‘How can I leave Clifford? How can I swear not to leave him, and then leave him? What sort of a man is it that wants me to do such a thing? A man who would soon leave me, I’m afraid. — No, go to Canada!’
She turned away. But she knew this one was just the man to take her at her word and go the next day. She registered a grudge against him, then turned to him:
‘Are you sorry I ever loved you?’ she asked.
He stared at her in confusion of feelings.
‘Ay! Maybe yer are!’ she said bitterly, mocking the dialect, sneering at him. ‘’Appen yer sorry for it, like?’
Her imitation was so clumsy, it saved her. He smiled at her.
‘Tha canna do’t,’ he said. ‘Dunna thee try.’
‘But are you sorry I ever loved you?’ she asked sternly. ‘Answer the truth — in part you are sorry.’
‘Am I?’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am! In part! — No, I’m not,’ he added quickly. And she could simply hear his mind creaking as he pondered. He looked up at her. ‘Sometimes I’m mad wi’ yer, like, because I feel — small! I can do nothing! — But I wouldn’t go back on it. It’s my life, if I die tomorrow or live to a hundred.’
‘In Canada — with a nice little Canadian wife?’
‘Ay! I might do that an a’! But —’
‘Ah, goodbye!’ she said in utter dreary fatigue.
She could see him trembling as he stood. Suddenly again he pressed back his throat and flung up his hands, his face distorted.
‘What am I to do?’ he cried.
He was in such evident torture, she was amazed. She went and quickly kissed him.
‘What do you want to do anything for?’ she said. ‘Wait just a month for me: I shall be back. And shall I come to the cottage to you tomorrow night, when Hilda is here? Shall I?’
He shuddered with conflicting desires.
‘Yer make a numskull of me,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she cried. ‘I don’t! I only love you. Wait till I come back from France, and we’ll think what to do for the best. Promise you’ll wait till I come back from France, and then we can try and get it all straight. Promise me, will you?’
‘To wait till you come back from France!’ The words sounded so sinister to him. France to him meant the war.
‘Yes! Only wait for me and not do anything new till I’m home again — early in July. Will you? Will you promise me?’
He could not answer for some time.
‘Ay!’ he said unwillingly.
‘You’ve promised — haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
She kissed him quickly.
‘And shall I come tomorrow night?’ she whispered.
‘Yes!’ he said with a little convulsive shudder.
‘Sure you want me?’ she insisted.
‘Oh God yes!’ he shouted.
She laughed a little.
‘Will you walk a little way with me?’ she said.
He walked in silence at her side. She could feel him growing calmer, falling into the rhythm of desire and of forgetfulness. But she said nothing.
‘You won’t go away with your sister tomorrow then?’ he asked.
‘I could persuade her to stay a night — though she said she only wanted to pick me up. She is driving the car herself. Father is going from York to London by train.’
‘Would she stop overnight if you asked her?’
Constance knew now his desire was uppermost again.
‘Surely! Or she’d do better. She could drop me at your lane end tomorrow evening and come for me again next morning, then we should be really free.’
‘You’ll tell her everything then?’
‘Oh, she knows.’
‘And what does she say?’
‘She’s glad for me.’
‘She’s fond of yer, like?’
‘Very! There are only the two of us.’
He was again left wondering at the strangeness of the gentry. They agreed that he should come up to Wragby after tea, and if he saw a red shawl hanging out of Constance’s window it meant danger, and she could not come. If there was a white shawl it meant she would come after ten o’clock, as before. But if there was a green shawl it meant he was to go back to the cottage and down to the lane end at the railway bridge, a good four miles away, because Constance would get down there, at the bridge over the cutting, and walk down the lane to the cottage.
‘We’re up to some rare tricks, that we are!’ he said.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked. She liked it.
‘Me? No, I don’t mind, on’y it seems a bit funny, like. — I hope yer’ll hang a green shawl out though.’
