LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 17

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• Author: D·H·Lawrence

`You see, Hilda,' said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing London,
  `you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and
  if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.'
  

  `For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!' said Hilda. `I've
  never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving
  himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their self-satisfied
  tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any man's little
  petsy-wetsy, nor his chair à plaisir either. I wanted a complete intimacy,
  and I didn't get it. That's enough for me.

Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing
  everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing
  everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary
  self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!

`I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with everybody,'
  she said to her sister.

`I hope at least I haven't a slave nature,' said Hilda.

`But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of
  yourself.'

Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard of
  insolence from that chit Connie.

`At least I'm not a slave to somebody else's idea of me: and the somebody
  else a servant of my husband's,' she retorted at last, in crude anger.

`You see, it's not so,' said Connie calmly.

She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now, though
  somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the dominion
  of other women. Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another
  life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women.
  How awful they were, women!

She was glad to be with her father, whose favourite she had always
  been. She and Hilda stayed in a little hotel off Pall Mall, and Sir
  Malcolm was in his club. But he took his daughters out in the evening,
  and they liked going with him.

He was still handsome and robust, though just a little afraid of the
  new world that had sprung up around him. He had got a second wife in
  Scotland, younger than himself and richer. But he had as many holidays
  away from her as possible: just as with his first wife.

Connie sat next to him at the opera. He was moderately stout, and had
  stout thighs, but they were still strong and well-knit, the thighs of
  a healthy man who had taken his pleasure in life. His good-humoured
  selfishness, his dogged sort of independence, his unrepenting sensuality,
  it seemed to Connie she could see them all in his well-knit straight
  thighs. Just a man! And now becoming an old man, which is sad. Because
  in his strong, thick male legs there was none of the alert sensitiveness
  and power of tenderness which is the very essence of youth, that which
  never dies, once it is there.

Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important
  to her than faces, which are no longer very real. How few people had
  live, alert legs! She looked at the men in the stalls. Great puddingy
  thighs in black pudding-cloth, or lean wooden sticks in black funeral
  stuff, or well-shaped young legs without any meaning whatever, either
  sensuality or tenderness or sensitiveness, just mere leggy ordinariness
  that pranced around. Not even any sensuality like her father's. They
  were all daunted, daunted out of existence.

But the women were not daunted. The awful mill-posts of most females!
  really shocking, really enough to justify murder! Or the poor thin pegs!
  or the trim neat things in silk stockings, without the slightest look
  of life! Awful, the millions of meaningless legs prancing meaninglessly
  around!

But she was not happy in London. The people seemed so spectral and
  blank. They had no alive happiness, no matter how brisk and good-looking
  they were. It was all barren. And Connie had a woman's blind craving
  for happiness, to be assured of happiness.

In Paris at any rate she felt a bit of sensuality still. But what a
  weary, tired, worn-out sensuality. Worn-out for lack of tenderness.
  Oh! Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical
  sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even
  of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently
  Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical
  jig-jig-jig! Ah, these manly he-men, these flaneurs, the oglers, these
  eaters of good dinners! How weary they were! weary, worn-out for lack
  of a little tenderness, given and taken. The efficient, sometimes charming
  women knew a thing or two about the sensual realities: they had that
  pull over their jigging English sisters. But they knew even less of
  tenderness. Dry, with the endless dry tension of will, they too were
  wearing out. The human world was just getting worn out. Perhaps it would
  turn fiercely destructive. A sort of anarchy! Clifford and his conservative
  anarchy! Perhaps it wouldn't be conservative much longer. Perhaps it
  would develop into a very radical anarchy.

Connie found herself shrinking and afraid of the world. Sometimes she
  was happy for a little while in the Boulevards or in the Bois or the
  Luxembourg Gardens. But already Paris was full of Americans and English,
  strange Americans in the oddest uniforms, and the usual dreary English
  that are so hopeless abroad.

She was glad to drive on. It was suddenly hot weather, so Hilda was
  going through Switzerland and over the Brenner, then through the Dolomites
  down to Venice. Hilda loved all the managing and the driving and being
  mistress of the show. Connie was quite content to keep quiet.

