《Lady Chatterley's Lover》　CHAPTER11
　　　　by D·H·Lawrence

Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were several:
the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir Geoffery's
father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffery's mother had liked cinquecento
furniture. Sir Geoffery himself had liked old carved oak chests, vestry
chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected very
modern pictures, at very moderate prices.

So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic
William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to
frighten the daughter of an R.A. She determined to look through it one
day, and clear it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.

Wrapped up carefully to preserve it from damage and dry-rot was the
old family cradle, of rosewood. She had to unwrap it, to look at it.
It had a certain charm: she looked at it a longtime.

`It's thousand pities it won't be called for,' sighed Mrs Bolton, who
was helping. `Though cradles like that are out of date nowadays.'

`It might be called for. I might have a child,' said Connie casually,
as if saying she might have a new hat.

`You mean if anything happened to Sir Clifford!' stammered Mrs Bolton.

`No! I mean as things are. It's only muscularparalysis with Sir Clifford---it
doesn't affect him,' said Connie, lying as naturally as breathing.

Clifford had put the idea into her head. He had said: `Of course I
may have a child yet. I'm not really mutilated at all. The potency may
easily come back, even if the muscles of the hips and legs are paralysed.
And then the seed may be transferred.'

He really felt, when he had his periods of energy and worked so hard
at the question of the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning.
Connie had looked at him in terror. But she was quite quick-witted enough
to use his suggestion for her own preservation. For she would have a
child if she could: but not his.

Mrs Bolton was for a moment breathless, flabbergasted. Then she didn't
believe it: she saw in it a ruse. Yet doctors could do such things nowadays.
They might sort of graft seed.

`Well, my Lady, I only hope and pray you may. It would be lovely for
you: and for everybody. My word, a child in Wragby, what a difference
it would make!'

`Wouldn't it!' said Connie.

And she chose three R. A. pictures of sixty years ago, to send to the
Duchess of Shortlands for that lady's next charitable bazaar. She was
called `the bazaar duchess', and she always asked all the county to
send things for her to sell. She would be delighted with three framed
R. A.s. She might even call, on the strength of them. How furious Clifford
was when she called!

But oh my dear! Mrs Bolton was thinking to herself. Is it Oliver Mellors'
child you're preparing us for? Oh my dear, that would be a Tevershall
baby in the Wragby cradle, my word! Wouldn't shame it, neither!

Among other monstrosities in this lumber room was a largish blackjapanned
box, excellently and ingeniously made some sixty or seventy years ago,
and fitted with every imaginable object. On top was a concentrated toilet
set: brushes, bottles, mirrors, combs, boxes, even three beautiful little
razors in safety sheaths, shaving-bowl and all. Underneath came a sort
of escritoire outfit: blotters, pens, ink-bottles, paper, envelopes,
memorandum books: and then a perfect sewing-outfit, with three different
sized scissors, thimbles, needles, silks and cottons, darning egg, all
of the very best quality and perfectly finished. Then there was a little
medicine store, with bottles labelled Laudanum, Tincture of Myrrh, Ess.
Cloves and so on: but empty. Everything was perfectly new, and the whole
thing, when shut up, was as big as a small, but fat weekend bag. And
inside, it fitted together like a puzzle. The bottles could not possibly
have spilled: there wasn't room.

The thing was wonderfully made and contrived, excellent craftsmanship
of the Victorian order. But somehow it was monstrous. Some Chatterley
must even have felt it, for the thing had never been used. It had a
peculiar soullessness.

Yet Mrs Bolton was thrilled.

`Look what beautiful brushes, so expensive, even the shaving brushes,
three perfect ones! No! and those scissors! They're the best that money
could buy. Oh, I call it lovely!'

`Do you?' said Connie. `Then you have it.'

`Oh no, my Lady!'

`Of course! It will only lie here till Doomsday. If you won't have
it, I'll send it to the Duchess as well as the pictures, and she doesn't
deserve so much. Do have it!'

`Oh, your Ladyship! Why, I shall never be able to thank you.'

`You needn't try,' laughed Connie.

And Mrs Bolton sailed down with the huge and very black box in her
arms, flushing bright pink in her excitement.

Mr Betts drove her in the trap to her house in the village, with the
box. And she had to have a few friends in, to show it: the school-mistress,
the chemist's wife, Mrs Weedon the undercashier's wife. They thought
it marvellous. And then started the whisper of Lady Chatterley's child.

`Wonders'll never cease!' said Mrs Weedon.

But Mrs Bolton was convinced, if it did come, it would be Sir Clifford's
child. So there!

Not long after, the rector said gently to Clifford:

`And may we really hope for an heir to Wragby? Ah, that would be the
hand of God in mercy, indeed!'

`Well! We may hope,' said Clifford, with a faint irony, and at the
same time, a certain conviction. He had begun to believe it really possible
it might even be his child.

Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody
called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman,
as Mrs Bolton said to Mrs Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his
old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out
of date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers.

