This letter went home to Constance. She felt a fetid black smoke of vulgar ignominy pouring out of it, covering her with smuts. She could not yet make out whether her own name had been spoken in connection with Parkin’s. It seemed not. Yet she recoiled from the fetid scandal of the whole thing.
Yet somewhere, as in a tiny convex mirror, she had a sharp little image of the man her man. It was an image tiny as a little flake of light yet vivid as a star: his male, naked purity. She hardly thought about him: she was angry altogether. Only this little image persisted like a spark which dances before the eyes even when they are shut. And she knew perfectly well, as a woman does know when she is not befogged and falsified, that a passionate man remains pure so long as his passion remains unmixed and uncontaminated by his ego. She did not mind, really, what things Parkin did or had done. She only minded the sharp intensity of his passion for her.
At the same time she loathed the squalor of other people. Not the wife so much. She understood the demon of a wife. The woman no doubt loved him and knew he despised her. The extent of her reckless defamation showed the extent of her morbid love for him, and also, the extent to which he was cold to her, despising her. In her present state the woman didn’t care what happened to her, poor thing. If she had been tortured on the rack she would have persisted just the same. She was like a dog with rabies, and death would be really the only solution. Constance was sorry for her in a way. But she shuddered with horror at the thought of her.
And into this awful stew Constance was by no means anxious to return. It was already the first week in July. Sir Malcolm really wanted to be in Scotland by August because then the fun would begin there — and Biarritz was already empty, it was out of season. The house party in the villa was slowly breaking up. The old artist decided to leave on the fifth.
Constance and Hilda, however, proposed motoring round the Bay of Biscay up to Brittany, and crossing to Southampton from Le Havre. It would be a new road. Their father agreed, stipulating only that he must be home in Yorkshire by the twentieth of the month.
Constance telegraphed the date of her departure to Clifford. The day before she left she had a letter from him, and another from Mrs Bolton. Clifford wrote:
‘I was delighted to know you are actually leaving that place. Once you set your face north, I shall feel you are really coming. It will be marvellous to have you back, though I am not going to complain for one instant of your absence. I have been looked after most assiduously by the excellent Mrs Bolton. She is quite a curious person, and difficult to understand. One of God’s freaks, I should say. She regales me with a great amount of Tevershall gossip, and makes me feel how near I am to the jungle. Nothing seems to surprise her. She takes the offensive Mrs Parkin Junior as calmly as she takes you or me. No fish is too weird for her aquarium. But of course, she is not quite normal. After a few hours of her gossip I emerge into the comparative paradise of Plotinus or even of Hegel and feel I am breathing again. It is surely absolutely true that our world, which seems to us a surface, is only the bottom of a very deep sea, and all our trees are submarine growths, and we are submarine monsters. Only the soul at times rises through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up into the other world, the true air, the veritable light. Then one feels like a kittiwake that shoots into the air with ecstasy after having preyed upon the submerged fishes. It is our mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the horrible subaqueous fauna of the human submarine jungle. But our immortal destiny is to escape, once we have swallowed our catch, up into the bright ether, bursting out from the surface tension of Old Ocean into real light. When I talk to you I feel myself plunging down, seizing the wriggling fish of the human secret, then up, up again, and out of the liquid into the ethereal. It is a great game. But with Mrs Bolton I can only plunge down among the seaweeds and the pallid monsters and stay there. I cannot soar again till she has gone.
‘We have had a great lashing of sea horrors in the Parkin scandal. I don’t know if you remember, I told you his truant wife had come back at him, to use an Americanism, and he found her stark naked in his bed. Since then he has been more or less in retreat behind his mother. The truant wife fortified herself for a week in the cottage, but I had her evicted. Since then, she has been sleeping somewhere in Dakin’s Row and spending her waking hours raising Cain. She has besieged old Mrs Parkin’s house and has seized her own daughter. The daughter, being kitten of the cat, bit and fought so hard that she received a smack in the face which sent her into the gutter, whence she was rescued by the indignant grandmother. The truant wife then proceeded to her favorite haunt, the Three Tunns, and blew off steam, as the colliers say. She has aired in minute detail every incident in her married life with Parkin that respects to his discredit. It is a curious recital. The virtuous Mrs Bolton will give me none of these details, she only says it is “too shameful to mention”. Doctor Smith, however, who is a humorist in these matters, has kept me informed. It is a curious, almost medieval assortment of sexual extravagance and minor perversities, for which I should not have thought our friend Parkin sufficiently imaginative. But it seems that these minor sexual perversities are of all time and circumstance, like fleas and bald heads. It throws a new light on our gamekeeper. I had thought him merely commonplace. Now I see that he too is a little subaqueous monster, incapable of existing without committing absurd and inadequate minor enormities. He has been to interview me several times in regard to this uproar with his wife, and I have been amused to watch him. He is somewhat like a dog with a tin can tied to his tail. Of course I pretend not to notice the tin can, but it rattles obviously when he moves. When I told him not to trouble about the things his wife says of him, he replied: “Them as listens to such things is worse than them as does ’em!” and at that he shuts up like an oyster. He is, however, applying for a divorce. His wife declares she will prevent him and have him in gaol. At present, however, she is herself locked up. She got drunk and attacked our friend Parkin with a large full bottle of Worthington. He defended with the butt of his gun but not before he had got a bad knock on the head. Our friend, the J.P., Arthur Linley, Esquire, had her arrested by the new police constable who is popularly known as the “Meat Fly”! The truant wife managed so to offend our estimable manager, Linley, that he gave her fourteen days. Now I hear she has sworn by all the gods that she will “do him in”: meaning Parkin, not Linley. In fact, it is a great scandal, such as visits a village like Tevershall once in twenty years. Of course, we shall have to stop that woman’s mouth, it has gone far enough.
