Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it
tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we
start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It
is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future:
but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live,
no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The
war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized
that one must live and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for
a month on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back
to Flanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later,
more or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three
years old, and he was twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits
seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the
doctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to
life again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down,
paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to
his home, Wragby Hall, the family 'seat'. His father had died,
Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady
Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the
rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate
income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise
there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the
war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children,
Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley
name alive while he could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a
wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor
attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and
into the fine melancholy park, of which he was really so proud,
though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to
some extent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful,
almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking
face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders
were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was
expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street.
Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight vacancy
of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was
wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious
brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of
being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him
had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of
insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with
soft brown hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of
unusual energy. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice,
and seemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so
at all. Her father was the once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm
Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in the
palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and cultured
socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be
called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been
taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they
had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and
Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in
every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the
least daunted by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural
atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the
cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure social
ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for
music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They
lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over
philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as
good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And
they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars,
twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free.
Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the
forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young
fellows, free to do as they liked, and--above all--to say what they
liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned
interchange of talk. Love was only a minor
accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs
by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked
so passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in
such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were
doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was
supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and
craving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of
herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth
with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The
arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making
and connexion were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of
an anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a
little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's
privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one's
whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of
an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a
girl's life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and
subjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business
was one of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections.
Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known
there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it
more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman
was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only
unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the
matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his
appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child
he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a
very pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man without
yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex
did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could
take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could
take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could
use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold
herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend
himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could
prolong the connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while
he was merely her tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the
war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with
a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is
unless they were profoundly interested,
talking to one another. The amazing,
the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately
talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day
after day for months...this they had never realized till it
happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk
to!--had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what
a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and
soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less
inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a
thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a
final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and
very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a
paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913,
when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see
plainly that they had had the love experience.
L'amour avait passe par la , as
somebody puts it. But he was a man of experience himself, and let
life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the
last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be 'free', and
to 'fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for
she was a woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed
her husband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old impression of
authority on her own mind or soul that she could not get rid of. It
had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm, who left his nervously hostile,
high-spirited wife to rule her own roost, while he went his own
way.
So the girls were 'free', and went back to Dresden, and their
music, and the university and the young men. They loved their
respective young men, and their respective young men loved them
with all the passion of mental attraction. All the wonderful things
the young men thought and expressed and wrote, they thought and
expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's young man was
musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for their
young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.
Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not
know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them:
that is, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but
unmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and
women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young
angularities softened, and her expression either anxious or
triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of
his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more
hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly
succumbed to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered
themselves, took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free.
Whereas the men, in gratitude to the woman for the sex experience,
let their souls go out to her. And afterwards looked rather as if
they had lost a shilling and found sixpence. Connie's man could be
a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is how men are!
Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate
you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you
again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that
they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever
they get, let a woman do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home
again after having been home already in May, to their mother's
funeral. Before Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were
dead: whereupon the sisters wept, and loved the young men
passionately, but underneath forgot them. They didn't exist any
more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's,
Kensington house, and mixed with the young Cambridge group, the
group that stood for 'freedom' and flannel trousers, and flannel
shirts open at the neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy,
and a whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive
sort of manner. Hilda, however, suddenly married a man ten years
older than herself, an elder member of the same Cambridge group, a
man with a fair amount of money, and a comfortable family job in
the government: he also wrote philosophical essays. She lived with
him in a smallish house in Westminster, and moved in that good sort
of society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers, but
who are, or would be, the real intelligent power in the nation:
people who know what they're talking about, or talk as if they
did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents, who gently mocked at
everything, so far. Her 'friend' was a Clifford Chatterley, a young
man of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was
studying the technicalities of coal-mining. He had previously spent
two years at Cambridge. Now he had become a first lieutenant in a
smart regiment, so he could mock at everything more becomingly in
uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie
was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big
sort, but still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had
been a viscount's daughter.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more
'society', was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He
was at his ease in the narrow 'great world', that is, landed
aristocracy society, but he was shy and nervous of all that other
big world which consists of the vast hordes of the middle and lower
classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he was just a
little bit frightened of middle-and lower-class humanity, and of
foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralysing way,
conscious of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence
of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our
day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like
Constance Reid fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of
herself in that outer world of chaos than he was master of
himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his
class. Or perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He
was only caught in the general, popular recoil of the young against
convention and against any sort of real authority. Fathers were
ridiculous: his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments
were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort especially so. And
armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals altogether, the
red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous, though
it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very
ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether
it were in the army or the government or the universities, was
ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any
pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey,
Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his
trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them into the
war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but, also, spending
more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley--Emma--came down to London from the
Midlands to do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way
about Sir Geoffrey and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the
elder brother and heir, laughed outright, though it was his trees
that were felling for trench props. But Clifford only smiled a
little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But when it
came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At least
people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about
something. They believed in something.