And the trip was really quite nice. Only Connie kept saying to herself:
  Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful,
  that I don't really care about the landscape any more! But I don't.
  It's rather awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake
  of Lucerne without ever noticing that there were even mountain and green
  water. I just don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare
  at it? Why should one? I refuse to.

No, she found nothing vital in France or Switzerland or the Tyrol or
  Italy. She just was carted through it all. And it was all less real
  than Wragby. Less real than the awful Wragby! She felt she didn't care
  if she never saw France or Switzerland or Italy again. They'd keep.
  Wragby was more real.

As for people! people were all alike, with very little difference.
  They all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers,
  they wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of
  a stone. Poor mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and
  squeezed and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment.
  What did people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?

No! said Connie to herself I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go
  about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of
  any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly
  humiliating: it's such a failure.

She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled
  Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow.

But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other
  man. She mustn't let her connexion with him go: oh, she mustn't let
  it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive
  people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh `enjoying oneself'! Another
  modern form of sickness.

They left the car in Mestre, in a garage, and took the regular steamer
  over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon
  rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across
  the water, look dim.

At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address.
  He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking,
  not at all impressive.

`Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier
  for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!'

He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain
  exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible,
  slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where
  the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong,
  odour of sewage.

But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either
  side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right-angles to the
  Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was
  perched above, behind them.

`Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?' he asked,
  rowing easy, and `wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief.

`Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,' said Hilda, in her
  curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.

`Ah! Twenty days!' said the man. There was a pause. After which he
  asked: `Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that
  they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?'

Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to
  have one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on
  land.

`What is there at the Villa? what boats?'

`There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But---' The but meant: they
  won't be your property.

`How much do you charge?'

It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week.

`Is that the regular price?' asked Hilda.

`Less, Signora, less. The regular price---'

The sisters considered.

`Well,' said Hilda, `come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it.
  What is your name?'

His name was Giovanni, and he wanted to know at what time he should
  come, and then for whom should he say he was waiting. Hilda had no card.
  Connie gave him one of hers. He glanced at it swiftly, with his hot,
  southern blue eyes, then glanced again.

`Ah!' he said, lighting up. `Milady! Milady, isn't it?'

`Milady Costanza!' said Connie.

He nodded, repeating: `Milady Costanza!' and putting the card carefully
  away in his blouse.

The Villa Esmeralda was quite a long way out, on the edge of the lagoon
  looking towards Chioggia. It was not a very old house, and pleasant,
  with the terraces looking seawards, and below, quite a big garden with
  dark trees, walled in from the lagoon.

Their host was a heavy, rather coarse Scotchman who had made a good
  fortune in Italy before the war, and had been knighted for his ultrapatriotism
  during the war. His wife was a thin, pale, sharp kind of person with
  no fortune of her own, and the misfortune of having to regulate her
  husband's rather sordid amorous exploits. He was terribly tiresome with
  the servants. But having had a slight stroke during the winter, he was
  now more manageable.

The house was pretty full. Besides Sir Malcolm and his two daughters,
  there were seven more people, a Scotch couple, again with two daughters;
  a young Italian Contessa, a widow; a young Georgian prince, and a youngish
  English clergyman who had had pneumonia and was being chaplain to Sir
  Alexander for his health's sake. The prince was penniless, good-looking,
  would make an excellent chauffeur, with the necessary impudence, and
  basta! The Contessa was a quiet little puss with a game on somewhere.
  The clergyman was a raw simple fellow from a Bucks vicarage: luckily
  he had left his wife and two children at home. And the Guthries, the
  family of four, were good solid Edinburgh middle class, enjoying everything
  in a solid fashion, and daring everything while risking nothing.

Connie and Hilda ruled out the prince at once. The Guthries were more
  or less their own sort, substantial, hut boring: and the girls wanted
  husbands. The chaplain was not a had fellow, but too deferential. Sir
  Alexander, after his slight stroke, had a terrible heaviness his joviality,
  but he was still thrilled at the presence of so many handsome young
  women. Lady Cooper was a quiet, catty person who had a thin time of
  it, poor thing, and who watched every other woman with a cold watchfulness
  that had become her second nature, and who said cold, nasty little things
  which showed what an utterly low opinion she had of all human nature.
  She was also quite venomously overbearing with the servants, Connie
  found: but in a quiet way. And she skilfully behaved so that Sir Alexander
  should think that he was lord and monarch of the whole caboosh, with
  his stout, would-be-genial paunch, and his utterly boring jokes, his
  humourosity, as Hilda called it.