‘The unpleasant part of it is, Parkin insists that he must leave my service and wants me to let him go at once. I insist he must find me another gamekeeper, or else stay his three months. He suggests his nephew Joe, but that boy is altogether inadequate. When he said he’d got to go I asked him why, precisely? And I told him he ought not to mind mere talk: though I must say I think the bottle of beer hit him hard. He replied: “I’m goin’, Sir Clifford, an’ I wish you’d tell My Lady I’m not ashamed o’ what I’ve got atween my legs, not if everybody tries to make me. But I’m not goin’ ter live nigh to ’em neither.” — I told him: “Live it down, man, live it down!” But I’m afraid he saw I was amused, for he said: “Ay, yo’ maun laugh, Sir Clifford, but it’s not for a man in your shapes to laugh neither.” —Which was impudence, but I suppose I provoked it. I said to him: “You’d laugh, you know, Parkin, if you heard those things about one of the colliers, for instance.” And he replied: “Ay, ’appen I should! An’ I sh’d expect him to stop me across t’mouth, an’ a’, if he got a chance an’ saw me!” — So I left it at that, and accepted his notice, provided he can get another man to go with the callow Joe. I’m afraid if he stays he’ll be slapping more people across the mouth than will be good for them or him. He’s held himself in remarkably well, considering. I think he must feel a little more guilty, or at fault, than he allows. —’
Mrs Bolton wrote rather briefly.
‘I saw Mr Parkin yesterday looking v
ery poorly. What with all this harassment and that blow on the head with a quart bottle of beer. His mother told me he was sick for more than an hour after it, vomiting and retching, and he does look very poorly. But he never says anything to anybody, can’t hardly get a word out of him. I said to him I was awfully sorry to see him looking so badly, and it was a shame. He asked me if I knew when your Ladyship was coming back. I told him what I knew and said I was writing to you. He asked me if I thought anybody had mentioned this affair to you, so I said Sir Clifford had, and I had myself. So he asked me to tell you he was leaving, but he shouldn’t be going to Canada yet, he would stop on and get his divorce from that woman first. I’m sure no man would want to be tied to her a day longer than he need. I told him I’d be sure and tell you, and I’d let him know if there was any message. He bears up just the same and looks you in the face to see what you’re thinking. But I’m afraid he’s poorly. It’s bound to be a strain on a man, such things said about him, and everybody talking behind his back —’
Constance replied to Mrs Bolton:
‘Tell Parkin I’m very sorry all this has happened. Ask him not to go away without leaving his address, because I want to bring him a little present from France, to thank him for being so kind to me in the spring when I was so run down, and he let me feed the baby pheasants.’
And the next day they set off in the car, northwards, home to it all. There is no escape in this world. The only way to get ahead is to go through with the thing no matter what it may be, and come out the other side.
It was full summer, and hay harvest, and the lonely country of France. Constance felt herself seized with one of the violent revulsions she had sometimes from the civilised world, the world that man has made, and that everyone has to live in. She felt it would be good and clean to be dead, to get away from it all. As for rising above it into any kind of immortality, that thought sickened her worse than ever. She wanted no immortality wherein she would remember, just as she wanted no sleep with tormented dreams. Whatever came after let it be utterly different, as different as profound sleep.
Yet the country they drove through was strange and fascinating, as if the world had forgotten it. How strange and remote France was! And sometimes they stayed in a village inn where the men came at evening and drank wine. She heard the guttural sound of the dialect, and a certain nostalgia came over her for the warm blindness of life like theirs. She saw them sitting with knees apart and loosely clenched fists resting on their live, animal thighs. That was how Parkin sat. And there was something in it so utterly restful and warm to her woman’s soul. She wanted that, to sink back into the half-dreamy warmth of the unawakened life. She felt she had been wakened too wide and too long. She wanted to sleep again, the warm sleep of life, with a man who would go powerfully through the passion of life without waking her, yet always there in her life as if they were sailing in one boat.
She saw the peasants, the fishermen, the wood-men, and saw they were gradually being wakened into the nervous misery of the civilised life. They were coming under the influence of the towns. Their life was passing away.
