roost turns
into pure hate. We're  all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians
are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'
     `But there are many  other ways,' said Hammond, `than the  Soviet  way.
The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'
     `Of  course not. But sometimes  it's intelligent to  be half-witted: if
you want to  make your end.  Personally, I  consider Bolshevism half-witted;
but  so  do  I consider our  social life in the west half-witted. So  I even
consider  our  far-famed  mental  life  half-witted.  We're  all as cold  as
cretins,  we're all as passionless as  idiots. We're all of  us Bolshevists,
only we give it another name. We think we're gods...men like gods! It's just
the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if
one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the
same thing: they're both too good to be true.'
     Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:
     `You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'
     `You lovely lad!' said  Tommy.  `No, my cherub, nine times out  of ten,
no!  Love's  another of those half-witted  performances today.  Fellows with
swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small  boy buttocks, like  two
collar  studs!  Do  you  mean  that  sort  of love? Or  the  joint-property,
make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I
don't believe in it at all!'
     `But you do believe in something?'
     `Me? Oh, intellectually  I believe in having a  good  heart,  a  chirpy
penis, a lively  intelligence, and the courage to say  "shit!" in front of a
lady.'
     `Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.
     Tommy Dukes  roared with laughter. `You  angel boy! If  only I  had! If
only I  had! No; my heart's as  numb as a  potato, my penis droops and never
lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front
of my mother or my aunt...they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really
intelligent,  I'm only  a  "mental-lifer".  It  would  be  wonderful  to  be
intelligent:  then  one would  be alive  in  all  the  parts  mentioned  and
unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you  do?---to  any
really  intelligent  person.  Renoir  said  he painted his pictures with his
penis...he did too,  lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God!
when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started
it.'
     `There are nice women in the world,' said Connie,  lifting  her head up
and speaking at last.
     The men resented  it...she should have pretended  to hear nothing. They
hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.
     `My God! "If they be not nice to me What care I how nice they be?"
     `No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman.
There's  no  woman I can really  want  when I'm faced with  her, and I'm not
going to  start forcing myself to  it...My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and
lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can  do. I  can  be quite
happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure!
What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'
     `It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.
     `Yes, life is all too simple!'

        Chapter 5

     On  a frosty morning with  a little  February sun,  Clifford and Connie
went for  a walk across the park  to the  wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in
his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.
     The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round
the near horizon went the haze,  opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the
top lay the small blue sky;  so that  it was like being inside an enclosure,
always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.
     The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay
bluish  in  the sockets  of  the tufts. Across the park ran  a  path  to the
wood-gate, a fine  ribbon  of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with
sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock  and refuse of the underworld
had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured
on  dry days,  darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now  it was pale shrimp-colour,
with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It  always pleased Connie, this underfoot
of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.
     Clifford steered  cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,
and Connie  kept  her hand on the chair. In front  lay the  wood, the  hazel
thicket nearest, the purplish  density  of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge
rabbits  bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in  a black train, and went
trailing off over the little sky.
     Connie opened the  wood-gate, and Clifford  puffed  slowly through into
the broad  riding that ran up an  incline between the clean-whipped thickets
of the  hazel. The wood was a  remnant of  the great forest where Robin Hood
hunted, and this riding was an  old, old thoroughfare coming across country.
But now, of course, it was  only a riding through the private wood. The road
from Mansfield swerved round to the north.
     In the wood  everything was  motionless,  the old leaves on the  ground
keeping  the frost on their  underside.  A jay called  harshly,  many little
birds fluttered. But there was no  game; no pheasants. They  had been killed
off  during  the  war,  and  the wood had  been left  unprotected, till  now
Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
     Clifford loved the wood;  he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were
his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place
inviolate, shut off from the world.
     The chair  chuffed slowly up the  incline,  rocking and jolting  on the
frozen clods. And  suddenly, on the left, came  a  clearing where there  was
nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here
and  there, big sawn  stumps,  showing  their tops and their grasping roots,
lifeless.  And  patches  of  blackness  where  the woodmen  had  burned  the
brushwood and rubbish.
     This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for
trench timber. The  whole  knoll, which  rose  softly  on  the  right of the
riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On  the crown of the knoll  where
the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over
the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at  Stacks Gate. Connie
had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the  wood. It
let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.