Sir Malcolm was painting. Yes, he still would do a Venetian lagoonscape,
  now and then, in contrast to his Scottish landscapes. So in the morning
  he was rowed off with a huge canvas, to his `site'. A little later,
  Lady Cooper would he rowed off into the heart of the city, with sketching-block
  and colours. She was an inveterate watercolour painter, and the house
  was full of rose-coloured palaces, dark canals, swaying bridges, medieval
  facades, and so on. A little later the Guthries, the prince, the countess,
  Sir Alexander, and sometimes Mr Lind, the chaplain, would go off to
  the Lido, where they would bathe; coming home to a late lunch at half
  past one.

The house-party, as a house-party, was distinctly boring. But this
  did not trouble the sisters. They were out all the time. Their father
  took them to the exhibition, miles and miles of weary paintings. He
  took them to all the cronies of his in the Villa Lucchese, he sat with
  them on warm evenings in the piazza, having got a table at Florian's:
  he took them to the theatre, to the Goldoni plays. There were illuminated
  water-fêtes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places.
  The Lido, with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like
  a strand with an endless heap of seals come up for mating. Too many
  people in the piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido,
  too many gondolas, too many motor-launches, too many steamers, too many
  pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many menservants wanting
  tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too much sun, too much
  smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too many silk shawls,
  too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls: too much enjoyment,
  altogether far too much enjoyment!

Connie and Hilda went around in their sunny frocks. There were dozens
  of people they knew, dozens of people knew them. Michaelis turned up
  like a bad penny. `Hullo! Where you staying? Come and have an ice-cream
  or something! Come with me somewhere in my gondola.' Even Michaelis
  almost sun-burned: though sun-cooked is more appropriate to the look
  of the mass of human flesh.

It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with
  all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on
  hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow
  in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic.
  And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the
  sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To
  be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!

Hilda half liked being drugged. She liked looking at all the women,
  speculating about them. The women were absorbingly interested in the
  women. How does she look! what man has she captured? what fun is she
  getting out of it?---The men were like great dogs in white flannel trousers,
  waiting to be patted, waiting to wallow, waiting to plaster some woman's
  stomach against their own, in jazz.

Hilda liked jazz, because she could plaster her stomach against the
  stomach of some so-called man, and let him control her movement from
  the visceral centre, here and there across the floor, and then she could
  break loose and ignore `the creature'. He had been merely made use of.
  Poor Connie was rather unhappy. She wouldn't jazz, because she simply
  couldn't plaster her stomach against some `creature's' stomach. She
  hated the conglomerate mass of nearly nude flesh on the Lido: there
  was hardly enough water to wet them all. She disliked Sir Alexander
  and Lady Cooper. She did not want Michaelis or anybody else trailing
  her.

The happiest times were when she got Hilda to go with her away across
  the lagoon, far across to some lonely shingle-bank, where they could
  bathe quite alone, the gondola remaining on the inner side of the reef.

Then Giovanni got another gondolier to help him, because it was a long
  way and he sweated terrifically in the sun. Giovanni was very nice:
  affectionate, as the Italians are, and quite passionless. The Italians
  are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved,
  and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of
  any sort.

So Giovanni was already devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted
  to cargoes of ladies in the past. He was perfectly ready to prostitute
  himself to them, if they wanted hint: he secretly hoped they would want
  him. They would give him a handsome present, and it would come in very
  handy, as he was just going to be married. He told them about his marriage,
  and they were suitably interested.

He thought this trip to some lonely bank across the lagoon probably
  meant business: business being l'amore, love. So he got a mate to help
  him, for it was a long way; and after all, they were two ladies. Two
  ladies, two mackerels! Good arithmetic! Beautiful ladies, too! He was
  justly proud of them. And though it was the Signora who paid him and
  gave him orders, he rather hoped it would be the young milady who would
  select hint for l'amore. She would give more money too.

