now she felt everything was leaving her. She had thought to appreciate this other man just as a body, as one might appreciate the Greek marbles, for example. And now instead of Greek marble he was a volcano to her. Or he turned her into a volcano.

  She was frightened. One thing she clearly saw: that human nature under all its dead surface of habit is, like the earth, volcanic and will inevitably start to upheave one day, when the pressure from within is too great or there is a call from the outside; just the one mysterious call that is the Open Sesame.

  It had happened to her with this man, this mere gamekeeper. Even that very morning she had seen him striding down the drive in his baggy coat to go to the police station, and she had smiled at his importance and his hurry. She could still see him objectively as something ridiculous and apart from herself. And now — she groaned in spirit — she could not detach herself from him, her independent existence was suddenly gone.

  Her first words when she got home and saw Clifford were:

  ‘I’m so hot! I hurried home. I went over to Marehay to see if the rabbits were doing as much damage as Allcock says. I met him, and he showed me. But I shouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t our rabbits at all. There’s a warren in his little spinney, you know.’

  And even as she was saying it she felt so unspeakably bored, bored by the look on Clifford’s face, bored by the house, bored by her own words, that she could have cried. She was crazy to be with the keeper, to be near him, near his body: even having tea with him in his little cottage. Only, only to be near him!

  Yet here she was gasping out about Marehay and rabbits and damages to Clifford. Why wasn’t she calm? Why wasn’t she balanced, her old self, her famous poise. Why couldn’t she recover her well-known poise. Suppose Clifford noticed something!

  The keeper — he was just a common man. She had seen him so this morning. She insisted on it. Yet all her body cried with a thousand tongues: No! No! He is unique! Poor Constance groaned in spirit. It is just race-urge which transfigures him for me, she told herself, using one of the H. G. Wells catchwords which she so despised. Her body laughed aloud. Race-urge! Well why not? Transfigures! Yes, a transfiguration! Ha ha! A transfiguration! A man suffused with the brightness of God. Ha ha! How’s that? Most men had lumps of clay in them that no fire could transfuse. Her keeper had a certain fineness and purity of flesh. He was always bodily nearer to God than most men, than Clifford.

  ‘And what do you think happened to me!’ said Clifford, with arch importance.

  ‘What?’ said Constance.

  ‘Miss Bentley actually called — sent in her card!’ he cried it out in triumph.

  ‘Never!’ she cried, her eyes glowing. Clifford was utterly uninterested in her and her tale of rabbits. And she, she had torn herself away from the other one for nothing.

  Clifford seemed in a perfectly good humour, as if there had never been any strain between them. She listened to him in perfect acquiescence: all about old Miss Bentley in a short and modish dress of tearose yellow. Some far corner of her critical feminine mind was interested. But her dynamic self was so bored, so bored, screaming with boredom.

  She fled at last upstairs and sat down in a low chair by her window. What could she do? How could she recover her poise? —How lovely he was, really! How he had pounced on her! How humble she ought to feel, how grateful to him, for feeling this straight unerring passion for her! How lovely it was to be near him! How lovely he was. If only she were near him now, just even to smell the corduroy of his coat. So common, an old corduroy coat! Made stripes on one’s face if one leaned against it. How ashamed she ought to be!— a gamekeeper, in her husband’s employ! But his body! — the unspeakable pleasure of being near him. ‘Ay!’ she imitated in her mind the broad sounds of the vernacular. ‘Ay! Ah should!’ And she laughed a little, she liked it so much. It amused her down to her very toes.

  But she could never live with him. No, no! Impossible! She was not a working man’s wife. It would be a false situation. He would probably begin speaking King’s English — and that would be the first step to his undoing. No no! He must never be uplifted. He must never be brought one stride nearer to Clifford. He must remain a gamekeeper, absolutely.

  And herself? It would be absurd for her to become a gamekeeper’s wife. Her piano, her paints, her books — leave them all behind? But even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to leave her thoughts behind, and all she had acquired, the whole run of her mind.

  ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces—’

  He was one of the hounds of spring: a Plutonic hound. Pluto, not Plato. And she was an escaping Persephone, Proserpine. Well, she’d rather be married to Pluto than Plato. She’d rather be caught by the wild hound of Pluto than by the speculative spaniel of Plato.

  This amused her very much. She was so pleased with her own wit.

  But at the same time, she was sad. The keeper would never know the difference between Pluto and Plato, not if he lived another hundred years. That was the whole Plutonic point: you didn’t even want to know. But she herself wanted to know: she would always want to know. She would always want to read Swinburne again sometimes: she would always want sometimes to play a bit of Mozart to herself: she would always want to go to see a collection of Cézanne or Renoir or Van Gogh, if she were able: she would have to go to the Uffizi gallery again before very long: she wished she could go tomorrow to hear Kovantchina again or to see a Russian ballet: she would love an evening of sheer talk as she used to have it in Chelsea: or if she could sit in a Bier-Halle again in Heidelberg or Munich, and hear student songs and philosophise: and she would always like to be able to glance at The Times Literary Supplement to see if there might be some thrilling book.