     This denuded place always made  Clifford  curiously angry. He had  been
through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till
he saw this  bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir
Geoffrey.
     Clifford sat with a fixed face as  the chair slowly  mounted. When they
came to the top of the rise he stopped;  he would not risk the long and very
jolty  down-slope.  He  sat looking  at  the  greenish  sweep of the  riding
downwards,  a  clear  way through the bracken and oaks.  It  swerved at  the
bottom  of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of
knights riding and ladies on palfreys.
     `I  consider this is really the heart  of  England,'  said Clifford  to
Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
     `Do you?'  she said, seating herself  in her blue  knitted dress, on  a
stump by the path.
     `I  do! this is  the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'
     `Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery.  Clifford was  too used  to  the  sound  to
notice.
     `I want this  wood perfect...untouched. I want  nobody  to trespass  in
it,' said Clifford.
     There was a certain  pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery  of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a
blow. How  still the trees  were,  with  their  crinkly,  innumerable  twigs
against the sky, and their  grey, obstinate  trunks  rising  from the  brown
bracken! How  safely the birds flitted among  them!  And once there had been
deer, and archers, and  monks padding along  on asses. The place remembered,
still remembered.
     Clifford sat in the  pale sun, with  the  light  on  his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
     `I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.
     `But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.
     `Quite!' said Clifford. `But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it  would  be  gone  already,  like  the rest of  the forest.  One must
preserve some of the old England!'
     `Must  one?' said Connie.  `If it  has to be preserved,  and  preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'
     `If some of the old England isn't  preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. `And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling
for it, must preserve it.'
     There was a sad pause. `Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.
     `For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One
may go against  convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was
a pause.
     `What tradition?' asked Connie.
     `The tradition of England! of this!'
     `Yes,' she said slowly.
     `That's why having a  son helps;  one is only a link  in  a  chain,' he
said.
     Connie was not keen on chains, but  she said nothing. She was  thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
     `I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.
     He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
     `It would almost be a  good thing if you had a child by another man, he
said. `If  we  brought it  up at  Wragby,  it would belong to us and to  the
place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood.  If we had the child to
rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth
considering?'
     Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an `it'
to him. It...it...it!
     `But what about the other man?' she asked.
     `Does it matter very  much?  Do  these  things  really  affect us  very
deeply?...You had that lover in Germany...what is it now? Nothing almost. It
seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in
our  lives that  matter  so very  much. They pass away, and  where are they?
Where...Where are the snows of yesteryear?...It's what endures through one's
life  that matters; my  own life matters  to me, in its long continuance and
development.  But  what  do  the   occasional  connexions  matter?  And  the
occasional sexual  connexions  especially! If people don't  exaggerate  them
ridiculously, they pass like  the mating of birds. And so they should.  What
does  it matter?  It's  the  life-long companionship  that matters. It's the
living together from day to day,  not  the sleeping together once  or twice.
You and  I are married, no matter what happens to us.  We have the habit  of
each  other.  And habit,  to  my thinking, is more vital than any occasional
excitement. The  long, slow, enduring thing...that's  what  we live by...not
the  occasional spasm of any sort.  Little  by little, living  together, two
people  fall  into  a  sort of unison,  they  vibrate  so intricately to one
another.  That's  the real secret of marriage, not  sex;  at  least  not the
simple function of sex. You  and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick
to that we ought to be able to  arrange this sex thing, as we arrange  going
to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'
     Connie sat and  listened in a sort of wonder, and a  sort of  fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so
she  said  to herself.  But her love was somehow only  an excursion from her
marriage with  Clifford; the  long, slow  habit of intimacy, formed  through
years of suffering and  patience.  Perhaps the human soul  needs excursions,
and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is  that you come
home again.
     `And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.
     `Why,  Connie, I should  trust  your  natural instinct  of decency  and
selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'
     She  thought  of Michaelis!  He  was absolutely Clifford's idea of  the
wrong sort of fellow.
     `But men and women may have different feelings about the  wrong sort of
fellow,' she said.
     `No,' he replied. `You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care
for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'
     She  was  silent.  Logic  might  be  unanswerable  because  it  was  so
absolutely wrong.