The mate he brought was called Daniele. He was not a regular gondolier,
  so he had none of the cadger and prostitute about him. He was a sandola
  man, a sandola being a big boat that brings in fruit and produce from
  the islands.

Daniele was beautiful, tall and well-shapen, with a light round head
  of little, close, pale-blond curls, and a good-looking man's face, a
  little like a lion, and long-distance blue eyes. He was not effusive,
  loquacious, and bibulous like Giovanni. He was silent and he rowed with
  a strength and ease as if he were alone on the water. The ladies were
  ladies, remote from him. He did not even look at them. He looked ahead.

He was a real man, a little angry when Giovanni drank too much wine
  and rowed awkwardly, with effusive shoves of the great oar. He was a
  man as Mellors was a man, unprostituted. Connie pitied the wife of the
  easily-overflowing Giovanni. But Daniele's wife would be one of those
  sweet Venetian women of the people whom one still sees, modest and flower-like
  in the back of that labyrinth of a town.

Ah, how sad that man first prostitutes woman, then woman prostitutes
  man. Giovanni was pining to prostitute himself, dribbling like a dog,
  wanting to give himself to a woman. And for money!

Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water.
  Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness!
  Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness.

Yet Daniele was still a man capable of a man's free allegiance. He
  did not wear the gondolier's blouse: only the knitted blue jersey. He
  was a little wild, uncouth and proud. So he was hireling to the rather
  doggy Giovanni who was hireling again to two women. So it is! When Jesus
  refused the devil's money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker, master
  of the whole situation.

Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind
  of stupor, to lind letters from home. Clifford wrote regularly. He wrote
  very good letters: they might all have been printed in a book. And for
  this reason Connie found them not very interesting.

She lived in the stupor of the light of the lagoon, the lapping saltiness
  of the water, the space, the emptiness, the nothingness: but health,
  health, complete stupor of health. It was gratifying, and she was lulled
  away in it, not caring for anything. Besides, she was pregnant. She
  knew now. So the stupor of sunlight and lagoon salt and sea-bathing
  and lying on shingle and finding shells and drifting away, away in a
  gondola, was completed by the pregnancy inside her, another fullness
  of health, satisfying and stupefying.

She had been at Venice a fortnight, and she was to stay another ten
  days or a fortnight. The sunshine blazed over any count of time, and
  the fullness of physical health made forgetfulness complete. She was
  in a sort of stupor of well-being.

From which a letter of Clifford roused her.

We too have had our mild local excitement. It appears the truant wife
  of Mellors, the keeper, turned up at the cottage and found herself unwelcome.
  He packed her off, and locked the door. Report has it, however, that
  when he returned from the wood he found the no longer fair lady firmly
  established in his bed, in puris naturalibus; or one should say, in
  impuris naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable
  to evict the somewhat man-handled Venus from his couch, he beat a retreat
  and retired, it is said, to his mother's house in Tevershall. Meanwhile
  the Venus of Stacks Gate is established in the cottage, which she claims
  is her home, and Apollo, apparently, is domiciled in Tevershall.

  I repeat this from hearsay, as Mellors has not come to me personally.
  I had this particular bit of local garbage from our garbage bird, our
  ibis, our scavenging turkey-buzzard, Mrs Bolton. I would not have repeated
  it had she not exclaimed: her Ladyship will go no more to the wood if
  that woman's going to be about!

I like your picture of Sir Malcolm striding into the sea with white
  hair blowing and pink flesh glowing. I envy you that sun. Here it rains.
  But I don't envy Sir Malcolm his inveterate mortal carnality. However,
  it suits his age. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as
  one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality---

This news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied ell being
  with vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she ad got to be bothered
  by that beast of a woman! Now she must start and fret! She had no letter
  from Mellors. They had agreed not to write at all, but now she wanted
  to hear from him personally. After all, he was the father of the child
  that was coming. Let him write!

  But how hateful! Now everything was messed up. How foul those low people
  were! How nice it was here, in the sunshine and the indolence, compared
  to that dismal mess of that English Midlands! After all, a clear sky
  was almost the most important thing in life.

