《Lady Chatterley's Lover》　CHAPTER9
　　　　by D·H·Lawrence

Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford.
What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate:
there was no passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost,
it seemed to her, she had married him because she disliked him, in a
secret, physical sort of way. But of course, she had married him really
because in a mental way he attracted her and excited her. He had seemed,
in some way, her master, beyond her.

Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her
depths: and she realized how it had been eating her life away.

She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come
from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was
terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and
so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The
individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two
modes: money and love. Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were
just insanity. His love was a sort of insanity.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.

Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane
people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware
of the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort
of bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the
signs of insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient
and living for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or
so of ten, frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a
finer, subtler will of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm
for her.

Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.

`It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. `I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your chair
today, the sun's just lovely.'

`Yes? Will you give me that book---there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'

`Why they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the `y' sound: be-yutiful!
`And the scent is simply gorgeous.'

`The scent is what I object to,' he said. `It's a little funereal.'

`Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed
by his higher fastidiousness.

`Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.

`I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'

`Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive, withdrawing
quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.

When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:

`I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'

Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:

`Very good, Sir Clifford!'

She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely" title="ad.无限地；无穷地">infinitely soft touch of her lingers on his
face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her
shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated,
watching that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his
cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed
and well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough and he was
a gentleman.

She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinitesoftness,
almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding
to her.

She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie.
She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely,
to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: `All men are
babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some
of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let
anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies,
just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!'

At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different
in a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had
got a good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of
him, to use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown
to man's proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner
and power in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had
never dreamed of, with which he could still bully her.

Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:

`For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long
run.

It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten o'clock.
Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript. But
the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But
she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs Bolton would
do even that.

For Connie had suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn to use
a typewriter. And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised
assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her,
and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was
very patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional
phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to
instruct her.

Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going
up to her room after dinner.

`Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.

`Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling.'

But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton, and asked
her to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught
her all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to
see Mrs Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her
queen or her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again.
And Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying
to her:

`You must say j'adoube!'

She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:

`J'adoube!'

Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession
of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from
the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him
want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him,
her genuine thrill.

To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a
little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's
tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie
did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford.
To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was
thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman,
this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared
in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion.
And his `educating' her roused in her a passion of excitement and response
much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very
fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her
very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing,
knowing as he knew.

There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and
so young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time,
there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and
private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed
it!

But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service,
for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!

Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather,
it bas mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream
of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was
Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with
a great deal more, that these women left out.' Once started, Mrs Bolton
was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them
all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their
affairs, it was wonderful, if just a trifle humiliating to listen to
her. At first she had not ventured to `talk Tevershall', as she called
it, to Clifford. But once started, it went on. Clifford was listening
for `material', and he found it in plenty. Connie realized that his
so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip,
clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was very warm
when she `talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous,
the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run
to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After
all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only
in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any
human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For
even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows
and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast
importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into
new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead
our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel,
properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it
is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide
of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify
the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'.
Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip,
all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of
the angels. Mrs Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels.
`And he was such a bad fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas,
as Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been
merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty
made a `bad man' of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a `nice woman' of
her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs Bolton's
talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at all
the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by
sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But
it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English
village.

`I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp.
You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year
from a fall; eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he
slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter,
an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem
a shame. Well, he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys
a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five years---yes, she's fifty-three
last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She
taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her father died. And then
she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if
you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock,
as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five, if he's a day,
yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see
them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his
knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see.
And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old
James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to
live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown
from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way
the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight
more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't
keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film,
but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films.
Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse
than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality!
Nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they
are for it, I must say. But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays,
now th' pits are working so bad, and they haven't got the money. And
the grumbling they do, it's awful, especially the women. The men are
so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh,
they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding
present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things
that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better than anybody
else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur coat, instead of
giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she going to
give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring coat,
my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor
folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want
a new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to them,
be thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery
you want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful
to go about in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her
get van-loads, an' I can't have a new spring coat. It's a damned shame.
Princess! Bloomin' rot about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos
she's got lots, they give her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've
as much right as anybody else. Don't talk to me about education. It's
munney as matters. I want a new spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get
it, cos there's no munney..." That's all they care about, clothes.
They think nothing of giving seven or eight guineas for a winter coat---colliers'
daughters, mind you---and two guineas for a child's summer hat. And
then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two-guinea hat, girls
as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one in my day. I heard
that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have
a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand
going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first
class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a thousand
pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are
what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And
boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking,