“Thirty-nine.”
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
“As much as that! Well, you’ve another good twenty years, by the look of you. Oh, gamekeeper or not, you’re a good cock. I can see that with one eye shut. Not like that blasted Clifford! A lily-livered hound with never a fuck in him, never had. I like you, my boy. I’ll bet you’ve a good cod on you; oh, you’re a bantam, I can see that. You’re a fighter. Gamekeeper! Ha-ha, by crikey, I wouldn’t trust my game to you! But look here, seriously, what are we going to do about it? The world’s full of blasted old women.”
Seriously, they didn’t do anything about it, except establish the old freemasonry of male sensuality between them.
“And look here, my boy, if ever I can do anything for you, you can rely on me. Gamekeeper! Christ, but it’s rich! I like it! Oh, I like it! Shows the girl’s got spunk. What? After all, you know, she has her own income, moderate, moderate, but above starvation. And I’ll leave her what I’ve got. By God, I will. She deserves it, for showing spunk, in a world of old women. I’ve been struggling to get myself clear of the skirts of old women for seventy years, and haven’t managed it yet. But you’re the man, I can see that.”
“I’m glad you think so. They usually tell me, in a sideways fashion, that I’m the monkey.”
“Oh, they would! My dear fellow, what could you be but a monkey, to all the old women.”
They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day.
The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet place.
“It’s a very great pity it’s such an ugly situation all round,” said Hilda.
“I had a lot o’ fun out of it,” said he.
“I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children.”
“The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark,” said he.
“I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable.”
“But then you don’t have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?” said he.
“If you’d been in her own class.”
“Or if I’d been in a cage at the Zoo.”
There was silence.
“I think,” said Hilda, “it will be best if she names quite another man as corespondent, and you stay out of it altogether.”
“But I thought I’d put my foot right in.”
“I mean, in the divorce proceeding.”
He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him.
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as corespondent, so that your name need not appear,” said Hilda.
“You mean a man?”
“Of course!”
“But she’s got no other?”
He looked in wonder at Connie.
“No, no!” she said hastily. “Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love.”
“Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he’s had nothing out of you?”
“Some men are chivalrous and don’t only count what they get out of a woman,” said Hilda.
“One for me, eh? But who’s the johnny?”
“A friend whom we’ve known since we were children in Scotland, an artist.”
“Duncan Forbes!” he said at once, for Connie had talked of him. “And how would you shift the blame on to him?”
“They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment.”
“Seems to me a lot of fuss for nothing,” he said.
“What else do you suggest?” said Hilda. “If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with.”
“All that!” he said grimly.
There was a long silence.
“We could go right away,” he said.
“There is no right away for Connie,” said Hilda. “Clifford is too well known.”
Again the silence of pure frustration.
“The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?”
He was silent for a long time.
“How are you going about it for us?” he said.
“We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as corespondent: then we must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.”
“Sounds like a lunatic asylum.”
“Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.”
“What is worse?”
“Criminals, I suppose.”
“Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,” he said grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.
“Well!” he said at last. “I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”
He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.
“Ma lass!” he said. “The world’s goin’ to put salt on thy tail.”
“Not if we don’t let it,” she said.
She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.
Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent gamekeeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark-skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane on the point of his art; it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.
They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the gamekeeper would say. He knew already Connie’s and Hilda’s opinions.
“It is like