They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal,
even the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would
burn at great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly
strong pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly strong,
wet wind the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes,
and left a fine powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel.

`But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?'
asked Winter.

`I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell
electric power. I'm certain I could do it.'

`If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid!
If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little
out of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm
gone, there may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men
again, and you won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid
idea, and I hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt
they would have up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the way,
dear boy, is there any foundation to the rumour that we may entertain
hopes of an heir to Wragby?'

`Is there a rumour?' asked Clifford.

`Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked me, that's all
I can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world,
if there were no foundation.'

`Well, Sir,' said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes.
`There is a hope. There is a hope.'

Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand.

`My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to
hear that! And to hear you are working in the hopes of a son: and that
you may again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah, my boy! to keep up
the level of the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares
to work!---'

The old man was really moved.

Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase.

`Connie,' said Clifford, `did you know there was a rumour that you
are going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?'

Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the
flowers.

`No!' she said. `Is it a joke? Or malice?'

He paused before he answered:

`Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy.'

Connie went on with her flowers.

`I had a letter from Father this morning,' She said. `He wants to know
if I am aware he has accepted Sir Alexander Cooper's Invitation for
me for July and August, to the Villa Esmeralda in Venice.'

`July and August?' said Clifford.

`Oh, I wouldn't stay all that time. Are you sure you wouldn't come?'

`I won't travel abroad,' said Clifford promptly. She took her flowers
to the window.

`Do you mind if I go?' she said. You know it was promised, for this
summer.

`For how long would you go?'

`Perhaps three weeks.'

There was silence for a time.

`Well,' said Clifford slowly, and a little gloomily. `I suppose I could
stand it for three weeks: if I were absolutely sure you'd want to come
back.'

`I should want to come back,' she said, with a quiet simplicity, heavy
with conviction. She was thinking of the other man.

Clifford felt her conviction, and somehow he believed her, he believed
it was for him. He felt immensely relieved, joyful at once.

`In that case,' he said,

`I think it would be all right, don't you?'

`I think so,' she said.

`You'd enjoy the change?' She looked up at him with strange blue eyes.

`I should like to see Venice again,' she said, `and to bathe from one
of the shingle islands across the lagoon. But you know I loathe the
Lido! And I don't fancy I shall like Sir Alexander Cooper and Lady Cooper.
But if Hilda is there, and we have a gondola of our own: yes, it will
be rather lovely. I do wish you'd come.'

She said it sincerely. She would so love to make him happy, in these
ways.

`Ah, but think of me, though, at the Gare du Nord: at Calais quay!'

`But why not? I see other men carried in litter-chairs, who have been
wounded in the war. Besides, we'd motor all the way.'

`We should need to take two men.'

`Oh no! We'd manage with Field. There would always be another man there.'

But Clifford shook his head.

`Not this year, dear! Not this year! Next year probably I'll try.'

She went away gloomily. Next year! What would next year bring? She
herself did not really want to go to Venice: not now, now there was
the other man. But she was going as a sort of discipline: and also because,
if she had a child, Clifford could think she had a lover in Venice.

It was already May, and in June they were supposed to start. Always
these arrangements! Always one's life arranged for one! Wheels that
worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!

It was May, but cold and wet again. A cold wet May, good for corn and
hay! Much the corn and hay matter nowadays! Connie had to go into Uthwaite,
which was their little town, where the Chatterleys were still the Chatterleys.
She went alone, Field driving her.

In spite of May and a new greenness, the country was dismal. It was
rather chilly, and there was smoke on the rain, and a certain sense
of exhaust vapour in the air. One just had to live from one's resistance.
No wonder these people were ugly and tough.

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall,
the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their
sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black.
It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The
utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness
of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which
every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty
was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers' shops, the rhubarb
and lemons in the greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all
went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of
the cinema with its wet picture announcements, `A Woman's Love!', and
the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and
big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan
chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings
and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself
superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not
a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensivink
brick, and gravelled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing,
and fixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls
were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-doh-la exercises
and beginning a `sweet children's song'. Anything more unlike song,
spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling
yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages:
savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something
when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing.
Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling
petrol. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom
the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical
yells and uncanny will-power remained?

A coal-cart was coming downhill, clanking in the rain. Field started
upwards, past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops,
the post-office, into the little market-place of forlorn space, where
Sam Black was peering out of the door of the Sun, that called itself
an inn, not a pub, and where the commercial travellers stayed, and was
bowing to Lady Chatterley's car.

The church was away to the left among black trees. The car slid on
downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington,
the Nelson, the Three Tuns, and the Sun, now it passed the Miners' Arms,
then the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare
and so, past a few new `villas', out into the blackened road between
dark hedges and dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate.

Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England!
No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come
to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious
in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive
side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible
insistentconsciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny
and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable.
How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw
the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted
smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels
fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have
the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced
them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any
more! It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of
it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper
classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she
was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered
with dread.