She did not mention the fact of her pregnancy, even to Hilda. She wrote
  to Mrs Bolton for exact information.

Duncan Forbes, an artist friend of theirs, had arrived at the Villa
  Esmeralda, coming north from Rome. Now he made a third in the gondola,
  and he bathed with them across the lagoon, and was their escort: a quiet,
  almost taciturn young man, very advanced in his art.

She had a letter from Mrs Bolton:

You will be pleased, I am sure, my Lady, when you see Sir Clifford.
  He's looking quite blooming and working very hard, and very hopeful.
  Of course he is looking forward to seeing you among us again. It is
  a dull house without my Lady, and we shall all welcome her presence
  among us once more.

  About Mr Mellors, I don't know how much Sir Clifford told you. It seems
  his wife came back all of a sudden one afternoon, and he found her sitting
  on the doorstep when he came in from the wood. She said she was come
  back to him and wanted to live with him again, as she was his legal
  wife, and he wasn't going to divorce her. But he wouldn't have anything
  to do with her, and wouldn't let her in the house, and did not go in
  himself; he went back into the wood without ever opening the door.

But when he came back after dark, he found the house broken into, so
  he went upstairs to see what she'd done, and he found her in bed without
  a rag on her. He offered her money, but she said she was his wife and
  he must take her back. I don't know what sort of a scene they had. His
  mother told me about it, she's terribly upset. Well, he told her he'd
  die rather than ever live with her again, so he took his things and
  went straight to his mother's on Tevershall hill. He stopped the night
  and went to the wood next day through the park, never going near the
  cottage. It seems he never saw his wife that day. But the day after
  she was at her brother Pan's at Beggarlee, swearing and carrying on,
  saying she was his legal wife, and that he'd beers having women at the
  cottage, because she'd found a scent-bottle in his drawer, and gold-tipped
  cigarette-ends on the ash-heap, and I don't know what all. Then it seems
  the postman Fred Kirk says he heard somebody talking in Mr Mellors'
  bedroom early one morning, and a motor-car had been in the lane.

Mr Mellors stayed on with his mother, and went to the wood through
  the park, and it seems she stayed on at the cottage. Well, there was
  no end of talk. So at last Mr Mellors and Tom Phillips went to the cottage
  and fetched away most of the furniture and bedding, and unscrewed the
  handle of the pump, so she was forced to go. But instead of going back
  to Stacks Gate she went and lodged with that Mrs Swain at Beggarlee,
  because her brother Dan's wife wouldn't have her. And she kept going
  to old Mrs Mellors' house, to catch him, and she began swearing he'd
  got in bed with her in the cottage and she went to a lawyer to make
  him pay her an allowance. She's grown heavy, and more common than ever,
  and as strong as a bull. And she goes about saying the most awful things
  about him, how he has women at the cottage, and how he behaved to her
  when they were married, the low, beastly things he did to her, and I
  don't know what all. I'm sure it's awful, the mischief a woman can do,
  once she starts talking. And no matter how low she may be, there'll
  be some as will believe her, and some of the dirt will stick. I'm sure
  the way she makes out that Mr Mellors was one of those low, beastly
  men with women, is simply shocking. And people are only too ready to
  believe things against anybody, especially things like that. She declared
  she'll never leave him alone while he lives. Though what I say is, if
  he was so beastly to her, why is she so anxious to go back to him? But
  of course she's coming near her change of life, for she's years older
  than he is. And these common, violent women always go partly insane
  whets the change of life comes upon them---

This was a nasty blow to Connie. Here she was, sure as life, coming
  in for her share of the lowness and dirt. She felt angry with him for
  not having got clear of a Bertha Coutts: nay, for ever having married
  her. Perhaps he had a certain hankering after lowness. Connie remembered
  the last night she had spent with him, and shivered. He had known all
  that sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting.
  It would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether. He was perhaps
  really common, really low.

  She had a revulsion against the whole affair, and almost envied the
  Guthrie girls their gawky inexperience and crude maidenliness. And she
  now dreaded the thought that anybody would know about herself and the
  keeper. How unspeakably humiliating! She was weary, afraid, and felt
  a craving for utter respectability, even for the vulgar and deadening
  respectability of the Guthrie girls. If Clifford knew about her affair,
  how unspeakably humiliating! She was afraid, terrified of society and
  its unclean bite. She almost wished she could get rid of the child again,
  and be quite clear. In short, she fell into a state of funk.