  She couldn’t do any of these things in a gamekeeper’s cottage. Or if she could it would somehow be false and wrong. Clifford could share it all with her. But Parkin — the very name seemed ridiculous to her — she wondered what his Christian name was — probably Bob or Billy — and she didn’t want to think of him as Bob or Billy — she didn’t want that sort of contact with him.

  No, she would just be an anomaly in a gamekeeper’s cottage. Besides, he had a wife. — She was on the alert at once. He must get divorced from that wife.

  Constance had a small income of her own. She could take a little farm, and he could be a farmer. Then she could have her own rooms and her own life and still live with him.

  But no! The meal times! The inability to converse! She knew she would have to have conversation. And when Hilda came, and at meals they talked all beyond him, and somehow he looked small, a cipher at his own table! No, no, it wouldn’t do, she could never live with him as his wife.

  She had almost recovered her poise in her effort to be reasonable. Of two things she was convinced: that she would never try to ‘elevate’ him, to bring him towards her own level of life: and that she could no more abandon her own way of life than he could his. Therefore — oh bitter conclusion! — it was useless to try and bring their two ways of life together.

  Then why their two bodies? Why this passion, which meant more than the rest of her life to her? — Ah, if she could be in the cottage with him now, just lighting the lamp! Perhaps they would have — she tried to think of something really common — bloaters, yes, bloaters for supper, grilled bloaters. The house simply reeked of grilled bloaters. And he sat with his elbows on the tab
le, in his shirt-sleeves, and picked bits of bloater bones away with his fingers. And drops of tea hung on his fierce moustache. And he said:

  ‘These ’ere bloaters is that salty, they nowt but brine. Pour us another cup o’ tea, leass.’

  And he would nudge his cup towards her. And she would rise obediently to get the brown teapot from the hob, to pour him his cup-a-tea.

  She would never be able to imitate his speech. You couldn’t even spell it. He didn’t say ‘these’ but ‘thaese’, like the Italian paesano. And not ‘nowt’ but ‘neôwt’, a sound impossible to write.

  She gave it up. Culturally, he was another race.

  But she laughed to herself at the picture of the bloaters and the cup-a-tea. She would still love him, because of the loveliness of his flesh-and-blood being. Even the smell of bloaters in his hair wouldn’t make him anything but physically attractive. She would love to sleep with him. He wouldn’t even wear pyjamas. Probably he slept in his day shirt. But curiously, nothing would make him physically unattractive.

  But if they lived together they would humiliate one another. She, because she was in another world of culture than his. And he, because his state of nature would ignore so much of her; and he had no goal, no onwards in his life. He was static. It was that that she could not bear. He was static.

  Even Clifford, poor Clifford, yearned and reached for that precious immortality of his, when he would be identified with the pure ideal. In a vague way Constance sympathised with him. It was better than reaching for nothing at all. But it was always a disembodied ideal. A weariness.

  She sighed and felt weary. Then she cheered up, thinking at least she could have the keeper’s children, like a fresh fountain of life. And perhaps her children would be able to discover a new immortality in which the disembodied ideal had some sort of a body again.

  She really agreed with Clifford: you had to have an immortality of some sort. She was somehow not interested in the long-drawn-out kind, as she called it, the immortality after death. It bored her to be immortal merely when she was dead. It was more imminent, really. One was perhaps more immortal when one never thought about it. Surely the keeper was immortal when he stepped out of the trees! Surely he was something else than commonplace, he had his immortality upon him. It wasn’t his business to think about it. But somebody should think about it.

  She really wanted to ask Clifford about it.

  He was very amiable at dinner.

  ‘I wondered why you didn’t come down,’ he said. ‘You were a long time upstairs.’

  ‘I was thinking about things,’ she said.

  ‘I guessed as much. I nearly sent Nurse up with a penny for them.— What did you think?’

  ‘Oh, it was all vague.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking too,’ he said, simply and pleasantly. ‘Does the physical side of sex really matter to you, Con?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does,’ she said demurely, smiling to herself at the way he put it.

  ‘Do you feel, really, you couldn’t do without it?’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid I do feel rather like that,’ she admitted.

  ‘And is there a particular man you care about, physically, enough to have children by him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said: still amused by the way he put it.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘I think you’re quite right, there’s nothing to do but for you to go ahead, and for me to keep my mind off it altogether. The man’s a decent man, I suppose. And if it’s a wise man who knows his own father, my so-called children will have to be unwise. —Or shall you tell them later?’

  ‘I haven’t got any yet,’ she smiled.

  ‘Quite! But let’s be premature. Promise me that you’ll never tell them I’m not their father; and I know you’ll try not to damage your own name or make me look ridiculous, but promise me, and I promise to leave you carte blanche and to keep my mind a blank in that direction.’

  She was rather breathless. She sat awhile, dazed.

  ‘Do you really mean it? — You won’t try ever to find out things?’

