There was a letter from Hilda on the breakfast tray. "Father is going
to London this week, and I shall call for you on Thursday week, June
17th. You must be ready so that we can go at once. I don't want to
waste time at Wragby, it's an awful place. I shall probably stay
the night at Retford with the Colemans, so I should be with you for
lunch Thursday. Then we could start at teatime, and sleep perhaps in
Grantham. It is no use our spending an evening with Clifford. If he
hates your going, it would be no pleasure to him."
So! She was being pushed round on the chessboard again.
Clifford hated her going, but it was only because he didn't feel _safe_
in her absence. Her presence, for some reason, made him feel safe, and
free to do the things he was occupied with. He was a great deal at the
pits, and wrestling in spirit with the almost hopeless problems of
getting out his coal in the most economical fashion and then selling
it when he'd got it out. He knew he ought to find some way of _using_
it, or converting it, so that he needn't sell it, or needn't have the
chagrin of failing to sell it. But if he made electric power, could he
sell that or use it? And to convert into oil was as yet too costly and
too elaborate. To keep industry alive there must be more industry, like
a madness.
It was a madness, and it required a madman to succeed in it. Well, he
was a little mad. Connie thought so. His very intensity and acumen in
the affairs of the pits seemed like a manifestation of madness to her,
his very inspirations were the inspirations of insanity.
He talked to her of all his serious schemes, and she listened in a kind
of wonder, and let him talk. Then the flow ceased, and he turned on the
loud-speaker, and became a blank, while apparently his schemes coiled
on inside him like a kind of dream.
And every night now he played pontoon, that game of the Tommies, with
Mrs. Bolton, gambling with sixpences. And again, in the gambling he
was gone in a kind of unconsciousness, or blank intoxication, or
intoxication of blankness, whatever it was. Connie could not bear to
see him. But when she had gone to bed, he and Mrs. Bolton would gamble
on till two and three in the morning, safely, and with strange lust.
Mrs. Bolton was caught in the lust as much as Clifford: the more so, as
she nearly always lost.
She told Connie one day: "I lost twenty-three shillings to Sir Clifford
last night."
"And did he take the money from you?" asked Connie aghast.
"Why, of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!"
Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The
upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs. Bolton's wages a hundred a year,
and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile it seemed to Connie, Clifford
was really going deader.
She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.
"Seventeenth!" he said. "And when will you be back?"
"By the twentieth of July at the latest."
"Yes! the twentieth of July."
Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child,
but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.
"You won't let me down, now, will you?" he said.
"How?"
"While you're away. I mean, you're sure to come back?"
"I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back."
"Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!"
He looked at her so strangely.
Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to
go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home
pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.
She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him
altogether, waiting till the time, herself, himself, should be ripe.
She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.
"And then when I come back," she said, "I can tell Clifford I must
leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is
you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia.
Shall we?"
She was quite thrilled by her plan.
"You've never been to the Colonies, have you?" he asked her.
"No! Have you?"
"I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt."
"Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?"
"We might!" he said slowly.
"Or don't you want to?" she asked.
"I don't care. I don't much care what I do."
"Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about
six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough,
isn't it?"
"It's riches to me."
"Oh, how lovely it will be!"
"But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to
have complications."
There was plenty to think about.
Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and
there was a thunderstorm.
"And weren't you happy when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a
gentleman?"
"Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel."
"Did you love him?"
"Yes! I loved him."
"And did he love you?"
"Yes! In a way, he loved me."
"Tell me about him."
"What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army.
And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was
a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a
passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his
spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never
regret it."
"And did you mind very much when he died?"
"I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of
me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death.
All things do, as far as that goes."
She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being
in a little ark in the Flood.
"You seem to have such a lot _behind_ you," she said.
"Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am,
pegging on, and in for more trouble."
She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm.
"And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel
was dead?"
"No! They were a mingy lot." He laughed suddenly. "The Colonel used
to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful
thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea
would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of lady-like snipe
ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their
boot-laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the
right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till
their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top
of everything. Prigs! A generation of lady-like prigs with half a ball
each."
Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.
"He hated them!"
"No," said he. "He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a
difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as
priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind,
to go that way."
"The common people too, the working people?"
"All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motorcars and cinemas and
aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation
breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts
and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of
bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the
mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their
real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making
mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike.
The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for
every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but
machine-fucking!--It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's
cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of
mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines."
He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even
then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the
wood. It made him feel so alone.
"But won't it ever come to an end?" she said.
"Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man
is killed, and they're _all_ tame: white, black, yellow, all colours
of tame ones: then they'll _all_ be insane. Because the root of sanity
is in the balls. Then they'll all be _insane_, and they'll make their
grand _auto da fé_. You know _auto da fé_ means _act of faith_? Ay
well, they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer
one another up."
"You mean kill one another?"
"I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years'
time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not
be ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out." The thunder was
rolling further away.
"How nice!" she said.
"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species
and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up,
it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way,
with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and
workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last
bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in
algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human
species! Good-bye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves
a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When
savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on
Tevershall pit-bank! _te deum laudamus!_"
Connie laughed, but not very happily.
"Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists," she said.
"You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end."
"So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would."
"Then why are you so bitter?"
"I'm not! If my cock gives its last crow, I don't mind."
"But if you have a child?" she said.
He dropped his head.
"Why," he said at last. "It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do,
to bring a child into this world."
"No! Don't say it! Don't say it!" she pleaded. "I think I'm going to
have one. Say you'll be pleased." She laid her hand on his.
"I'm pleased for you to be pleased," he said. "But for me it seems a
ghastly treachery to the unborn creature."
"Ah no!" she said, shocked. "Then you _can't_ ever really want me! You
_can't_ want me, if you feel that!"
Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the
threshing of the rain.
"It's not quite true!" she whispered. "It's not quite true! There's
another truth." She felt he was bitter now partly because she was
leaving him, deliberately going away to Venice. And this half pleased
her.
She pulled open his clothing and uncovered his belly, and kissed his
navel. Then she laid her cheek on his belly, and pressed her arm round
his warm, silent loins. They were alone in the flood.
"Tell me you want a child, in hope!" she murmured, pressing her face
against his belly. "Tell me you do!"
"Why!" he said at last: and she felt the curious quiver of changing
consciousness and relaxation going through his body. "Why, I've thought
sometimes if one but tried, here among th' colliers even! They workin'
bad now, an' not earnin' much. If a man could say to 'em: Dunna think
o' nowt but th' money. When it comes ter _wants_, we want but little.
Let's not live for money."
She softly rubbed her cheek on his belly, and gathered his balls in her
hand. The penis stirred softly, with strange life, but did not rise up.
The rain beat bruisingly outside.
"Let's live for summat else. Let's not live ter make money, neither for
us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we're forced to. We're forced to
make a bit for us-selves, an' a fair lot for th' bosses. Let's stop it!
Bit by bit, let's stop it. We needn't rant an' rave. Bit by bit, let's
drop the whole industrial life, an' go back. The least little bit o'
money 'll do. For everybody, me an' you, bosses an' masters, even th'
king. The least little bit o' money 'll really do. Just make up your
mind to it, an' you've got out o' th' mess." He paused, then went on:
"An' I'd tell 'em: Look! Look at Joe! He moves lovely! Look how he
moves, alive and aware. He's beautiful! An' look at Jonah! He's
clumsy, he's ugly, because he's niver willin' to rouse himself. I'd
tell 'em: Look! look at yourselves! one shoulder higher than t'other,
legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves, wi'
the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take
yer clothes off an' look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an'
beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead. So I'd tell 'em. An' I'd get
my men to wear different clothes: 'appen close red trousers, bright
red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs,
that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again,
to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once
the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and
showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the woman 'ud begin
to be women. It's because th' men _aren't_ men, that th' women have
to be.--An' in time pull down Tevershall and build a few beautiful
buildings, that would hold us all. An' clean the country up again. An'
not have many children, because the world is overcrowded.
"But I wouldn't preach to the men: only strip 'em an' say: Look at
yourselves! That's workin' for money!--Hark at yourselves! That's
working for money. You've been working for money! Look at Tevershall!
It's horrible. That's because it was built while you was working for
money. Look at your girls! They don't care about you, you don't care
about them. It's because you've spent your time working an' caring for
money. You can't talk nor move nor live, you can't properly be with a
woman. You're not alive. Look at yourselves!"
There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading
in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had
gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and
a little icy.
"You've got four kinds of hair," she said to him. "On your chest it's
nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache
is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a
little bush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!"
He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on
his groin.
"Ay! There's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the
maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?"
She looked up at him.
"Oh, I do, terribly!" she said.
"Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by
its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough.
The moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back
and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made
foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside
out, and nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn,
I forget it all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people
these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects,
and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the
machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch
absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can,
I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one
to live, which I rather doubt."
