Lady Chatterley’s Lover

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER

kissing the loving mother’s hand, bit it firmly, and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and harassed grandmother.

The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poisongas. She has aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor: the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, ‘in the Italian way’, well that is a matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else.

However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists, and the colliers’ wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had been an immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose lot, if one is to believe all accounts.

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The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at the top of her voice, that her husband has been ‘keeping’ women down at the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women. This has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the thing has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken out against the woman.

I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was impossible to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual, with his Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody care for me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending the tin can isn’t there. But I heard that in the village the women call away their children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade in person. He goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the tin can is firmly tied to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like Don Rodrigo in the Spanish ballad: ‘Ah, now it bites me where I most have sinned!’

I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in the wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him it was a nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied that he had no power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and its unpleasant course. ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘folks should do their own fuckin’, then they wouldn’t want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man’s.’

He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real germ of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is nei-

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ther delicate nor respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle again. ‘It’s not for a man the shape you’re in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin’ a cod atween my legs.’ These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do not help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think it would be as well if the man left the place.

I asked him if it was true that he entertained ladies down at the cottage, and all he said was: ‘Why, what’s that to you, Sir Clifford?’ I told him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he replied: ‘Then you mun button the mouths o’ a’ th’ women.’—When I pressed him about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: ‘Surely you might ma’e a scandal out o’ me an’ my bitch Flossie. You’ve missed summat there.’ As a matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he’d be hard to beat.

I asked him if it would be easy for him to find another job. He said: ‘If you’re hintin’ that you’d like to shunt me out of this job, it’d be easy as wink.’ So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the end of next week, and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow, Joe Chambers, into as many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told him I would give him a month’s wages extra, when he left. He said he’d rather I kept my money, as I’d no occasion to ease my conscience. I asked him what he meant, and he said: ‘You don’t owe me nothing extra, Sir Clifford, so don’t pay me nothing extra. If you think you see my shirt hanging out, just tell me.’

Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone away: we don’t know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows her face in Tevershall. And I heard she is

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mortally afraid of gaol, because she merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week, and the place will soon become normal again.

Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or in Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think you were out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite away by the end of the month.

So you see, we are deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.

The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of Clifford’s letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better when she received the following from Mellors:

The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She noticed the glass and the back-board in the square bedroom. Unfortunately, on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials, several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded no clue until she broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an autobiography of the actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart Reid, on the front page. After this, for some days she went round loudly saying that my paramour was no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself. The news came at last to the rector, Mr Burroughs, and

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to Sir Clifford. They then proceeded to take legal steps against my liege lady, who for her part disappeared, having always had a mortal fear of the police.

Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship’s name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course it was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar in the scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem. But he didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a disreputable character also walked about with my breeches’ buttons undone, and I as good as told him he’d nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave me the sack, and I leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall know me no more.

I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square, will either give me a room or will find one for me.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha—

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She resented that too. He need not be so falsely chivalrous. She wished he had said to Clifford: ‘Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I am proud of it!’ But his courage wouldn’t carry him so far.

So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that would soon die down.

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She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and did nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the gondola with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan, who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was in love with her again. But she said to him: ‘I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.’

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love. He wanted to be with her.

‘Have you ever thought,’ he said to her one day, ‘how very little people are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn’t possibly go away from them.’

‘Ask him,’ said Connie.

Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.

‘Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe,’ said Connie. ‘The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.’ ‘And,’ she thought to herself, ‘like you, Duncan.’

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CHAPTER 18

She had to make up her mind what to do. She would leave Venice on the Saturday that he was leaving Wragby: in six days’ time. This would bring her to London on the Monday following, and she would then see him. She wrote to him to the London address, asking him to send her a letter to Hartland’s hotel, and to call for her on the Monday evening at seven.

Inside herself she was curiously and complicatedly angry, and all her responses were numb. She refused to confide even in Hilda, and Hilda, offended by her steady silence, had become rather intimate with a Dutch woman. Connie hated these rather stifling intimacies between women, intimacy into which Hilda always entered ponderously.

Sir Malcolm decided to travel with Connie, and Duncan could come on with Hilda. The old artist always did himself well: he took berths on the Orient Express, in spite of Connie’s dislike of trains de luxe, the atmosphere of vulgar depravity there is aboard them nowadays. However, it would make the journey to Paris shorter.

Sir Malcolm was always uneasy going back to his wife. It was habit carried over from the first wife. But there would be a house-party for the grouse, and he wanted to be well ahead. Connie, sunburnt and handsome, sat in silence, forgetting all about the landscape.

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‘A little dull for you, going back to Wragby,’ said her father, noticing her glumness.

‘I’m not sure I shall go back to Wragby,’ she said, with startling abruptness, looking into his eyes with her big blue eyes. His big blue eyes took on the frightened look of a man whose social conscience is not quite clear.

‘You mean you’ll stay on in Paris a while?’ ‘No! I mean never go back to Wragby.’

He was bothered by his own little problems, and sincerely hoped he was getting none of hers to shoulder.

‘How’s that, all at once?’ he asked. ‘I’m going to have a child.’ It was the first time she had uttered the words to any living

soul, and it seemed to mark a cleavage in her life. ‘How do you know?’ said her father. She smiled. ‘How should I know?’

‘But not Clifford’s child, of course?’ ‘No! Another man’s.’ She rather enjoyed tormenting him.

‘Do I know the man?’ asked Sir Malcolm.

‘No! You’ve never seen him.’ There was a long pause. ‘And what are your plans?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the point.’ ‘No patching it up with Clifford?’

‘I suppose Clifford would take it,’ said Connie. ‘He told me, after last time you talked to him, he wouldn’t mind if I had a child, so long as I went about it discreetly.’

‘Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I suppose it’ll be all right.’

‘In what way?’ said Connie, looking into her father’s eyes. They were big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a cer-

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tain uneasiness in them, a look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen selfishness, usually good-hu- moured and wary.

‘You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put another baronet in Wragby.’

Sir Malcolm’s face smiled with a half-sensual smile. ‘But I don’t think I want to,’ she said.

‘Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the truth from me, my child, it’s this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing and, externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you’ll get very little out of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won’t get much out of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It’s an amusing thing to do.’

And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.

‘I hope you had a real man at last,’ he said to her after a while, sensually alert.

‘I did. That’s the trouble. There aren’t many of them about,’ she said. ‘No, by God!’ he mused. ‘There aren’t! Well, my dear, to look at you, he

was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn’t make trouble for you?’ ‘Oh no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.’

‘Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.’

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Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.

He drove with her to Hartland’s hotel, and saw her installed: then went round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.

She found a letter from Mellors.

I won’t come round to your hotel, but I’ll wait for you outside the Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.

There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the cut-to-pattern class thing.

‘Ah, there you are! How well you look!’ ‘Yes! But not you.’ She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheek-

bones showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman’s now alert instinct for happiness, she registered it at once. ‘I’m happy when he’s there!’ Not all the sunshine of Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.

‘Was it horrid for you?’ she asked as she sat opposite him at table. He was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with the curious loose forgottenness of a sleeping ani-

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