As for the scent-bottle, that was her own folly. She had not been able
  to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts
  in the drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle
  of Coty's Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted
  him to remember her in the perfume. As for the cigarette-ends, they
  were Hilda's.

She could not help confiding a little in Duncan Forbes. She didn't
  say she had been the keeper's lover, she only said she liked him, and
  told Forbes the history of the man.

`Oh,' said Forbes, `you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled
  the man down and done him its. If he has refused to creep up into the
  middle classes, when he had a chance; and if he's a man who stands up
  for his own sex, then they'll do him in. It's the one thing they won't
  let you be, straight and open in your sex. You can be as dirty as you
  like. In fact the more dirt you do on sex the better they like it. But
  if you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll
  down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital
  thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you
  have it. You'll see, they'll hound that man down. And what's he done,
  after all? If he's made love to his wife all ends on, hasn't he a right
  to? She ought to be proud of it. But you see, even a low bitch like
  that turns on him, and uses the hyena instinct of the mob against sex,
  to pull him down. You have a snivel and feel sinful or awful about your
  sex, before you're allowed to have any. Oh, they'll hound the poor devil
  down.'

Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done,
  after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite
  pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm,
  natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.

No no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with
  tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as
  if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she
  heard his voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody!
  And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again,
  over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through
  her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said:
  Oh, no! I mustn't go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick
  to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm,
  flamy life till he gave it me. And I won't go back on it.

She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a
  note to the keeper, and asking Mrs Bolton to give it him. And she wrote
  to him:

I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is making
  for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will all
  blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and
  I do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it.
  She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home
  in ten days' time, and I do hope everything will be all right.

  A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset.
  

  I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the sixteenth.
  But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby misses
  you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of sunshine,
  sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So please
  do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing you
  for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains.

  I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs Bolton. She is a queer
  specimen. The more I live, the more I realize what strange creatures
  human beings are. Some of them might Just as well have a hundred legs,
  like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and
  dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually
  nonexistent. One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even is
  oneself.

The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball.
  Mrs Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though
  dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever
  it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises
  her. It is as if the events of other people's lives were the necessary
  oxygen of her own.

She is preoccupied with tie Mellors scandal, and if I will let her
  begin, she takes me down to the depths. Her great indignation, which
  even then is like the indignation of an actress playing a role, is against
  the wife of Mellors, whom she persists in calling Bertha Courts. I have
  been to the depths of the muddy lies of the Bertha Couttses of this
  world, and when, released from the current of gossip, I slowly rise
  to the surface again, I look at the daylight its wonder that it ever
  should be.

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us
  the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all
  our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine
  fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the
  soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live,
  far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air. I am convinced
  that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women
  are a species of fish.

But sometimes the soul does come up, shoots like a kittiwake into the
  light, with ecstasy, after having preyed on the submarine depths. It
  is our mortal destiny, I suppose, to prey upon the ghastly subaqueous
  life of our fellow-men, in the submarine jungle of mankind. But our
  immortal destiny is to escape, once we have swallowed our swimmy catch,
  up again into the bright ether, bursting out from the surface of Old
  Ocean into real light. Then one realizes one's eternal nature.

When I hear Mrs Bolton talk, I feel myself plunging down, down, to
  the depths where the fish of human secrets wriggle and swim. Carnal
  appetite makes one seize a beakful of prey: then up, up again, out of
  the dense into the ethereal, from the wet into the dry. To you I can
  tell the whole process. But with Mrs Bolton I only feel the downward
  plunge, down, horribly, among the sea-weeds and the pallid monsters
  of the very bottom.

I am afraid we are going to lose our game-keeper. The scandal of the
  truant wife, instead of dying down, has reverberated to greater and
  greater dimensions. He is accused of all unspeakable things and curiously
  enough, the woman has managed to get the bulk of the colliers' wives
  behind her, gruesome fish, and the village is putrescent with talk.