The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly
came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of
departing storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he
was really talking to himself, not to her. Despair seemed to come down
on him completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She
knew her leaving him, which he had only just realised inside himself,
had plunged him back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a
steel curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush
away. She got up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then
her dress and underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed keen
animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured
in the greenish light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran
out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy
rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the
eurythmic dance-movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It
was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain
beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming
belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the
full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him,
repeating a wild obeisance.
He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped
out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting
rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie,
her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw
him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast,
with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the
path, the wet boughs whipping her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the
round wet head, the wet back leaning forward in flight, the rounded
buttocks twinkling: a wonderful cowering female nakedness in flight.
She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his
naked arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and
straightened herself, and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up
against his body. He pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap
of soft, chilled female flesh that became quickly warm as flame, in
contact. The rain streamed on them till they smoked. He gathered her
lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand and pressed them in towards
him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the rain. Then suddenly he
tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the roaring silence
of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and
finished, like an animal.
He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.
"Come in," he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran
straight and swift: he didn't like the rain. But she came slower,
gathering forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps
and watching him fleeting away from her.
When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already
started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose
and fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed
ruddy and her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless,
with a small wet head and full, trickling, naive haunches, she looked
another creature.
He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child.
Then he rubbed himself, having shut the door of the hut. The fire was
blazing up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and
rubbed her wet hair.
"We're drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!"
he said.
She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.
"No!" she said, her eyes wide. "It's not a towel, it's a sheet."
And she went on busily rubbing her head, while he busily rubbed his.
Still panting with their exertions, each wrapped in an army blanket,
but the front of the body open to the fire, they sat on a log side
by side before the blaze, to get quiet. Connie hated the feel of the
blanket against her skin. But now the sheet was all wet.
She dropped her blanket and kneeled on the clay hearth, holding her
head to the fire, and shaking her hair to dry it. He watched the
beautiful curving drop of her haunches. That fascinated him today. How
it sloped with a rich downslope to the heavy roundness of her buttocks!
And in between, folded in the secret warmth, the secret entrances!
He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves
and the globe-fulness.
"Tha's got such a nice tail on thee," he said, in the throaty caressive
dialect. "Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest,
nicest woman's arse as is! An' ivry bit of it is woman, woman sure as
nuts. Tha'rt not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are
ter! Tha's got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in
'is guts. It's a bottom as could hold the world up, it is."
All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it
seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And
his fingertips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after
time, with a soft little brush of fire.
"An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as
couldna shit nor piss."
Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he
went on unmoved.
"Tha'rt real, tha art! Tha'rt real, even a bit of a bitch. Here tha
shits an' here tha pisses: an' I lay my hand on 'em both an' like thee
for it. I like thee for it. Tha's got a proper, woman's arse, proud of
itself. It's none ashamed of itself, this isna."
He laid his hand close and firm over her secret places, in a kind of
close greeting.
"I like it," he said. "I like it! An' if I only lived ten minutes, an'
stroked thy arse an' got to know it, I should reckon I'd lived _one_
life, sees ter! Industrial system or not! Here's one o' my lifetimes."
She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. "Kiss me!"
she whispered.
And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their
minds, and at last she was sad.
She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her
ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon
them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body
in the fireglow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to
a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and
took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on
to her.
"Flowers stops out of doors all weathers," he said. "They have no
houses."
"Not even a hut!" she murmured.
With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine
brown fleece of the mount of Venus.
"There!" he said. "There's forget-me-nots in the right place!"
She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown
maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.
"Doesn't it look pretty!" she said.
"Pretty as life," he replied.
And he stuck a pink campion bud among the hair.
"There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the
bulrushes."
"You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?" she asked wistfully,
looking up into his face.
But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite
blank.
"You do as you wish," he said.
And he spoke in good English.
"But I won't go if you don't wish it," she said, clinging to him.
There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire.
The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he
said nothing.
"Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford.
I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to--" she resumed.
"To let them think a few lies," he said.
"Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?"
"I don't care what they think."
"I do! I don't want them handling me with their unpleasant cold minds,
not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm
finally gone."
He was silent.
"But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?"
"Oh, I must come back," she said: and there was silence.
"And would you have a child in Wragby?" he asked.
She closed her arm round his neck.
"If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to," she said.
"Take you where to?"
"Anywhere! away! But right away from Wragby."
"When?"
"Why, when I come back."
"But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're
once gone?" he said.
"Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully.
Besides, I come back to you, really."
