`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 extraordinarilyunpleasant 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!