《Lady Chatterley's Lover》　CHAPTER3
　　　　by D·H·Lawrence

Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness. Out of her disconnexion,
a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. It twitched
her limbs when she didn't want to twitch them, it jerked her spine when
she didn't want to jerk upright but preferred to rest comfortably. It
thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she
must jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness.
It made her heart beat violently for no reason. And she was getting
thinner.

It was just restlessness. She would rush off across the park, abandon
Clifford, and lie prone in the bracken. To get away from the house...she
must get away from the house and everybody. The work was her one refuge,
her sanctuary.

But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no connexion
with it. It was only a place where she could get away from the rest.
She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself...if it had any
such nonsensical thing.

Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way.
Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion: she had lost touch with the
substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did
not exist...which had nothing in them! Void to void. Vaguely she knew.
But it was like beating her head against a stone.

Her father warned her again: `Why don't you get yourself a beau, Connie?
Do you all the good in the world.'

That winter Michaelis came for a few days. He was a young Irishman
who had already made a large fortune by his plays in America. He had
been taken up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in
London, for he wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society
realized that it had been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel
Dublin street-rat, and revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in
what was caddish and bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English,
and to the class that made this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest
crime. He was cut dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse can.

Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down
Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best
tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay.

Clifford was inviting the young man of thirty at an inauspicious moment
in thyoung man's career. Yet Clifford did not hesitate. Michaelis had
the ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider,
he would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture,
when the rest of the smart world was cutting him. Being grateful, he
would no doubt do Clifford `good' over there in America. Kudos! A man
gets a lot of kudos, whatever that may be, by being talked about in
the right way, especially `over there'. Clifford was a coming man; and
it was remarkable what a sound publicity instinct he had. In the end
Michaelis did him most nobly in a play, and Clifford was a sort of popular
hero. Till the reaction, when he found he had been made ridiculous.

Connie wondered a little over Clifford's blind, imperious instinct
to become known: known, that is, to the vast amorphous world he did
not himself know, and of which he was uneasily afraid; known as a writer,
as a first-class modern writer. Connie was aware from successful, old,
hearty, bluffing Sir Malcolm, that artists did advertise themselves,
and exert themselves to put their goods over. But her father used channels
ready-made, used by all the other R. A.s who sold their pictures. Whereas
Clifford discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He had all
kinds of people at Wragby, without exactly lowering himself. But, determined
to build himself a monument of a reputation quickly, he used any handy
rubble in the making.

Michaelis arrived duly, in a very neat car, with a chauffeur and a
manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at right of him something
in Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly...in
fact, he wasn't at all, well, what his appearance intended to imply.
To Clifford this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the
man; to the amazing success in him. The bitch-goddess, as she is called,
of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble,
half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely:
for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess, Success also,
if only she would have him.

Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors,
hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no,
he obviously wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale
face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and
a grievance: that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who
would scorn to let such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour.
Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that hes, and the strong
queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary
but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha
aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming
throug亠?
And how they enjoyed the various kicks T!!!
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P?SMB?姓,?N0????^6ah, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap
of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with
repulsion, amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And
they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford
looked! How much stupideand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked
down to Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent
business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions,
and he answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.

`Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick
you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once
you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'

`But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.

`Oh, quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept
outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you
can't help it.'

`But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.

`Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but
a writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's
no question of that.'

`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.

`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the
public, if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make
them popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort
that will have to be...for the time being.'

He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such
fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed
so old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down
in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the
same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense;
but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.

`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said
Clifford contemplatively.

`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.

`And are you alone?' asked Connie.

`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek,
so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to
marry. Oh, yes, I must marry.'

`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'

He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will!
I find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even
an Irishwoman...'

`Try an American,' said Clifford.

`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if
he will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'

Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholyspecimen of extraordinary
success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand dollars from
America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he looked sideways,
downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty
of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong
queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary
but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha
aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming
through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap
of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with
repulsion, amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And
they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford
looked! How much stupider!

Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned
his full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment.
He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made.
With the English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider,
not even love. Yet women sometimes fell for him...Englishwomen too.

He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which
would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead,
perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.

Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before
lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis,
restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a
fine November...day fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park.
My God! What a place!

He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley:
he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he care
to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.

Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the
central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor,
of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's
own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed
things, or had contact with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance
vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne.

`It's very pleasant up here,' he said, with his queer smile, as if
it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to
the top.'

`Yes, I think so,' she said.

Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in
Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never
seen it, and she asked very few people up.

Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked.
She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers...other
people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy
was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked
frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing
his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful
pride in his success.

`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.

`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being
a lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it
for a few moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether,
like you!'

`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.

`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are,
aren't you?'

She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.

`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking
sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that
is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie
lose her power to see him detached from herself.

He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered
everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was crying
out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.

`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.

`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to
utter it.

He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.

`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked suddenly,
fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out an
appeal that affected her direct in the womb.

She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled
beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands, and buried
his face in her lap, remaining motionless. She was perfectly dim and
dazed, looking down in a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape
of his neck, feeling his face pressing her thighs. In all her burning
dismay, she could not help putting her hand, with tenderness and compassion,
on the defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.

Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing
eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed
the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything,
anything.