They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the
children. In all these things, of course, the authorities were
ridiculously at fault. But Clifford could not take it to heart. To
him the authorities were ridiculous ab
ovo , not because of toffee or
Tommies.
And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather
ridiculous fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a
while. Till things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to
save the situation over here. And this surpassed even ridicule, the
flippant young laughed no more.
In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became
heir. He was terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir
Geoffrey, and child of Wragby, was so ingrained in him, he could
never escape it. And yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the
vast seething world, was ridiculous. Now he was heir and
responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? and also splendid
and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?
Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale
and tense, withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to
save his country and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or
who it might. So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that
was really England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well
of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd
George as his forebears had stood for England and St George: and he
never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled timber
and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd
George.
And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford
felt his father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he
himself any further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the
ridiculousness of everything, and the paramount ridiculousness of
his own position? For willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby
with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much
death and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to
have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived
curiously isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of
all their connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family
tie, a sense of the weakness of their position, a sense of
defencelessness, in spite of, or because of, the title and the
land. They were cut off from those industrial Midlands in which
they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their own class
by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their
father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive
about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But
now Herbert was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry.
Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his
silent, brooding insistence that it should be so was hard for
Clifford to bear up against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and
she felt his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what
the young ones of the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's
honeymoon with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were
intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had
been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to
him. They were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie
exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond
a man's 'satisfaction'. Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his
'satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was
deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, or
an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which
persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary.
Though Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her
sister-in-law Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and
there was no child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.
Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of
1920. Miss Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection,
had departed and was living in a little flat in
London.
Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about
the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was
a warren of a place without much distinction. It stood on an
eminence in a rather fine old park of oak trees, but alas, one
could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with
its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of
the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which
began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless
ugliness for a long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched,
small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids,
sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.
Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or
the Sussex downs: that was her England. With the stoicism of the
young she took in the utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron
Midlands at a glance, and left it at what it was: unbelievable and
not to be thought about. From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she
heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the
winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse
little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit-bank was
burning, had been burning for years, and it would cost thousands to
put it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way,
which was often, the house was full of the stench of this
sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement. But even on
windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth:
sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the Christmas roses the
smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from the
skies of doom.
Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was
rather awful, but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went
on. Life, like all the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at
night red blotches burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and
contracting, like burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At
first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she
was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the
morning it rained.
Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London. This
country had a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie
wondered what else they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The
people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside,
and as unfriendly. Only there was something in their deep-mouthed
slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed
pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work,
that was terrible and a bit mysterious.
There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no
festivities, no deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank
ride in a motor-car up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy
trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were
feeding, to the knoll where the house spread its dark brown facade,
and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering, like unsure
tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a
welcome.
There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall
village, none. No caps were touched, no curtseys bobbed. The
colliers merely stared; the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie
as to an acquaintance, and nodded awkwardly to Clifford; that was
all. Gulf impassable, and a quiet sort of resentment on either
side. At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle of
resentment that came from the village. Then she hardened herself to
it, and it became a sort of tonic, something to live up to. It was
not that she and Clifford were unpopular, they merely belonged to
another species altogether from the colliers. Gulf impassable,
breach indescribable, such as is perhaps nonexistent south of the
Trent. But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf
impassable, across which no communication could take place. You
stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the
common pulse of humanity.
Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the
abstract. In the flesh it was--You leave me alone!--on either
side.
The rector was a nice man of about sixty, full of his duty,
and reduced, personally, almost to a nonentity by the silent--You
leave me alone!--of the village. The miners' wives were nearly all
Methodists. The miners were nothing. But even so much official
uniform as the clergyman wore was enough to obscure entirely the
fact that he was a man like any other man. No, he was Mester Ashby,
a sort of automatic preaching and praying concern.
This stubborn, instinctive--We think ourselves as good as
you, if you are Lady
Chatterley!--puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely. The
curious, suspicious, false amiability with which the miners' wives
met her overtures; the curiously offensive tinge of--Oh dear me!
I am somebody now, with Lady
Chatterley talking to me! But she needn't think I'm not as good as
her for all that!--which she always heard twanging in the women's
half-fawning voices, was impossible. There was no getting past it.
It was hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.
Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she
just went by without looking at them, and they stared as if she
were a walking wax figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford
was rather haughty and contemptuous; one could no longer afford to
be friendly. In fact he was altogether rather supercilious and
contemptuous of anyone not in his own class. He stood his ground,
without any attempt at conciliation. And he was neither liked nor
disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like the
pit-bank and Wragby itself.
But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now
he was lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal
servants. For he had to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of
bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just as carefully dressed as ever,
by his expensive tailors, and he wore the careful Bond Street
neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just as smart
and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern
ladylike young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and
broad shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his
eyes, at the same time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain,
revealed his nature. His manner was often offensively supercilious,
and then again modest and self-effacing, almost
tremulous.
Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof
modern way. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his
maiming, to be easy and flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such
Connie stuck to him passionately.
But she could not help feeling how little connexion he really
had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he
saw them as objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than
parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along
with him. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to
have them look at him now he was lame. And their queer, crude life
seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs.
He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a
microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in
actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and,
through the close bond of family defence, with Emma. Beyond this
nothing really touched him. Connie felt that she herself didn't
really, not really touch him; perhaps there was nothing to get at
ultimately; just a negation of human contact.
Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every
moment. Big and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel
himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair
with a motor attachment, in which he could puff slowly round the
park. But alone he was like a lost thing. He needed Connie to be
there, to assure him he existed at all.
Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories;
curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever,
rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The
observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch,
no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a
vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an
artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true
to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.
Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories.
He wanted everyone to think them good, of the best,
ne plus ultra . They appeared in the
most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to
Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as
if the whole of his being were in his stories.
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was
thrilled. He talked everything over with her monotonously,
insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her
might. It was as if her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up
and pass into theme stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed
her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to
superintend the house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey
for many years, and the dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct
female you could hardly call her a parlour-maid, or even a
woman...who waited at table, had been in the house for forty years.
Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was awful! What
could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these
endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the
mechanical cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had
insisted on a new cook, an experienced woman who had served him in
his rooms in London. For the rest the place seemed run by
mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty good order, strict
cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict honesty.
And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of
feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a
disused street.
What could she do but leave it alone? So she left it alone.
Miss Chatterley came sometimes, with her aristocratic thin face,
and triumphed, finding nothing altered. She would never forgive
Connie for ousting her from her union in consciousness with her
brother. It was she, Emma, who should be bringing forth the
stories, these books, with him; the Chatterley stories, something
new in the world, that they ,
the Chatterleys, had put there. There was no other standard. There
was no organic connexion with the thought and expression that had
gone before. Only something new in the world: the Chatterley books,
entirely personal.
Connie's father, where he paid a flying visit to Wragby, and
in private to his daughter: As for Clifford's writing, it's smart,
but there's nothing in it . It
won't last! Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had done
himself well all his life, and her eyes, her big, still-wondering
blue eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing
in it? If the critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost
famous, and it even brought in money...what did her father mean by
saying there was nothing in Clifford's writing? What else could
there be?
For Connie had adopted the standard of the young: what there
was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another
without necessarily belonging to one another.
It was in her second winter at Wragby her father said to her:
'I hope, Connie, you won't let circumstances force you into being a
demi-vierge.'
'A demi-vierge!' replied Connie vaguely. 'Why? Why
not?'
'Unless you like it, of course!' said her father hastily. To
Clifford he said the same, when the two men were alone: 'I'm afraid
it doesn't quite suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.'
'A half-virgin!' replied Clifford, translating the phrase to
be sure of it.
He thought for a moment, then flushed very red. He was angry
and offended.
'In what way doesn't it suit her?' he asked
stiffly.
'She's getting thin...angular. It's not her style. She's not
the pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she's a bonny Scotch
trout.'
'Without the spots, of course!' said Clifford.
He wanted to say something later to Connie about the
demi-vierge business...the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he
could not bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with
her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her,
in his mind and hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one
another, and neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They
were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something,
and that something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't
mind whether she were demi-vierge or demi-monde, so long as he
didn't absolutely know, and wasn't made to see. What the eye
doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.
Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby,
living their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work.
Their interests had never ceased to flow together over his work.
They talked and wrestled in the throes of composition, and felt as
if something were happening, really happening, really in the
void.
And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was
non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants...but spectral, not
really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the
woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the
mystery, kicking the brown leaves of autumn, and picking the
primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like
the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like
oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure
somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows
or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything...no touch,
no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of
webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir
Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last. Why
should there be anything in them, why should they last? Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is
the appearance of
reality.
Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really,
and he invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people,
critics and writers, people who would help to praise his books. And
they were flattered at being asked to Wragby, and they praised.
Connie understood it all perfectly. But why not? This was one of
the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong with
it?
She was hostess to these people...mostly men. She was hostess
also to Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft,
ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue
eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong,
female loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and
'womanly'. She was not a 'little pilchard sort of fish', like a
boy, with a boy's flat breast and little buttocks. She was too
feminine to be quite smart.
So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice
to her indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel
at the slightest sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no
encouragement at all. She was quiet and vague, she had no contact
with them and intended to have none. Clifford was extraordinarily
proud of himself.
His relatives treated her quite kindly. She knew that the
kindliness indicated a lack of fear, and that these people had no
respect for you unless you could frighten them a little. But again
she had no contact. She let them be kindly and disdainful, she let
them feel they had no need to draw their steel in readiness. She
had no real connexion with them.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because
she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in
their ideas and his books. She entertained...there were always
people in the house. Time went on as the clock does, half past
eight instead of half past seven.