  ‘About you and your physical love affairs I will not ever try to find out anything: I wish to know absolutely nothing. And I accept your children for mine. — But promise me what I asked.’

  She still pondered, as if there might be a trap.

  ‘It’s awfully good of you. I promise you as far as one can promise those things. — I’ll never let the children know you are not their father — if there are children. — And I will be careful —’

  She ended rather vaguely.

  ‘That’s all then,’ he said. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like it made legal? — Ask old Morley to draw up a mutual document to the effect?’

  He smiled wryly. But she did not speak.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind awfully?’ she said at last. ‘I should feel so bad if you minded much.’

  ‘All right then!’ he replied. ‘I’ll only mind a little. The great catastrophe happened. This is only one of the consequent difficulties.—You’re sure you’d not rather depart altogether with Mr X?’

  She looked him slowly in the face.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘I don’t want that.’

  ‘Just for the breeding season, as it were,’ he said — and she wondered for a moment, wildly, if he knew. — ‘I suppose it’s natural, and it’s no use trying to go against nature. The war should have taught us that. — All right, my dear, breed! It’s nature’s law. I hope my heir will have a father worthy of a future baronet: but I trust your taste. —It’s all awfully like an H. G. Wells novel, where prize specimen human males are raised on a sort of antiseptic stud farm, and led round to the passive females at the proper season — about May, I suppose, about now. But it’s the consequences of the war, so we’ll say no more.’

  There was a dead silence between them.

  ‘You wouldn’t rather I went away and left you?’ she asked dully.

  ‘My dear child, don’t you see it’s myself I curse, really, for putting you in this predicament. I admire your grit. Go ahead! I look forward to my son and heir.’

  ‘Supposing there weren’t one?’ she said.

  He spread his hands and lifted his shoulders.

  ‘A la guerre comme à la guerre,’ he said, with keen irony, ‘et depuis la guerre comme depuis —’

  She felt depressed. It was so plucky of him, but not very human. Perhaps she was even a little disappointed.

  ‘You’re awfully good, Clifford!’ she said. ‘And you know I’ll stick to you, don’t you? — If you want me to.’

  ‘My dear girl, what would my life be if you left me? I’m getting off cheap, in deferred payments, really. — I’ve thought it out and have come to the conclusion that wisdom is justified of all her children. You will surely be justified of yours. Go ahead and produce that son and heir.’

  She didn’t quite know what he meant, and doubted if he knew himself. And she felt he needn’t be so glib about son and heir. But she admired him, and she really wanted to stick to him.

  The trouble was, he seemed to her now so boring. There was no wonder in him.

  The world looked different to her. It had come alive. She used to see it aesthetically. Now it had come alive, and was — she didn’t know what to say — portentous. She shivered to think of her other world, the cardboard aesthetic and automatic world where she had lived with Clifford. To see the trees bulging and urging like ships at anchor on a tide: to feel the world full of its own strange, ceaseless life! — She caught her breath, fearing to lose it again, fearing lest she might die down to the original machine-measured hours. Now the clock mattered so little. The soft, full surge of the day had no minutes to it.

  ‘I must be very careful,’ she said to herself, ‘not to lose my touch with him. It is he who connects me up with real life. And that is what I really want. It’s not so much the passion itself — it’s this, that all the stage setting of the world has come real, it lives with me, and I’m not on a stage with actors and dummies any more. Oh,
let me pray never to fall back into that bored deadness! — After all, I’m like the woman who touched Jesus. You touch the living body, and the flow starts in you, the dead dries up. Oh, if I can only keep in touch all my life, all my life. They say passion dries up, and love dies out. I hope it won’t be so. I hope I never need lose touch again, not even when I die.’

  The problem haunted her. The new soft flowing of life all around her that was the kingdom of life itself, must it die out? Must she, later on, fall back into the periodic excitement and boredom, interest and depression, feeling of creation and feeling of emptiness, which had been her life up to now? It all seemed to her so dried up, so dead: even the excitement and the fervid interest and the very creativity. It seemed somehow mechanical, like sparks out of a machine.

  But was it possible? Was it possible that one could stay in the soft flow of life without falling back into the old dreariness? That one’s life could be all the time like a little river running between rocks and sedges and under bridges, and never dried up? She felt sure that in the past people had suffered and known sorrow and pain and fear: but they hadn’t been inwardly bored, and outwardly mechanically active.

  She thought of the people round her: the servants, for example, and Mrs Bolton. Did Mrs Bolton have a real source in life? Or was she dried up in her soul?

  No, it seemed she had a source. Yet her husband had been dead so long.

  ‘Is it long since your husband was killed, Mrs Bolton? — Very many years?’

  The nurse sat very still. Her face was rather long, and pale with a healthy pallor. But she had fine grey eyes, very searching. She looked at Constance.

  ‘Twenty-three years, my lady, since they brought him home,’ she said. And her mouth closed firmly.

  Constance felt her heart lurch. My God! If they brought home the dead body of one’s own man, which had been the living body on earth to you!