"To your husband's gamekeeper?"
"I don't see that that matters," she said.
"No?" He mused a while. "And when would you think of going away again,
then; finally? When exactly?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'd come back from Venice. And then we'd prepare
everything."
"How prepare?"
"Oh, I'd tell Clifford. I'd have to tell him."
"Would you!"
He remained silent. She put her arms fast round his neck.
"Don't make it difficult for me," she pleaded.
"Make what difficult?"
"For me to go to Venice and arrange things."
A little smile, half a grin, flickered on his face.
"I don't make it difficult," he said. "I only want to find out just
what you are after. But you don't really know yourself. You want to
take time: get away and look at it. I don't blame you. I think you're
wise. You may prefer to stay mistress of Wragby. I don't blame you.
I've no Wragbys to offer. In fact, you know what you'll get out of me.
No, no, I think you're right! I really do! And I'm not keen on coming
to live on you, being kept by you. There's that too."
She felt, somehow, as if he were giving her tit for tat.
"But you want me, don't you?" she asked.
"Do you want me?"
"You know I do. _That's_ evident."
"Quite! And _when_ do you want me?"
"You know we can arrange it all when I come back. Now I'm out of breath
with you. I must get calm and clear."
"Quite! Get calm and clear!"
She was a little offended.
"But you trust me, don't you?" she said.
"Oh, absolutely!"
She heard the mockery in his tone.
"Tell me, then," she said flatly; "do you think it would be better if I
_don't_ go to Venice?"
"I'm sure it's better if you _do_ go to Venice," he replied in the
cool, slightly mocking voice.
"You know it's next Thursday?" she said.
"Yes!"
She now began to muse. At last she said:
"And we _shall_ know better where we are when I come back, shan't we?"
"Oh, surely!"
The curious gulf of silence between them!
"I've been to the lawyer about my divorce," he said, a little
constrainedly.
She gave a slight shudder.
"Have you!" she said. "And what did he say?"
"He said I ought to have done it before; that may be a difficulty. But
since I was in the army, he thinks it will go through all right. If
only it doesn't bring _her_ down on my head!"
"Will she have to know?"
"Yes! she is served with a notice: so is the man she lives with, the
co-respondent."
"Isn't it hateful, all the performances! I suppose I'd have to go
through it with Clifford."
There was a silence.
"And of course," he said, "I have to live an exemplary life for the
next six or eight months. So if you go to Venice, there's temptation
removed for a week or two, at least."
"Am I temptation!" she said, stroking his face. "I'm so glad I'm
temptation to you! Don't let's think about it! You frighten me when you
start thinking: you roll me out flat. Don't let's think about it. We
can think so much when we are apart. That's the whole point! I've been
thinking, I _must_ come to you for another night before I go. I must
come once more to the cottage. Shall I come on Thursday night?"
"Isn't that when your sister will be there?"
"Yes! But she said we would start at teatime. So we could start at
teatime. But she could sleep somewhere else and I could sleep with you."
"But then she'd have to know."
"Oh, I shall tell her. I've more or less told her already. I must talk
it all over with Hilda. She's a great help, so sensible."
He was thinking of her plan.
"So you'd start off from Wragby at teatime, as if you were going to
London? Which way were you going?"
"By Nottingham and Grantham."
"And then your sister would drop you somewhere and you'd walk or drive
back here? Sounds very risky, to me."
"Does it? Well then, Hilda could bring me back. She could sleep at
Mansfield, and bring me back here in the evening, and fetch me again in
the morning. It's quite easy."
"And the people who see you?"
"I'll wear goggles and a veil."
He pondered for some time.
"Well," he said. "You please yourself, as usual."
"But wouldn't it please you?"
"Oh, yes! It'd please me all right," he said a little grimly. "I might
as well smite while the iron's hot."
"Do you know what I thought?" she said suddenly. "It suddenly came to
me. You are the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle'!"
"Ay! And you? Are you the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar?"
"Yes!" she said. "Yes! You're Sir Pestle and I'm Lady Mortar."
"All right, then I'm knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady
Jane."
"Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I'm my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must
have flowers too. Yes!"
She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his
penis.
"There!" she said. "Charming! Charming! Sir John!"
And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast.
"And you won't forget me _there_, will you?" she kissed him on the
breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple,
kissing him again.
"Make a calendar of me!" he said. He laughed, and the flowers shook
from his breast.
"Wait a bit!" he said.
He rose, and opened the door of the hut. Flossie, lying in the porch,
got up and looked at him.