‘Yes! It’s the Mohammedan’s sacred colour. Well, Mohammed liked love well enough.’
‘Did he?’
‘He did. Not like Jesus!’
And that evening she talked to Clifford about Mohammed.
‘Do you think it was right for Jesus to say to the woman: “Go, and sin no more”? After all, he was only a man!’ she said. ‘Not a woman himself!’
‘Quite!’
‘Supposing the woman had said: “Come thou, and sin with me!” Would it have been better, do you think?’
Clifford looked at her — she seemed excited and reckless — and laughed.
‘He wouldn’t have gone,’ he said.
Constance was at first very happy, alone with Hilda. They motored down to London and had a couple of days there by themselves, shopping and going to the theatre.
‘It’s awfully nice to be manless for a while, don’t you think?’ said the younger sister to the elder.
‘I think it’s a mistake, anyhow, to have a man permanently about,’ said Hilda. ‘Men and women are so different, why should they be chained together? One of them has to give way to the other, and whichever one it is, the result is nasty, in my opinion. Marriage is a mistake.’
Constance pondered this.
‘Yes!’ she admitted. ‘I suppose it is! Men are either dense or exhausting. It’s a relief to be away from them altogether for a time.’
‘For most of the time,’ said Hilda.
But Constance was a little more old-fashioned and shrinking than her sister. Hilda had a certain sombre splendour about her. She really despised men. She despised her father; she had despised her husband, she despised him even now for paying her quite a good income: she despised and disliked Clifford: Heaven knows how she would have despised Parkin. Altogether it was a queer go!
Yet she was very handsome, beautiful and warm-coloured and so womanly-looking, with the same soft brown hair as Constance, and big, slow grey eyes. A sort of Brunhild, waging an invisible war, she lived a great deal alone. She had had her lovers. For her there was no longer any very great difference between one sort of man and another, one man and another. They were like puppets in a show, all different, but all worked in the same way, by pulling wires and letting go. And sex she despised as a sort of fraud: more wire-pulling.
She had a strange power of her own, however, silent and inexplicable. Her husband was in Parliament. She had lived in the political world. And men had talked to her a great deal. In the end they had all seemed to her conceited puppies. And almost invariably she made them feel it. Only in some of the tough, socially highly refined members of the aristocratic families, men who held permanent jobs and were not very much heard of, because they had no need to run after popularity, did she meet her match. They were extremely well bred and subtly insolent to her. Secure of their positions, having nothing much to win and not afraid of losing what they had got, inwardly cynical and empty, they had a strange cunning which made them aware of any subversive potency in any individual, and they had a strange, cold, almost insect-like power of paralysing the same subversive potency when they came across it personally.
These were the only men who had been able to confuse Hilda completely and make her feel small. Therefore they were to her the most typical men. Other men were fools in comparison, because they had not this strange cold cunning
, a sort of cold, insect-like sapience, and a cunning of knowing just where to bite and leave the numbing venom. They had made her know she was plebeian. And that had been her defeat.
For a few days, however, she was very exhilarating company, for she was very clever. And it thrilled Constance to look on London as a sort of macabre farce, a sort of monkey show with the men for the complacent monkeys and the women for the spiteful ones. To be a spectator in cruel remoteness.
Sir Malcolm arrived, and was a very complacent old monkey. He came of a decent Scotch family of country squires and was incurably conceited but not very boring. He had been made a knight for painting ‘historic’ pictures. But he had a Scottish oddness and a fund of curious information, a leaning towards the lurid and the ‘wicked’ aspect of life, and was still quite handsome, with silky white hair, ruddy face, and a little white moustache. The clue to his life was that he had never really put himself out for anything or anybody, and nothing and nobody had ever really put him out. He had a silent, knowing little smile sometimes, and a suave diffidence always. He was fond of his daughters because he was head of their clan. He preferred not to know anything more about them than that they were fine girls whom you handled with gloves on. But he liked the company of young and handsome women: he had married rather late, in the first instance. And the peculiar bond of clan made things easy between them. They none of them ever became personal with one another. They remained just tribal. And that simplifies matters.