     `And should you expect me to tell you?' she  asked, glancing  up at him
almost furtively.
     `Not at all, I'd better not know...But you do agree with me, don't you,
that the  casual  sex thing  is nothing,  compared  to  the  long life lived
together?  Don't  you think  one can just subordinate the  sex thing  to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven  to?
After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of
life the slow building  up of  an  integral personality,  through the years?
living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack
of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and  have a love-affair. If
lack of  a child  is going to  disintegrate  you, then have a  child  if you
possibly can. But only do  these things so that you have an integrated life,
that  makes   a  long  harmonious  thing.  And  you   and   I  can  do  that
together...don't you think?...if we adapt ourselves to  the necessities, and
at  the  same  time  weave  the adaptation  together into a  piece with  our
steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'
     Connie was a  little  overwhelmed  by his words. She knew he  was right
theoretically.  But when  she actually touched  her steadily-lived life with
him she...hesitated. Was  it actually her  destiny to go on weaving  herself
into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?
     Was  it just that? She  was to be  content to  weave a steady life with
him, all one  fabric, but perhaps brocaded  with the occasional flower of an
adventure. But how could she know what  she would  feel next year? How could
one ever know?  How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little  yes,
gone on a breath! Why should one  be pinned down by that  butterfly word? Of
course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and
no's! Like the straying of butterflies.
     `I think  you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree  with
you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'
     `But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'
     `Oh yes! I think I do, really.'
     She was watching a  brown spaniel  that had run out of a side-path, and
was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man
with a gun  strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if
about  to  attack them;  then  stopped  instead, saluted,  and  was  turning
downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had  frightened Connie, he
seemed to emerge with such a  swift menace. That  was how she had seen  him,
like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.
     He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters...the old style, with
a  red  face  and  red  moustache and  distant  eyes.  He was going  quickly
downhill.
     `Mellors!' called Clifford.
     The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a
soldier!
     `Will  you  turn  the  chair  round and get  it started? That makes  it
easier,' said Clifford.
     The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came  forward with
the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping  invisible. He was
moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie  at all,
only at the chair.
     `Connie, this  is  the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken  to
her ladyship yet, Mellors?'
     `No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.
     The man  lifted his hat  as  he stood,  showing his thick,  almost fair
hair.  He stared straight  into  Connie's  eyes, with  a perfect,  fearless,
impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like.  He made her feel
shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand
and made her a slight  bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He
remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.
     `But you've been here some time, haven't you?' Connie said to him.
     `Eight months, Madam...your Ladyship!' he corrected himself calmly.
     `And do you like it?'
     She looked him  in  the eyes. His eyes  narrowed a little,  with irony,
perhaps with impudence.
     `Why, yes, thank you, your Ladyship! I was reared here...'
     He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to  take
hold  of  the chair. His voice  on the last words had fallen into the  heavy
broad drag of the dialect...perhaps also in  mockery, because there had been
no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman. Anyhow, he was a
curious, quick, separate fellow, alone, but sure of himself.
     Clifford started the little engine, the man carefully turned the chair,
and set it nose-forwards to the incline that curved gently to the dark hazel
thicket.
     `Is that all then, Sir Clifford?' asked the man.
     `No, you'd better come along  in case  she  sticks.  The  engine  isn't
really strong  enough for  the uphill  work.' The man glanced round  for his
dog...a thoughtful glance. The  spaniel looked at him and faintly  moved its
tail. A little smile, mocking or teasing her, yet gentle, came into his eyes
for  a moment, then faded away, and his  face was  expressionless. They went
fairly  quickly down the  slope,  the man  with his hand on  the rail of the
chair,  steadying it. He looked like a free soldier rather than  a  servant.
And something about him reminded Connie of Tommy Dukes.
     When  they came  to the  hazel grove, Connie suddenly ran  forward, and
opened the  gate  into the park. As she stood holding it, the two men looked
at her  in passing, Clifford critically, the other man with a curious,  cool
wonder; impersonally wanting to see what she looked like. And she saw in his
blue, impersonal eyes  a look  of suffering and detachment,  yet  a  certain
warmth. But why was he so aloof, apart?
