Lady Chatterley’s Lover · Chapter 10 (4/6)

“Which way were you going?” asked Mrs. Flint.

“By the warren.”

“Let me see! Oh yes, the cows are in the gin close. But they’re not up yet. But the gate’s locked, you’ll have to climb.”

“I can climb,” said Connie.

“Perhaps I can just go down the close with you.”

They went down the poor, rabbit-bitten pasture. Birds were whistling in wild evening triumph in the wood. A man was calling up the last cows, which trailed slowly over the path-worn pasture.

“They’re late, milking, tonight,” said Mrs. Flint severely. “They know Luke won’t be back till after dark.”

They came to the fence, beyond which the young fir wood bristled dense. There was a little gate, but it was locked. In the grass on the inside stood a bottle, empty.

“There’s the keeper’s empty bottle for his milk,” explained Mrs. Flint. “We bring it as far as here for him, and then he fetches it himself.”

“When?” said Connie.

“Oh, any time he’s around. Often in the morning. Well, goodbye Lady Chatterley! And do come again. It was so lovely having you.”

Connie climbed the fence into the narrow path between the dense, bristling young firs. Mrs. Flint went running back across the pasture, in a sunbonnet, because she was really a schoolteacher. Constance didn’t like this dense new part of the wood; it seemed gruesome and choking. She hurried on with her head down, thinking of the Flints’ baby. It was a dear little thing, but it would be a bit bowlegged like its father. It showed already, but perhaps it would grow out of it. How warm and fulfilling somehow to have a baby, and how Mrs. Flint had showed it off! She had something anyhow that Connie hadn’t got, and apparently couldn’t have. Yes, Mrs. Flint had flaunted her motherhood. And Connie had been just a bit, just a little bit jealous. She couldn’t help it.

She started out of her muse, and gave a little cry of fear. A man was there.

It was the keeper, he stood in the path like Balaam’s ass, barring her way.

“How’s this?” he said in surprise.

“How did you come?” she panted.

“How did you? Have you been to the hut?”

“No! No! I went to Marehay.”

He looked at her curiously, searchingly, and she hung her head a little guiltily.

“And were you going to the hut now?” he asked rather sternly.

“No! I mustn’t. I stayed at Marehay. No one knows where I am. I’m late. I’ve got to run.”

“Giving me the slip, like?” he said, with a faint ironic smile.

“No! No. Not that. Only⁠—”

“Why, what else?” he said. And he stepped up to her, and put his arm around her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.

“Oh, not now, not now,” she cried, trying to push him away.

“Why not? It’s only six o’clock. You’ve got half an hour. Nay! Nay! I want you.”

He held her fast and she felt his urgency. Her old instinct was to fight for her freedom. But something else in her was strange and inert and heavy. His body was urgent against her, and she hadn’t the heart any more to fight.

He looked round.

“Come⁠—come here! Through here,” he said, looking penetratingly into the dense fir trees, that were young and not more than half-grown.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to come through, to a place where there was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident⁠—he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came in to her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled her all cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost. Till at last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenceless nakedness, and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her. He was coming apart; but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to leave her uncovered. He must cover her now forever.

But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself. She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. “We came off together that time,” he said.

She did not answer.

“It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks lives their lives through and they never know it,” he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

“Do they?” she said. “Are you glad?”

He looked back into her eyes. “Glad,” he said. “Ay, but never mind.” He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her forever.

At last she sat up.

“Don’t people often come off together?” she asked with naive curiosity.

“A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.” He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

“Have you come off like that with other women?”

He looked at her amused.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn’t want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.

He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the path again.

The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. “I won’t come with you,” he said; “better not.”

She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left.

Connie went slowly home, realising the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman.⁠—It feels like a child, she said to herself; it feels like a child in me.⁠—And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.

“If I had a child!” she thought to herself; “if I had him inside me as a child!”⁠—and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realised the immense difference between having a child to oneself, and having a child to a man whom one’s bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one’s bowels and one’s womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self, and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it. She knew she could fight it. She had a devil of self-will in her breast that could have fought the full soft heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it. She could even now do it, or she thought so, and she could then take up her passion with her own will.

Ah yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods, to call on Iacchos, the bright phallus that had no independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallus, her own.

So, in the flux of new awakening, the old hard passion flamed in her for a time, and the man dwindled to a contemptible object, the mere phallus-bearer, to be torn to pieces when his service was performed. She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman gleaming and rapid, beating down the male; but while she felt this, her heart was heavy. She did not want it, it was known and barren, birthless; the adoration was her treasure. It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown. No, no, she would give up her hard bright female power; she was weary of it, stiffened with it; she would sink in the new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of adoration. It was early yet to begin to fear the man.

“I walked over by Marehay, and I had tea with Mrs. Flint,” she said to Clifford. “I wanted to see the baby. It’s so adorable, with hair like red cobwebs. Such a dear! Mr. Flint had gone to market, so she and I and the baby had tea together. Did you wonder where I was?”

“Well, I wondered, but I guessed you had dropped in somewhere to tea,” said Clifford jealously. With a sort of second sight he sensed something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible, but he ascribed it to the baby. He thought that all that ailed Connie was that she did not have a baby, automatically bring one forth, so to speak.

“I saw you go across the park to the iron gate, my Lady,” said Mrs. Bolton; “so I thought perhaps you’d called at the Rectory.”

“I nearly did, then I turned towards Marehay instead.”

The eyes of the two women met: Mrs. Bolton’s grey and bright and searching; Connie’s blue and veiled and strangely beautiful. Mrs. Bolton was almost sure she had a lover, yet how could it be, and who could it be? Where was there a man?

“Oh, it’s so good for you, if you go out and see a bit of company sometimes,” said Mrs. Bolton. “I was saying to Sir Clifford, it would do her ladyship a world of good if she’d go out among people more.”

“Yes, I’m glad I went, and such a quaint dear cheeky baby, Clifford,” said Connie. “It’s got hair just like spider webs, and bright orange, and the oddest, cheekiest, pale-blue china eyes. Of course it’s a girl, or it wouldn’t be so bold, bolder than any little Sir Francis Drake.”

“You’re right, my Lady⁠—a regular little Flint. They were always a forward sandy-headed family,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“Wouldn’t you like to see it, Clifford? I’ve asked them to tea for you to see it.”

“Who?” he asked, looking at Connie in great uneasiness.

“Mrs. Flint and the baby, next Monday.”

“You can have them to tea up in your room,” he said.

“Why, don’t you want to see the baby?” she cried.

“Oh, I’ll see it, but I don’t want to sit through a teatime with them.”

“Oh,” said Connie, looking at him with wide veiled eyes.

She did not really see him, he was somebody else.

“You can have a nice cosy tea up in your room, my Lady, and Mrs. Flint will be more comfortable than if Sir Clifford was there,” said Mrs. Bolton.

She was sure Connie had a lover, and something in her soul exulted. But who was he? Who was he? Perhaps Mrs. Flint would provide a clue.

Connie would not take her bath this evening. The sense of his flesh touching her, his very stickiness upon her, was dear to her, and in a sense holy.

Clifford was very uneasy. He would not let her go after dinner, and she had wanted so much to be alone. She looked at him, but was curiously submissive.

“Shall we play a game, or shall I read to you, or what shall it be?” he asked uneasily.

“You read to me,” said Connie.

“What shall I read⁠—verse or prose? Or drama?”

“Read Racine,” she said.

It had been one of his stunts in the past, to read Racine in the real French grand manner, but he was rusty now, and a little self-conscious; he really preferred the loudspeaker. But Connie was sewing, sewing a little silk frock of primrose silk, cut out of one of her dresses, for Mrs. Flint’s baby. Between coming home and dinner she had cut it out, and she sat in the soft quiescent rapture of herself, sewing, while the noise of the reading went on.

Inside herself she could feel the humming of passion, like the after-humming of deep bells.

Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She caught the sense after the words had gone.

“Yes! Yes!” she said, looking up at him. “It is splendid.”

Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of her eyes, and of her soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and still. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him. So he went on helplessly with his reading, and the throaty sound of the French was like the wind in the chimneys to her. Of the Racine she heard not one syllable.

She was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing with the dim, glad moan of spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same world with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful feet, beautiful in the phallic mystery. And in herself, in all her veins, she felt him and his child. His child was in all her veins, like a twilight.

“For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor feet, nor golden Treasure of hair.⁠ ⁠…”

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oak-wood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

But Clifford’s voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds. How extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there over the book, queer and rapacious and civilised, with broad shoulders and no real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold inflexible will of some bird, and no warmth, no warmth at all! One of those creatures of the afterwards, that have no soul, but an extra-alert will, cold will. She shuddered a little, afraid of him. But then, the soft warm flame of life was stronger than he, and the real things were hidden from him.