"Ay, it's me!" he said.
The rain had ceased. There was a wet, heavy, perfumed stillness.
Evening was approaching.
He went out and down the little path in the opposite direction from the
riding. Connie watched his thin, white figure, and it looked to her
like a ghost, an apparition moving away from her.
When she could see it no more, her heart sank. She stood in the door
of the hut, with a blanket round her, looking into the drenched,
motionless silence.
But he was coming back, trotting strangely, and carrying flowers. She
was a little afraid of him, as if he were not quite human. And when he
came near, his eyes looked into hers, but she could not understand the
meaning.
He had brought columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts
and honeysuckle in small bud. He fastened fluffy young oak-sprays round
her breasts, sticking in tufts of bluebells and campion: and in her
navel he poised a pink campion flower, and in her maiden-hair were
forget-me-nots and woodruff.
"That's you in all your glory!" he said. "Lady Jane, at her wedding
with John Thomas."
And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of
creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth
in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And
she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling
under his nose.
"This is John Thomas marryin' Lady Jane," he said. "An' we mun let
Constance an' Oliver go their ways. Maybe--"
He spread out his hand with a gesture, and then he sneezed, sneezing
away the flowers from his nose and his navel. He sneezed again.
"Maybe what?" she said, waiting for him to go on.
He looked at her a little bewildered.
"Eh?" he said.
"Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say," she insisted.
"Ay, what _was_ I going to say?"
He had forgotten. And it was one of the disappointments of her life,
that he never finished.
A yellow ray of sun shone over the trees.
"Sun!" he said. "And time you went. Time, my lady, time! What's that as
flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!"
He reached for his shirt.
"Say good night! to John Thomas," he said, looking down at his penis.
"He's safe in the arms of creeping-jenny! Not much burning pestle about
him just now."
And he put his flannel shirt over his head.
"A man's most dangerous moment," he said, when his head had emerged,
"is when he's getting into his shirt. Then he puts his head in a
bag. That's why I prefer those American shirts, that you put on like
a jacket." She still stood watching him. He stepped into his short
drawers, and buttoned them round the waist.
"Look at Jane!" he said. "In all her blossoms! Who'll put blossoms on
you next year, Jinny? Me, or somebody else? 'Good-bye my bluebell,
farewell to you!' I hate that song, it's early war days." He had sat
down, and was pulling on his stockings. She still stood unmoving. He
laid his hand on the slope of her buttocks. "Pretty little Lady Jane!"
he said. "Perhaps in Venice you'll find a man who'll put jasmine in
your maiden-hair, and a pomegranate flower in your navel. Poor little
Lady Jane!"
"Don't say those things!" she said. "You only say them to hurt me."
He dropped his head. Then he said, in dialect:
"Ay, maybe I do, maybe I do! Well then, I'll say nowt, an' ha' done
wi't. But tha mun dress thysen, an' go back to thy stately homes of
England, how beautiful they stand. Time's up! Time's up for Sir John,
an' for little Lady Jane! Put thy shimmy on, Lady Chatterley! Tha
might be anybody, standin' there be-out even a shimmy, an' a few rags
o' flowers. There then, there then, I'll undress thee, tha bob-tailed
young throstle." And he took the leaves from her hair, kissing her damp
hair, and the flowers from her breasts, and kissed her breasts, and
kissed her navel, and kissed her maiden-hair, where he left the flowers
threaded. "They mun stop while they will," he said. "So! There tha'rt
bare again, nowt but a bare-arsed lass an' a bit of a Lady Jane! Now
put thy shimmy on, for tha mun go, or else Lady Chatterley's going to
be late for dinner, an' where 'ave yer been to my pretty maid!"
She never knew how to answer him when he was in this condition of
the vernacular. So she dressed herself and prepared to go a little
ignominiously home to Wragby. Or so she felt it: a little ignominiously
home.
He would accompany her to the broad riding. His young pheasants were
all right under the shelter.
When he and she came out on to the riding, there was Mrs. Bolton
faltering palely towards them.
"Oh, my Lady, we wondered if anything had happened!"
"No! Nothing has happened."
Mrs. Bolton looked into the man's face, that was smooth and new-looking
with love. She met his half-laughing, half-mocking eyes. He always
laughed at mischance. But he looked at her kindly.
"Evening, Mrs. Bolton! Your Ladyship will be all right now, so I can
leave you. Good night to your ladyship! Good night, Mrs. Bolton!"
He saluted and turned away.