     Clifford stopped the chair, once through  the  gate, and the  man  came
quickly, courteously, to close it.
     `Why did you run to  open?' asked  Clifford in his  quiet,  calm voice,
that showed he was displeased. `Mellors would have done it.'
     `I thought you would go straight ahead,' said Connie. `And leave you to
run after us?' said Clifford.
     `Oh, well, I like to run sometimes!'
     Mellors  took  the chair again, looking perfectly unheeding, yet Connie
felt he noted everything. As he pushed the chair up the steepish rise of the
knoll in the park,  he breathed rather quickly,  through parted lips. He was
rather frail really. Curiously  full of  vitality,  but  a  little frail and
quenched. Her woman's instinct sensed it.
     Connie  fell back, let the chair  go on. The day had greyed  over;  the
small  blue sky that  had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed
in again, the lid was down, there  was a raw coldness. It was going to snow.
All grey, all grey! the world looked worn out.
     The chair waited at the top of the pink path. Clifford looked round for
Connie.
     `Not tired, are you?' he said.
     `Oh, no!' she said.
     But she was.  A strange, weary yearning,  a dissatisfaction had started
in her. Clifford did not notice: those were not things he was aware  of. But
the stranger knew. To Connie,  everything in  her world and life seemed worn
out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the hills.
     They  came to the house, and  around to  the back, where there  were no
steps.  Clifford managed  to  swing himself over  on  to  the  low,  wheeled
house-chair; he was very strong and agile with his arms.  Then Connie lifted
the burden of his dead legs after him.
     The  keeper,  waiting at attention to be dismissed,  watched everything
narrowly, missing nothing.  He went pale, with a sort  of  fear, when he saw
Connie lifting the  inert legs of the man in her arms, into the other chair,
Clifford pivoting round as she did so. He was frightened.
     `Thanks, then, for the help,  Mellors,'  said Clifford  casually, as he
began to wheel down the passage to the servants' quarters.
     `Nothing else, Sir?' came the neutral voice, like one in a dream.
     `Nothing, good morning!'
     `Good morning, Sir.'
     `Good  morning! it was kind of  you to  push the chair up that hill...I
hope  it wasn't heavy  for you,'  said Connie,  looking back  at  the keeper
outside the door.
     His eyes came to  hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of
her.
     `Oh no, not heavy!'  he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into
the broad sound of the vernacular: `Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'
     `Who is your game-keeper?' Connie asked at lunch.
     `Mellors! You saw him,' said Clifford.
     `Yes, but where did he come from?'
     `Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy...son of a collier, I believe.'
     `And was he a collier himself?'
     `Blacksmith  on  the pit-bank,  I believe:  overhead smith. But he  was
keeper  here  for two years before the war...before  he joined up. My father
always had a good Opinion of him, so when he  came back, and went to the pit
for a blacksmith's job,  I just took him back here as  keeper.  I was really
very glad to  get him...its almost impossible to find a  good man round here
for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who knows the people.'
     `And isn't he married?'
     `He was. But  his wife  went off with...with various  men...but finally
with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still.'
     `So this man is alone?'
     `More  or  less!  He has  a  mother in  the  village...and  a child,  I
believe.'
     Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes,
in which  a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground,
but the  background was like the Midlands  atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he  stared at Connie in  his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background  of his  mind  filling up  with mist, with  nothingness.  And  it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
     And dimly she  realized  one of  the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul  receives a  wounding shock, which does not kill the
body,  the soul seems to recover as  the  body  recovers.  But this  is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly  the wound to the soul  begins to make itself  felt,  like a  bruise,
which Only  slowly deepens its terrible ache, till  it fills all the psyche.
And  when we think we have  recovered and  forgotten, it  is  then  that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
     So it was  with  Clifford.  Once he was  `well',  once  he was  back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and  feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to  forget, and  to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming  up, and spreading in him.  For a time it had been so deep  as to  be
numb, as  it were non-existent. Now slowly it began  to assert itself  in  a
spread  of  fear,  almost  paralysis. Mentally  he still was  alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
     And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an  emptiness, an indifference  to  everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused,  he could still talk  brilliantly and, as it were,
command  the  future: as when,  in the wood,  he  talked about  her having a
child, and  giving  an heir to Wragby. But the day after,  all the brilliant
words  seemed  like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really  nothing,  blown away  on any gust  of wind.  They were not the leafy
words  of an effective  life,  young with  energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
     So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of  a  strike, and  it  seemed  to  Connie  there  again it was not  a
manifestation  of energy, it  was the bruise of the  war  that  had  been in
abeyance,  slowly  rising  to  the surface and  creating  the great  ache of
unrest,  and stupor of discontent. The bruise  was  deep,  deep,  deep...the
bruise  of the false inhuman war. It  would take  many years for the  living
blood of the generations to  dissolve the vast black clot of  bruised blood,
deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
     Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness In her
life  that affected her. Clifford's mental life  and hers gradually began to
feel like  nothingness. Their  marriage, their  integrated  life based on  a
habit  of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became
utterly  blank  and nothing. It  was  words,  just so  many  words. The only
reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
     There  was Clifford's  success:  the  bitch-goddess! It was true he was
almost  famous,  and  his  books  brought  him  in a  thousand  pounds.  His
photograph  appeared  everywhere.  There was a  bust  of him in one  of  the
galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of  modern voices. With  his uncanny  lame  instinct  for publicity, he  had
become  in  four  or  five  years  one  of  the  best  known  of  the  young
`intellectuals'.  Where  the intellect came  in, Connie did  not  quite see.
Clifford was really  clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and
motives which leaves everything in  bits at the end. But  it was rather like
puppies tearing  the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and
playful, but  curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It  was weird
and it was nothing. This was the feeling  that echoed  and re-echoed  at the
bottom  of  Connie's  soul:  it  was   all  flag,  a  wonderful  display  of
nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!
     Michaelis  had  seized upon Clifford  as the central figure for a play;
already  he  had  sketched  in  the plot, and  written  the  first  act. For
Michaelis was even better than Clifford at  making a display of nothingness.
It was the last  bit of passion left in these men: the passion  for making a
display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money
that Michaelis was after. Clifford had  never been  primarily out for money,
though he made  it where  he could,  for  money  is  the  seal and stamp  of
success. And  success was what  they wanted.  They wanted, both  of them, to
make a real  display...a  man's  own  very  display  of himself  that should
capture for a time the vast populace.
     It  was  strange...the  prostitution  to the  bitch-goddess. To Connie,
since she was really outside  of it,  and  since  she had grown  numb to the
thrill  of  it,  it was  again nothingness.  Even  the  prostitution  to the
bitch-goddess  was  nothingness,  though  the   men  prostituted  themselves
innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
     Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it
long ago. And Clifford  was  again thrilled.  He was going  to be  displayed
again  this time,  somebody was going  to  display him, and to advantage. He
invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
     Michaelis  came:  in summer, in a  pale-coloured  suit  and white suede
gloves,  with  mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely,  and Act I was a great
success. Even Connie  was thrilled...thrilled to  what bit of marrow she had
left.  And  Michaelis,   thrilled   by  his  power  to  thrill,  was  really
wonderful...and  quite beautiful,  in  Connie's eyes. She saw  in  him  that
ancient motionlessness of a race that can't  be  disillusioned any  more, an
extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is  pure. On the far side of  his supreme
prostitution to the  bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African  ivory
mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
     His moment of sheer  thrill  with the two  Chatterleys, when  he simply
carried  Connie  and Clifford  away,  was  one of  the  supreme  moments  of
Michaelis'  life. He had succeeded:  he had carried them away. Even Clifford
was temporarily in love with him...if that is the way one can put it.
     So next morning Mick  was more  uneasy  than ever;  restless, devoured,
with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie  had not visited him
in the night...and he  had  not known where to find her.  Coquetry!...at his
moment of triumph.
     He went up to her sitting-room  in the morning. She knew he would come.
And his  restlessness  was evident.  He asked her about his  play...did  she
think  it good? He had to hear it  praised: that affected  him with the last
thin  thrill  of  passion  beyond  any  sexual orgasm. And  she  praised  it
rapturously. Yet all the while, at the  bottom of her soul, she knew it  was
nothing.
     `Look here!'  he said suddenly at last.  `Why  don't you and I  make  a
clean thing of it? Why don't we marry?'