And she was afraid for herself. She dreamed at night that she had been arrested and had to stand up before a judge, to be tried as a criminal. She could not make out quite what her crime was. But it was something shameful.
When she thought about it awake, she knew it was the Parkin scandal. And she realised how frightened she was. She was frightened with an old Mosaic fear, afraid of the horrible power of society and of its commandments which she had broken. She felt she was dynamically an enemy of society, and that she was terrified. She had all her life had a secret fear of people and of the ponderous crushing apparatus of the law. Now, for some reason owing to the Parkin scandal, the fear became acute and almost overmastering.
And still she distinguished it from a sense of guilt or wrong. ‘No!’ she said to herself. ‘I don’t feel guilty or wrong. On the contrary, I feel it is right what I have done, and will do. Yet I feel paralysed with fear. I feel as if they had got me under. I feel as if they had got me down.’
She laboured under this sense of having been got down, subtly caught and pulled down by the vast mob which is civilised society. She couldn’t rise. Her spirits would not rise. She wished she were going to the moon rather than back to Wragby. Heavily her soul dragged on, feeling impotent, humiliated, enslaved.
Then she thought of Parkin. He would be having the same experience, only worse. She knew his peculiar shrinking — from the mass of people, a shrinking which lay beneath his violent aggressiveness, which last was only the cornered dog showing its teeth. She knew how he would suffer, having his nakedness uncovered by that foul woman, his wife. — ‘Minor sexual perversities,’ Clifford said, and seemed amused. She didn’t quite know what he referred to, but she knew that every woman, and hence every man had private sexual secrets which no one had any right to betray. ‘The biggest part of my life,’ she said to herself, ‘is secret, and the first business I have is to keep the secret, and to respect the secret in other people.’
But now Parkin would be exposed in his private intimacies, and the whole place would be grinning and jeering at him, and many would be indignantly crying shame, abomination. She knew what it meant! And he had to pass back and forth through the long, dismal mining village, if he was living with his mother. And all the people would be trying to throw him down and cover him with obscenity as if with excrement.
‘I’m not ashamed of what I’ve got atween my legs.’ He meant his penis. She thought of the naked man, the passion and the mystery of him: the mystery of the penis! And she knew, as every woman knows, that the penis is the column of blood, the living fountain of fullness in life. From the strange rising and surging of the blood all life rises into being. Whatever else it is, it is the river of the only God we can be sure about, the blood. ‘There is a fountain filled with blood,’ said the hymn. And it is eternally true. And every man is such a fountain. And it is not the dead, spilled blood which will wash away all sin, but the living rush of the ever new blood ever renewed. Dead blood can but stink at last. It is the living blood that is the living side, which washes away the old corruptions. And the symbol of the rush of the living blood is the phallus, and the penis is the fountain of life filled with blood.
And with the mystery of the phallus goes all the beauty of the world, and beauty is more than knowledge. Knowledge is so often an illusion, and even when it seems sure, its power to sustain us goes dead. The knowledge of the movement of the stars and the laws of celestial gravitation is wonderful, but the beauty of the stars in their motions is still more wonderful, and it is the penis which connects us sensually with the planets. But for the penis we should never know the loveliness of Sirius or the categorical difference between a pomegranate and an india-rubber ball.
Man need not sacrifice the intellect to the penis, nor the penis to the intellect. But there is an eternal hostility between the two, and life is for ever torn across by the conflict between them. Yet man has a holy ghost inside him which partakes of the nature of both. And hence man has a new aim in life, to maintain a truce between the two and some sort of fluctuating harmony. Instead of deliberately, as science and Socrates, Christianity and Buddha have all done, deliberately setting out to murder the one in order to exalt the other.
What are we when the phallic wonder in us is dead? We are wretched things, and evil. What are we when the penis is the mere tool and toy of the mind? We are perverted and vicious. It is the penis alone which saves men from utterly destroying the world, and the phallus alone is the symbol of our unison in the blood. The cross, as the symbol of the murdered phallus, is an evil symbol and carries evil wherever it goes.
Poor Parkin, they could hurt him so much more than they could hurt Clifford, for example. One could not really hurt Clifford, in the wincing, sensitive way in which one can hurt a physical man. One could only offend him or hurt his self-esteem or abandon him to his own dreariness. He was dreary really. In spite of
all his subtlety, he was tough and insentient. It was so like him to join in the laugh against his gamekeeper. He would join in a common laugh. There was something so vulgar about it.
She felt a great wave of distaste go over her against Clifford. He was so cold, so egoistic in a polished way, and so insentient in a refined way. She loathed his refined insentience, his refined lack of feeling. He could talk about ‘minor sexual perversities’ so glibly, without for a second remembering his own. He could laugh with that vulgar superiority, as if he himself verily never had had a penis. And verily, she thought, in the magic and the sacred reality of it he never had. He had had an organ, a toy and a tool for his own ego.
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 16