Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are

alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the

rest you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically,

that's that!

She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him;

and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which

she helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped

to make.---`Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out

of writing'; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere.

Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of!

The rest all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.

So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to

make another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford

seemed to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class

literature or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in it! said her

father. Twelve hundred pounds last year! was the retort simple and final.

If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on,

till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of

power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle, powerful emanation

of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness

of money a word on a bit of paper. It was a sort of magic, certainly

it was triumph. The bitch-goddess! Well, if one had to prostitute oneself,

let it be to a bitch-goddess! One could always despise her even while

one prostituted oneself to her, which was good.

Clifford, of course, had still many childish taboos and fetishes. He

wanted to be thought `really good', which was all cock-a-hoopy nonsense.

What was really good was what actually caught on. It was no good being

really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the `really

good' men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life, and

if you missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with

the rest of the failures.

Connie was contemplating a winter in London with Clifford, next winter.

He and she had caught the bus all right, so they might as well ride

on top for a bit, and show it.

The worst of it was, Clifford tended to become vague, absent, and to

fall into fits of vacant depression. It was the wound to his psyche

coming out. But it made Connie want to scream. Oh God, if the mechanism

of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one

to do? Hang it all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely?

Sometimes she wept bitterly, but even as she wept she was saying to

herself: Silly fool, wetting hankies! As if that would get you anywhere!

Since Michaelis, she had made up her mind she wanted nothing. That

seemed the simplest solution of the otherwise insoluble. She wanted

nothing more than what she'd got; only she wanted to get ahead with

what she'd got: Clifford, the stories, Wragby, the Lady-Chatterley business,

money and fame, such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with it all.

Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up and forget

it. If you don't hang on to it in your mind, it's nothing. Sex especially...nothing!

Make up your mind to it, and you've solved the problem. Sex and a cocktail:

they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to

about the same thing.

But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would

venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider,

and it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose children you

wanted. Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a child to

a rabbit! Tommy Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate

him with a baby, another generation. He ended in himself. And out of

all the rest of Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was not a

man who did not rouse her contempt, when she thought of having a child

by him. There were several who would have been quite possible as lover,

even Mick. But to let them breed a child on you! Ugh! Humiliation and

abomination.

So that was that!

Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait!

She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if

she couldn't find one who would do.---`Go ye into the streets and by

ways of Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man.' It had been impossible

to find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands

of male humans. But a man! C'est une autre chose!

She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an Englishman,

still less an Irishman. A real foreigner.

But wait! wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the following

winter she would get him abroad to the South of France, Italy. Wait!

She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair,

and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious

to the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer,

not she! One might take a lover almost at any moment, but a man who

should beget a child on one...wait! wait! it's a very different matter.---`Go

ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem...' It was not a question

of love; it was a question of a man. Why, one might even rather hate

him, personally. Yet if he was the man, what would one's personal hate

matter? This business concerned another part of oneself.

It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's

chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly

in the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there.

This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper,

and as the boy was laid up with influenza, somebody always seemed to

have influenza at Wragby, Connie said she would call at the cottage.

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey

and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for

the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether.

The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless" title="a.静止的；固定的">motionless, only great drops

fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash. For the rest,

among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless inertia,

silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy,

somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer

world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking

reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and

yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically

waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only

waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest,

for them the end of all things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic

silence, the silence of strong trees, meant something else.

As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper's cottage,

a rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney,

looked uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke

rose from the chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front

of the house was dug and kept very tidy. The door was shut.

Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man, with his curious

far-seeing eyes. She did not like bringing him orders, and felt like

going away again. She knocked softly, no one came. She knocked again,

but still not loudly. There was no answer. She peeped through the window,

and saw the dark little room, with its almost sinisterprivacy, not

wanting to be invaded.

She stood and listened, and it seemed to her she heard sounds from

the back of the cottage. Having failed to make herself heard, her mettle

was roused, she would not be defeated.

So she went round the side of the house. At the back of the cottage

the land rose steeply, so the back yard was sunken, and enclosed by

a low stone wall. She turned the corner of the house and stopped. In

the little yard two paces beyond her, the man was washing himself, utterly

unaware. He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down

over his slender loins. And his white slim back was curved over a big

bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with

a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms, and pressing

the soapy water from his ears, quick, subtle as a weasel playing with

water, and utterly alone. Connie backed away round the corner of the

house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself, she had had

a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself, commonplace enough,

Heaven knows!

Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her

in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsybreeches slipping down

over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and

the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her.

Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and

inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature.

Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency,

the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours

that one might touch: a body!

Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it;

it lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A

man washing himself in a back yard! No doubt with evil-smelling yellow

soap! She was rather annoyed; why should she be made to stumble on these

vulgar privacies?

So she walked away from herself, but after a while she sat down on

a stump. She was too confused to think. But in the coil of her confusion,

she was determined to deliver her message to the fellow. She would not

he balked. She must give him time to dress himself, but not time to

go out. He was probably preparing to go out somewhere.

So she sauntered slowly back, listening. As she came near, the cottage

looked just the same. A dog barked, and she knocked at the door, her

heart beating in spite of herself.

She heard the man coming lightly downstairs. He opened the door quickly,

and startled her. He looked uneasy himself, but instantly a laugh came

on his face.

`Lady Chatterley!' he said. `Will you come in?'

His manner was so perfectly easy and good, she stepped over the threshold

into the rather dreary little room.

`I only called with a message from Sir Clifford,' she said in her soft,

rather breathless voice.

The man was looking at her with those blue, all-seeing eyes of his,

which made her turn her face aside a little. He thought her comely,

almost beautiful, in her shyness, and he took command of the situation

himself at once.

`Would you care to sit down?' he asked, presuming she would not. The

door stood open.

`No thanks! Sir Clifford wondered if you would and she delivered her

message, looking unconsciously into his eyes again. And now his eyes

looked warm and kind, particularly to a woman, wonderfully warm, and

kind, and at ease.

`Very good, your Ladyship. I will see to it at once.'

Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort

of hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she

looked round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with

something like dismay.

`Do you live here quite alone?' she asked.

`Quite alone, your Ladyship.'

`But your mother...?'

`She lives in her own cottage in the village.'

`With the child?' asked Connie.

`With the child!'

And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of derision.

It was a face that changed all the time, baking.

`No,' he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, `my mother comes and

cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself.'

Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little mockingly,

but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was in

trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his

face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they

looked as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their

warmth. But a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really

there for him.

She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked

up at him again, and remarked:

`I hope I didn't disturb you?'

The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.

`Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat

on, but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and

the unexpected sounds ominous.'

He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his

shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender

he was, thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something

young and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a

man about thirty-seven or eight.

She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he

upset her so much, in spite of herself.

And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: `She's nice, she's real!

She's nicer than she knows.'

She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a game-keeper,

so unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common

with the local people. But also something very uncommon.

`The game-keeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,' she said to

Clifford; `he might almost be a gentleman.'

`Might he?' said Clifford. `I hadn't noticed.'

`But isn't there something special about him?' Connie insisted.

`I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him.

He only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India,

I rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps

he was an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the

men were like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back

into their old places when they get home again.'

Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar

tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really

climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed.

`But don't you think there is something special about him?' she asked.

`Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed.'

He looked at her curiously, uneasily, half-suspiciously. And she felt

he wasn't telling her the real truth; he wasn't telling himself the

real truth, that was it. He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional

human being. People must be more or less at his level, or below it.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation.

They were so tight, so scared of life!