     `But I am married,' she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
     `Oh that!...he'll  divorce you all right...Why don't you and I marry? I
want  to marry. I know it would be the best thing  for me...marry and lead a
regular life. I lead  the deuce of a life, simply tearing  myself to pieces.
Look here, you and I, we're made for one another...hand and glove. Why don't
we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn't?'
     Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she  felt nothing. These men, they
were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of
their  heads  as if  they  were  squibs,  and  expected you  to  be  carried
heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
     `But  I  am  married already,'  she said. `I can't leave  Clifford, you
know.'
     `Why not? but why not?' he cried. `He'll hardly know you've gone, after
six months. He doesn't know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man
has no use for you  at all, as far as I can see; he's entirely wrapped up in
himself.'
     Connie felt there was truth  in this.  But she also  felt that Mick was
hardly making a display of selflessness.
     `Aren't all men wrapped up in themselves?' she asked.
     `Oh,  more  or  less, I allow. A man's got to be,  to  get through. But
that's not the  point. The point is, what sort  of a time  can a  man give a
woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he?  If  he can't he's  no
right to the woman...' He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes,
almost hypnotic.  `Now  I  consider,'  he  added,  `I can give a  woman  the
darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.'
     `And what sort of a good time?' asked Connie, gazing on  him still with
a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing
at all.
     `Every sort of a good time,  damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a
point,  any  nightclub you like,  know anybody  you  want to know, live  the
pace...travel and be somebody wherever you go...Darn  it, every sort of good
time.'
     He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him
as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of
her  mind was tickled at the  glowing prospects he offered  her. Hardly even
her  most outside self responded, that  at any  other  time would  have been
thrilled. She just got  no feeling from it, she  couldn't `go off'. She just
sat  and  stared and looked  dazzled, and  felt nothing, only  somewhere she
smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
     Mick sat  on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his  chair, glaring at her
almost  hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity  for her
to say Yes!  or whether he was more panic-stricken for  fear she should  say
Yes!---who can tell?
     `I should have to  think about it,' she said.  `I couldn't  say now. It
may seem to  you Clifford doesn't count, but  he  does. When  you  think how
disabled he is...'
     `Oh damn it all! If a  fellow's going  to trade on his  disabilities, I
might begin to say  how lonely I am, and always have been, and  all the rest
of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow's got nothing
but disabilities to recommend him...'
     He turned aside,  working his  hands furiously in his trousers pockets.
That evening he said to her:
     `You're coming round to my  room tonight, aren't you? I don't darn know
where your room is.'
     `All right!' she said.
     He was a more excited lover that night, with his  strange, small  boy's
frail nakedness. Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis  before he
had  really  finished his. And  he roused a certain craving passion  in her,
with his little boy's nakedness and softness; she had to go on after he  had
finished, in the  wild tumult and heaving of  her loins, while he heroically
kept himself  up, and present in her, with all  his  will and self-offering,
till she brought about her own crisis, with weird little cries.
     When at  last he  drew  away  from her, he  said, in  a  bitter, almost
sneering little voice:
     `You  couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could  you? You'd have
to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'
     This little speech, at the moment, was one of the shocks  of  her life.
Because that passive  sort  of giving himself was so obviously his only real
mode of intercourse.
     `What do you mean?' she said.
     `You know  what I mean. You keep on for hours after I've gone off...and
I have  to hang  on with  my teeth till you bring yourself off  by your  own
exertions.'
     She  was stunned  by this unexpected  piece of brutality, at the moment
when she  was glowing with a  sort of pleasure  beyond words, and  a sort of
love for him. Because, after all, like so many modern  men, he  was finished
almost before he had begun. And that forced the woman to be active.
     `But you want me to go on, to get my own satisfaction?' she said.
     He laughed grimly: `I  want it!' he  said. `That's good! I want to hang
on with my teeth clenched, while you go for me!'
     `But don't you?' she insisted.
     He avoided the question. `All the darned women are like that,' he said.
`Either they don't go off at all, as if they  were dead  in there...or  else
they  wait  till a chap's  really  done, and  then  they  start in to  bring
themselves off, and a chap's got  to hang on.  I  never had a woman yet  who
went off just at the same moment as I did.'
