There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
‘But you are beautiful!’ she said. ‘So pure and fine! Come!’ She held her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
‘No!’ she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her dropping breasts. ‘Let me see you!’
He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
‘How strange!’ she said slowly. ‘How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?’
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.
‘So proud!’ she murmured, uneasy. ‘And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he’s lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me! — ’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change. — ’Ay!’ he said at last, in a little voice. ‘Ay ma lad! tha’re theer right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an’ ta’es no count O’ nob’dy! Tha ma’es nowt O’ me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha’re more cocky than me, an’ tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my lady Jane? Tha’s dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an’ tha comes up smilin’. — Ax ‘er then! Ax lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads, O ye gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th’ cheek on thee! Cunt, that’s what tha’re after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt O’ lady Jane! — ’
‘Oh, don’t tease him,’ said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast.
‘Lie down!’ he said. ‘Lie down! Let me come!’ He was in a hurry now.
And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallos.
‘And now he’s tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!’ she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. ‘Isn’t he somehow lovely! so on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He’s mine too. He’s not only yours. He’s mine! And so lovely and innocent!’ And she held the penis soft in her hand.
He laughed.
‘Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love,’ he said.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Even when he’s soft and little I feel my heart simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite different!’
‘That’s John Thomas’s hair, not mine!’ he said.
‘John Thomas! John Thomas!’ and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again.
‘Ay!’ said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. ‘He’s got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An’ sometimes I don’ know what ter do wi’ him. Ay, he’s got a will of his own, an’ it’s hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn’t have him killed.’
‘No wonder men have always been afraid of him!’ she said. ‘He’s rather terrible.’
The quiver was going through the man’s body, as the stream of consciousness again changed its direction, turning downwards. And he was helpless, as the penis in slow soft undulations filled and surged and rose up, and grew hard, standing there hard and overweening, in its curious towering fashion. The woman too trembled a little as she watched.
‘There! Take him then! He’s thine,’ said the man.
And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away with the last, blind flush of extremity.
He heard the distant hooters of Stacks Gate for seven o’clock. It was Monday morning. He shivered a little, and with his face between her breasts pressed her soft breasts up over his ears, to deafen him.
She had not even heard the hooters. She lay perfectly still, her soul washed transparent.
‘You must get up, mustn’t you?’ he muttered.
‘What time?’ came her colourless voice.
‘Seven-o’clock blowers a bit sin’.’
‘I suppose I must.’
She was resenting as she always did, the compulsion from outside.
He sat up and looked blankly out of the window.
‘You do love me, don’t you?’ she asked calmly.
He looked down at her.
‘Tha knows what tha knows. What dost ax for!’ he said, a little fretfully.
‘I want you to keep me, not to let me go,’ she said.
His eyes seemed full of a warm, soft darkness that could not think.
‘When? Now?’
‘Now in your heart. Then I want to come and live with you, always, soon.’
He sat naked on the bed, with his head dropped, unable to think.
‘Don’t you want it?’ she asked.
‘Ay!’ he said.
Then with the same eyes darkened with another flame of consciousness, almost like sleep, he looked at her.
‘Dunna ax me nowt now,’ he said. ‘Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when ‘er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi’ my balls an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma’e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am while I can. Tha can ax me iverything after. Now let me be, let me be!’
And softly, he laid his hand over her mound of Venus, on the soft brown maiden-hair, and himself sat still and naked on the bed, his face motionless in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless, and in the invisible flame of another consciousness, he sat with his hand on her, and waited for the turn.
After a while, he reached for his shirt and put it on, dressed himself swiftly in silence, looked at her once as she still lay naked and faintly golden like a Gloire de Dijon rose on the bed, and was gone. She heard him downstairs opening the door.
And still she lay musing, musing. It was very hard to go: to go out of his arms. He called from the foot of the stairs: ‘Half past seven!’ She sighed, and got out of bed. The bare little room! Nothing in it at all but the small chest of drawers and the smallish bed. But the board floor was scrubbed clean. And in the corner by the window gable was a shelf with some books, and some from a circulating library. She looked. There were books about Bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth’s core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! He was a reader after all.
The sun fell on her naked limbs through the gable window. Outside she saw the dog Flossie roaming round. The hazel-brake was misted with green, and dark-green dogs-mercury under. It was a clear clean morning with birds flying and triumphantly singing. If only she could stay! If only there weren’t the other ghastly world of smoke and iron! If only he would make her a world.