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!---Yes, but he was as apart from
it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was
dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness,
as far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk
of England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of
it.

The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and
in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away
in long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield
and Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.

As she rose on to the high country, she could see on her left, on a
height above the rolling land, the shadowy, powerful bulk of Warsop
Castle, dark grey, with below it the reddish plastering of miners' dwellings,
newish, and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from
the great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into
the pockets of the Duke and the other shareholders. The powerful old
castle was a ruin, yet it hung its bulk on the low sky-line, over the
black plumes and the white that waved on the damp air below.

A turn, and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate. Stacks Gate,
as seen from the highroad, was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the
Coningsby Arms, standing red and white and gilt in barbarousisolation
off the road. But if you looked, you saw on the left rows of handsome
`modern' dwellings, set down like a game of dominoes, with spaces and
gardens, a queer game of dominoes that some weird `masters' were playing
on the surprised earth. And beyond these blocks of dwellings, at the
back, rose all the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of
a really modern mine, chemical works and long galleries, enormous, and
of shapes not before known to man. The head-stock and pit-bank of the
mine itself were insignificant among the huge new installations. And
in front of this, the game of dominoes stood forever in a sort of surprise,
waiting to be played.

This was Stacks Gate, new on the face of the earth, since the war.
But as a matter of fact, though even Connie did not know it, downhill
half a mile below the `hotel' was old Stacks Gate, with a little old
colliery and blackish old brick dwellings, and a chapel or two and a
shop or two and a little pub or two.

But that didn't count any more. The vast plumes of smoke and vapour
rose from the new works up above, and this was now Stacks Gate: no chapels,
no pubs, even no shops. Only the great works', which are the modern
Olympia with temples to all the gods; then the model dwellings: then
the hotel. The hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners' pub though
it looked first-classy.

Even since Connie's arrival at Wragby this new place had arisen on
the face of the earth, and the model dwellings had filled with riff-raff
drifting in from anywhere, to poach Clifford's rabbits among other occupations.

The car ran on along the uplands, seeing the rolling county spread
out. The county! It had once been a proud and lordly county. In front,
looming again and hanging on the brow of the sky-line, was the huge
and splendid bulk of Chadwick Hall, more window than wall, one of the
most famous Elizabethan houses. Noble it stood alone above a great park,
but out of date, passed over. It was still kept up, but as a show place.
`Look how our ancestors lorded it!'

That was the past. The present lay below. God alone knows where the
future lies. The car was already turning, between little old blackened
miners' cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite, on a damp day,
was sending up a whole array of smoke plumes and steam, to whatever
gods there be. Uthwaite down in the valley, with all the steel threads
of the railways to Sheffield drawn through it, and the coal-mines and
the steel-works sending up smoke and glare from long tubes, and the
pathetic little corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble
down, still pricking the fumes, always affected Connie strangely. It
was an old market-town, centre of the dales. One of the chief inns was
the Chatterley Arms. There, in Uthwaite, Wragby was known as Wragby,
as if it were a whole place, not just a house, as it was to outsiders:
Wragby Hall, near Tevershall: Wragby, a `seat'.

The miners' cottages, blackened, stood flush on the pavement, with
that intimacy and smallness of colliers' dwellings over a hundred years
old. They lined all the way. The road had become a street, and as you
sank, you forgot instantly the open, rolling country where the castles
and big houses still dominated, but like ghosts. Now you were just above
the tangle of naked railway-lines, and foundries and other `works' rose
about you, so big you were only aware of walls. And iron clanked with
a huge reverberating clank, and huge lorries shook the earth, and whistles
screamed.

Yet again, once you had got right down and into the twisted and crooked
heart of the town, behind the church, you were in the world of two centuries
ago, in the crooked streets where the Chatterley Arms stood, and the
old pharmacy, streets which used to lead Out to the wild open world
of the castles and stately couchant houses.

But at the corner a policeman held up his hand as three lorries loaded
with iron rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the
lorries were past could he salute her ladyship.

So it was. Upon the old crookedburgess streets hordes of oldish blackened
miners' dwellings crowded, lining the roads out. And immediately after
these came the newer, pinker rows of rather larger houses, plastering
the valley: the homes of more modern workmen. And beyond that again,
in the wide rolling regions of the castles, smoke waved against steam,
and patch after patch of raw reddish brick showed the newer mining settlements,
sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the sky-line
of the slopes. And between, in between, were the tattered remnants of
the old coaching and cottage England, even the England of Robin Hood,
where the miners prowled with the dismalness of suppressed sporting
instincts, when they were not at work.

England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of
England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connexion
with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days
of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the
drab stucco, that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like
the stately homes, they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down.
As for the cottages of England---there they are---great plasterings
of brick dwellings on the hopelesscountryside.

`Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are
going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie
passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till
the war the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too
big, too expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial. The
gentry were departing to pleasanter places, where they could spend their
money without having to see how it was made.'

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made
the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already
blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural
England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the
old England. And the continuity is not Organic, but mechanical.