I hear this Bertha Coutts besieges Mellors in his mother's house, having
  ransacked the cottage and the hut. She seized one day upon her own daughter,
  as that chip of the female block was returning from school; but the
  little one, instead of kissing the loving mother's hand, bit it firmly,
  and so received from the other hand a smack in the face which sent her
  reeling into the gutter: whence she was rescued by an indignant and
  harassed grandmother.

The woman has blown off an amazing quantity of poison-gas. She has
  aired in detail all those incidents of her conjugal life which are usually
  buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence, between married
  couples. Having chosen to exhume them, after ten years of burial, she
  has a weird array. I hear these details from Linley and the doctor:
  the latter being amused. Of course there is really nothing in it. Humanity
  has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if
  a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, `in the Italian
  way', well that is a matter of taste. But I had hardly expected our
  game-keeper to be up to so many tricks. No doubt Bertha Coutts herself
  first put him up to them. In any case, it is a matter of their own personal
  squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else.

However, everybody listens: as I do myself. A dozen years ago, common
  decency would have hushed the thing. But common decency no longer exists,
  and the colliers' wives are all up in arms and unabashed in voice. One
  would think every child in Tevershall, for the last fifty years, had
  been an immaculate conception, and every one of our nonconformist females
  was a shining Joan of Arc. That our estimable game-keeper should have
  about him a touch of Rabelais seems to make him more monstrous and shocking
  than a murderer like Crippen. Yet these people in Tevershall are a loose
  lot, if one is to believe all accounts.

The trouble is, however, the execrable Bertha Coutts has not confined
  herself to her own experiences and sufferings. She has discovered, at
  the top of her voice, that her husband has been `keeping' women down
  at the cottage, and has made a few random shots at naming the women.
  This has brought a few decent names trailing through the mud, and the
  thing has gone quite considerably too far. An injunction has been taken
  out against the woman.

I have had to interview Mellors about the business, as it was impossible
  to keep the woman away from the wood. He goes about as usual, with his
  Miller-of-the-Dee air, I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody care for
  me! Nevertheless, I shrewdly suspect he feels like a dog with a tin
  can tied to its tail: though he makes a very good show of pretending
  the tin can isn't there. But I heard that in the village the women call
  away their children if he is passing, as if he were the Marquis de Sade
  in person. He goes on with a certain impudence, but I am afraid the
  tin can is firmly tied to his tail, and that inwardly he repeats, like
  Don Rodrigo in the Spanish ballad: `Ah, now it bites me where I most
  have sinned!'

I asked him if he thought he would be able to attend to his duty in
  the wood, and he said he did not think he had neglected it. I told him
  it was a nuisance to have the woman trespassing: to which he replied
  that he had no power to arrest her. Then I hinted at the scandal and
  its unpleasant course. `Ay,' he said. `folks should do their own fuckin',
  then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another
  man's.'

He said it with some bitterness, and no doubt it contains the real
  germ of truth. The mode of putting it, however, is neither delicate
  nor respectful. I hinted as much, and then I heard the tin can rattle
  again. `It's not for a man the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit
  me for havin' a cod atween my legs.'

These things, said indiscriminately to all and sundry, of course do
  not help him at all, and the rector, and Finley, and Burroughs all think
  it would be as well if the man left the place.

I asked him fit was true that he entertained ladies down at the cottage,
  and all he said was: `Why, what's that to you, Sir Clifford?' I told
  him I intended to have decency observed on my estate, to which he replied:
  `Then you mun button the mouths o' a' th' women.'---When I pressed him
  about his manner of life at the cottage, he said: `Surely you might
  ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat
  there.' As a matter of fact, for an example of impertinence he'd be
  hard to beat.

I asked him fit would be easy for him to find another job. He said:
  `If you're hintin' that you'd like to shunt me out of this job, it'd
  be easy as wink.' So he made no trouble at all about leaving at the
  end of next week, and apparently is willing to initiate a young fellow,
  Joe Chambers, into as many mysteries of the craft as possible. I told
  him I would give him a month's wages extra, when he left. He said he'd
  rather I kept my money, as I'd no occasion to ease my conscience. I
  asked him what he meant, and he said: `You don't owe me nothing extra,
  Sir Clifford, so don't pay me nothing extra. If you think you see my
  shirt hanging out, just tell me.'