She came downstairs, down the steep, narrow wooden stairs. Still she would be content with this little house, if only it were in a world of its own.
He was washed and fresh, and the fire was burning. ‘Will you eat anything?’ he said.
‘No! Only lend me a comb.’
She followed him into the scullery, and combed her hair before the han
dbreadth of mirror by the back door. Then she was ready to go.
She stood in the little front garden, looking at the dewy flowers, the grey bed of pinks in bud already.
‘I would like to have all the rest of the world disappear,’ she said, ‘and live with you here.’
‘It won’t disappear,’ he said.
They went almost in silence through the lovely dewy wood. But they were together in a world of their own.
It was bitter to her to go on to Wragby.
‘I want soon to come and live with you altogether,’ she said as she left him.
He smiled, unanswering.
She got home quietly and unremarked, and went up to her room.
CHAPTER 15
There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast-tray. ‘Father is going to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June 17th. You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don’t want to waste time at Wragby, it’s an awful place. I shall probably stay the night at Retford with the Colemans, so I should be with you for lunch, Thursday. Then we could start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in Grantham. It is no use our spending an evening with Clifford. If he hates your going, it would be no pleasure to him.’
So! She was being pushed round on the chess-board again.
Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn’t feel safe in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and free to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the pits, and wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of getting out his coal in the most economical fashion and then selling it when he’d got it out. He knew he ought to find some way of using it, or converting it, so that he needn’t sell it, or needn’t have the chagrin of failing to sell it. But if he made electric power, could he sell that or use it? And to convert into oil was as yet too costly and too elaborate. To keep industry alive there must be more industry, like a madness.
It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in the affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her, his very inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.
He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the loudspeaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled on inside him like a kind of dream.
And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with Mrs Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he was gone in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or intoxication of blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to see him. But when she had gone to bed, he and Mrs Bolton would gamble on till two and three in the morning, safely, and with strange lust. Mrs Bolton was caught in the lust as much as Clifford: the more so, as she nearly always lost.
She told Connie one day: ‘I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.’
‘And did he take the money from you?’ asked Connie aghast.
‘Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!’
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton’s wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
‘Seventeenth!’ he said. ‘And when will you be back?’
‘By the twentieth of July at the latest.’
‘Yes! the twentieth of July.’
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
‘You won’t let me down, now, will you?’ he said.
‘How?’
‘While you’re away, I mean, you’re sure to come back?’
‘I’m as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.’
‘Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!’
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself, himself, should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
‘And then when I come back,’ she said, ‘I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?’
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
‘You’ve never been to the Colonies, have you?’ he asked her.
‘No! Have you?’
‘I’ve been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.’
‘Why shouldn’t we go to South Africa?’
‘We might!’ he said slowly.
‘Or don’t you want to?’ she asked.
‘I don’t care. I don’t much care what I do.’
‘Doesn’t it make you happy? Why not? We shan’t be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It’s not much, but it’s enough, isn’t it?’
‘It’s riches to me.’
‘Oh, how lovely it will be!’
‘But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we’re going to have complications.’
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.
‘And weren’t you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?’
‘Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Yes! I loved him.’
‘And did he love you?’
‘Yes! In a way, he loved me.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it.’
‘And did you mind very much when he died?’
‘I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes.’
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood.
‘You seem to have such a lot behind you,’ she said.
‘Do I? It seems to me I’ve died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble.’
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
‘And weren’t you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?’
‘No! They were a mingy lot.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They’re the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren’t correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That’s what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they’re always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each — ’
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
‘He hated them!’
‘No,’ said he. ‘He didn’t bother. He just disliked them. There’s a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It’s the fate of mankind, to go that way.’
‘The common people too, the working people?’
‘All the l
ot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They’re all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking! — It’s all alike. Pay ‘em money to cut off the world’s cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave ‘em all little twiddling machines.’
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone.
‘But won’t it ever come to an end?’ she said.
‘Ay, it will. It’ll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they’re all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they’ll all be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they’ll all be insane, and they’ll make their grand auto da fe. You know auto da fe means act of faith? Ay, well, they’ll make their own grand little act of faith. They’ll offer one another up.’
‘You mean kill one another?’
‘I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years’ time there won’t be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten. They’ll have lovingly wiped each other out.’ The thunder was rolling further away.
‘How nice!’ she said.
‘Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Goodbye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! te deum laudamus!’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 501