     Connie only half heard this piece of novel, masculine  information. She
was   only  stunned   by  his  feeling  against  her...his  incomprehensible
brutality. She felt so innocent.
     `But you want me to have my satisfaction too, don't you?' she repeated.
     `Oh, all right! I'm quite willing. But I'm darned if hanging on waiting
for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man...'
     This speech was one  of the  crucial  blows of Connie's life. It killed
something in  her. She had  not  been so  very  keen on Michaelis;  till  he
started it, she did not  want him. It was as  if she never positively wanted
him. But once he had started her, it  seemed only natural for her to come to
her own crisis with him. Almost she had loved him for it...almost that night
she loved him, and wanted to marry him.
     Perhaps instinctively he knew it, and that was why he had to bring down
the  whole show with  a smash;  the house of cards. Her whole sexual feeling
for him, or for any man, collapsed that night. Her  life fell apart from his
as completely as if he had never existed.
     And she went through the days  drearily. There was nothing now but this
empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living
together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with
one another.
     Nothingness! To accept  the great nothingness of  life seemed to be the
one end of living. All the  many  busy and important little things that make
up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

        Chapter 6

     `Why don't  men and  women  really like  one  another nowadays?' Connie
asked Tommy Dukes, who was more or less her oracle.
     `Oh, but they do!  I don't think since the  human species was invented,
there has ever been a time when men and women have liked one another as much
as they  do today.  Genuine liking!  Take myself. I really like women better
than men; they are braver, one can be more frank with them.'
     Connie pondered this.
     `Ah, yes, but you never have anything to do with them!' she said.
     `I? What am I doing but talking perfectly sincerely to  a woman at this
moment?'
     `Yes, talking...'
     `And what  more could  I  do if  you were  a  man, than  talk perfectly
sincerely to you?'
     `Nothing perhaps. But a woman...'
     `A  woman wants you to like her and  talk to her, and at  the same time
love  her and  desire  her; and it seems  to me the two things are  mutually
exclusive.'
     `But they shouldn't be!'
     `No doubt water ought  not  to be so wet as  it  is; it overdoes  it in
wetness.  But there it is! I like women  and talk  to them, and therefore  I
don't love them  and desire  them. The  two things don't happen at the  same
time in me.'
     `I think they ought to.'
     `All right. The fact that  things  ought to be something else than what
they are, is not my department.
     Connie considered this. `It isn't  true,' she said. `Men can love women
and talk to them.  I don't see how they can love them  without talking,  and
being friendly and intimate. How can they?'
     `Well,' he said, `I don't know. What's the use  of  my  generalizing? I
only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking
to them; but talking to them, though it makes me  intimate in one direction,
sets  me poles apart from them as far as  kissing is concerned. So there you
are!  But don't take me  as a general example, probably  I'm  just a special
case: one of the men who like  women,  but don't love  women, and even  hate
them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance.
     `But doesn't it make you sad?'
     `Why should  it? Not a bit! I look at  Charlie May, and the rest of the
men who  have affairs...No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman
I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any  woman I want, and never see
one...why, I presume I'm cold, and really like some women very much.'
     `Do you like me?'
     `Very much! And you see  there's no question of kissing between us,  is
there?'
     `None at all!' said Connie. `But oughtn't there to be?'
     `Why, in God's name? I like Clifford,  but what would you say if I went
and kissed him?'
     `But isn't there a difference?'
     `Where  does it lie, as far  as we're concerned?  We're all intelligent
human  beings, and  the male and female business  is  in  abeyance.  Just in
abeyance. How  would you like me to start acting up like a  continental male
at this moment, and parading the sex thing?'
     `I should hate it.'
     `Well then!  I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run
across the female of my species.  And I  don't  miss her, I just like women.
Who's  going to force me into loving or pretending to love them, working  up
the sex game?'
     `No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?'
     `You may feel it, I don't.'
     `Yes, I  feel something is wrong  between men and women. A woman has no
glamour for a man any more.'
     `Has a man for a woman?'
     She pondered the other side of the question.
     `Not much,' she said truthfully.
     `Then let's leave  it all  alone, and just be  decent  and simple, like
proper  human  beings  with  one  another.  Be