It was this Scottish tribal feeling which was their strength and their weakness. Alone, quite alone, they were each one of them a little at a loss, as if cut off from one another. Together, or even with other members of the family, they felt immensely reinforced. And yet they had very little personal contact: even Constance and Hilda. It was female, tribal, and family, what was between them.
They were in a smallish hotel opposite the Louvre palace, on the left bank of the river. In Paris Constance always felt herself settling back into the historic past. Paris, however modern, was, at least by the river, medievally modern: in this respect it seemed to her like Edinburgh: they were both medievally modern. And she liked it. At first she always liked it very much. One relaxed and sank back in some way upon the past. One was not kept up to the scratch so relentlessly as in England.
She liked to walk in the streets on the left side and to sit in the Luxembourg Gardens. How beautiful the midsummer flowers were in the Luxembourg Gardens, so brilliant and so purely decorative! Not at all wistful and a little amateurish as the very lovely and abundant flowers were in Hyde Park! Not in the very least like the pathos of the gardens at Wragby. Fine, splendid, showy, jaunty! She liked them very much. And the thin-legged boys playing games with a ball and crying out with such pseudo-sportsmanlike alertness — they might have come out of a Fourteenth Century picture, the clothing merely a little different.
For the first time, even, she rather liked the way the men looked at her: looked at her to see what she would be like to sleep with. She didn’t mind the flâneurs strolling past Hilda and her herself, looking always up and down, at the body of the woman. She rather liked being just a woman in the body.
And there was often something comely and attractive about the men. They were usually well nourished, but then she preferred them so. And their eyes, if bold, were not hard and fishy. Sometimes there was a soft physical warmth in them. Often they were vulgar. But fairly often there was a certain male humanness that she liked.
Then, after about a week the excitement passed, and though Paris did not cease to be sympathetic, it became depressing. These men, these men, like creatures roving restlessly in Hades, in a sort of afterlife, seeking for something in a woman that they had really ceased to want, they were depressed and depressing. They were really terribly disheartened. Only they kept up the old woman-hunt, which no longer really interested either them or the woman. Only they could think of nothing else. In their souls they could discover no new impulse.
‘These Frenchmen take an awful lot of pains chasing women they don’t really want,’ she said to Hilda.
‘Do any men really want women?’ said Hilda. ‘Don’t they all do it because it’s been done since time began, and they’re bored, and it’s a stop-gap for their boredom, for a while.’
Constance pondered for a time.
‘And because they don’t know what to do with themselves when they’re alone,’ she said.
‘Even less than women do,’ said Hilda.
‘Seems sad, doesn’t it!’ said Constance.
‘It’s a great bluff, the man and woman thing. It’s like fox-hunting: a silly sort of amusement for satisfying atavistic instincts.’
Constance looked at her sister in fear. She was a little afraid of Hilda’s cruelty.
‘I don’t think it’s that quite!’ said Constance. ‘There can be always something new in the physical connection between men and women, don’t you think? Don’t you think a new element enters it, and that’s what keeps life fresh?’
‘If you speak from experience, it may be so. I myself haven’t had the experience.’
Constance pondered this. Was her experience such? Was her experience with Parkin just the experience of woman since time began? And would it die down to nothingness the same — or end in something miserable, perhaps a bit squalid?
Yet as she watched the Frenchmen in Paris — or in Fontainebleau or in Chartres or in Orleans, as they motored south — and saw them handsome fellows, often real typical lovers of women: why didn’t they move her personally? Why did she think so many a time: I should love that one to be my lover if I was somebody else? He’d be such a handsome lover for another woman: ‘jeune, beau, vigoreux,’ as the song says. But never for herself. The tiny special spark was always missing.