Well, there is the end of it for the time being. The woman has gone
  away: we don't know where to: but she is liable to arrest if she shows
  her face in Tevershall. And I heard she is mortally afraid of gaol,
  because she merits it so well. Mellors will depart on Saturday week,
  and the place will soon become normal again.

Meanwhile, my dear Connie, if you would enjoy to stay in Venice or
  in Switzerland till the beginning of August, I should be glad to think
  you were out of all this buzz of nastiness, which will have died quite
  away by the end of the month.

So you see, we arc deep-sea monsters, and when the lobster walks on
  mud, he stirs it up for everybody. We must perforce take it philosophically.

The irritation, and the lack of any sympathy in any direction, of Clifford's
  letter, had a bad effect on Connie. But she understood it better when
  she received the following from Mellors:

  The cat is out of the bag, along with various other pussies. You have
  heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up
  her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled
  a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did
  not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt
  photograph. She noticed the glass and the back-board in the square bedroom.
  Unfortunately, on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches,
  and the initials, several times repeated: C. S. R. This, however, afforded
  no clue until she broke into the hut, and found one of your books, an
  autobiography of the actress Judith, with your name, Constance Stewart
  Reid, on the front page. After this, for some days she went round loudly
  saying that my paramour was no less a person than Lady Chatterley herself.
  The news came at last to the rector, Mr Burroughs, and to Sir Clifford.
  They then proceeded to take legal steps against my liege lady, who for
  her part disappeared, having always had a mortal fear of the police.
  

  Sir Clifford asked to see me, so I went to him. He talked around things
  and seemed annoyed with me. Then he asked if I knew that even her ladyship's
  name had been mentioned. I said I never listened to scandal, and was
  surprised to hear this bit from Sir Clifford himself. He said, of course
  it was a great insult, and I told him there was Queen Mary on a calendar
  in the scullery, no doubt because Her Majesty formed part of my harem.
  But he didn't appreciate the sarcasm. He as good as told me I was a
  disreputable character also walked about with my breeches' buttons undone,
  and I as good as told him he'd nothing to unbutton anyhow, so he gave
  me the sack, and I leave on Saturday week, and the place thereof shall
  know me no more.

I shall go to London, and my old landlady, Mrs Inger, 17 Coburg Square,
  will either give me a room or will find one for me.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and
  her name's Bertha---

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this.
  He might have said some few words of consolation or reassurance. But
  she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford.
  She resented that too. He need riot be so falsely chivalrous. She wished
  he had said to Clifford: `Yes, she is my lover and my mistress and I
  am proud of it!' But his courage wouldn't carry him so far.

  So her name was coupled with his in Tevershall! It was a mess. But that
  would soon die down.

She was angry, with the complicated and confused anger that made her
  inert. She did not know what to do nor what to say, so she said and
  did nothing. She went on at Venice just the same, rowing out in the
  gondola with Duncan Forbes, bathing, letting the days slip by. Duncan,
  who had been rather depressingly in love with her ten years ago, was
  in love with her again. But she said to him: `I only want one thing
  of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.'

So Duncan left her alone: really quite pleased to be able to. All the
  same, he offered her a soft stream of a queer, inverted sort of love.
  He wanted to be with her.

`Have you ever thought,' he said to her one day, `how very little people
  are connected with one another. Look at Daniele! He is handsome as a
  son of the sun. But see how alone he looks in his handsomeness. Yet
  I bet he has a wife and family, and couldn't possibly go away from them.'

`Ask him,' said Connie.

Duncan did so. Daniele said he was married, and had two children, both
  male, aged seven and nine. But he betrayed no emotion over the fact.

`Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that
  look of being alone in the universe,' said Connie. `The others have
  a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass, like Giovanni.' `And,'
  she thought to herself, `like you, Duncan.'

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1. Ebooks list page : 86
2. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 10
3. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 14
4. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 6
5. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 1
6. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 11
7. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 2
8. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 9
9. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 3
10. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 8
11. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 7
12. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 5
13. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 4
14. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 13
15. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 16
16. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER: CHAPTER 19