And there had to be that tiny special spark. And she realised, as she travelled, that she would easier find it in some rare Englishman than in a Frenchman. It was the spark of the great adventure, the power to change nature from the inside. Often she thought of what Clifford had read and pointed out to her: ‘Nature is a lot of fixed laws, and human nature is a composition of old habits and fixed feelings. But inside nature there is a spark which sometimes flies into consciousness and causes the shrivelling of old feelings and the kindling of new ones, and displaces old habits and makes a little creative chaos out of which a new nature of man emerges.’
Constance in her own mind was determined that this spark did not fly out of nowhere into somewhere, but flew forth from the perfect contact of woman with a man. That was her philosophy.
And was there not something fine or pure or vivid in Parkin’s nature as a man which would strike the right spark of her, the woman? Or was she fooling herself?
Perhaps all women in love had imagined it so. But perhaps it was always true. Maybe the danger lay in not sticking to the truth of it: in letting old habits and old feelings and old laws put out the spark.
‘I’ve got to make up my mind —’ this was her continual thought —‘whether to take Parkin absolutely into the inmost part of my life or whether to think of him as just an escapade.’
She knew she didn’t think of him as just an escapade. But she could not yet open her soul’s last secret recess to his embrace. ‘I daren’t let him spring his seed right in there,’ she thought.
And she did not want to leave Clifford to go to live with the other man. ‘If we were just naked man to naked woman I might want to,’ she said. ‘But we are both clothed around with so many clothings, and so different. It’s like asking a tortoise to risk breaking his shell to get a new form for himself.’
She didn’t want to leave Clifford, to be stuck down among the working classes. Neither did she want to go to Canada and be a colonial. That, perhaps, even less. She had the greatest aversion to the thought. With intense tenacity she stuck to England. The personal escape into the colonies seemed to her a vulgar move, a step into nullity. The mystery did not lie that way. Parkin need never offer her that. If he wanted it, he must go a
lone. She would let him go.
She did not want to leave Clifford. He stood, socially, for the best humanity has achieved in the collective sense. The whole habit of life was least humiliating that way.
And she did not want to leave the ruling class to enter the subservient class. That too she knew. If she had to belong to a class let it be to the ruling class. Of course the present ruling class might be overthrown. Privately she felt that it would be. But until there were some signs of a new rule she would stick to the old.
The amorphousness of the colonies was merely vulgar. And she herself was no bohemian, and Parkin was no artist. He belonged more to a class — his own class — than Clifford did to his. Clifford, in his very Platonism, was somewhat beyond class.
Yes, and Parkin was beyond class in passion. She had to admit that. Once the queer, passionate lights began to glow and shift in the man’s eyes, there was no ladyship nor anything else except a kindled womanhood.
At this thought Constance always cringed a little. She lost her prestige. And she cringed a little. ‘Ma chuckie! Ma chuckie! Ah want thee that much!’ She heard the curious, crooning voice of the keeper and felt his hand beneath her hips, pressing her up at him with an elemental power, and she shivered. She shivered with reminiscent passion but also with a sort of shame. Such a loss of prestige! ‘Ah want thee that much!’ Even that which was almost awful to her, filling her with a sort of awe, was also rather ridiculous. ‘Ah want thee that much!’ — And even want is pronounced to rhyme with chant or with pant! — She felt a fool in retrospect. After all — she wasn’t just ‘his chuckie’. After...
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daily newspapers or journal. Yet she would have missed them if they had not come home. And she replied with abrupt little letters, which she squeezed out rather with an effort. From Parkin, of course, she could not hear, because she had never written a word to him, and he had no idea where she was.
She heard of him, however, from Clifford. It was towards the end of June, time old Sir Malcolm was thinking of returning to his wife in Yorkshire. He was due back the first week in July, due to take his middle-aged wife to Scotland. But he was still gay-dogging and deferring.
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 14