“As you like.”
Mellors slung into his coat, looked at Connie, saluted, and was gone. Connie, furious, went upstairs.
At lunch she could not contain her feeling.
“Why are you so abominably inconsiderate, Clifford?” she said to him.
“Of whom?”
“Of the keeper! If that is what you call the ruling classes, I’m sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“A man who’s been ill, and isn’t strong! My word, if I were the serving classes, I’d let you wait for service. I’d let you whistle.”
“I quite believe it.”
“If he’d been sitting in a chair with paralysed legs, and behaved as you behaved, what would you have done for him?”
“My dear evangelist, this confusing of persons and personalities is in bad taste.”
“And your nasty, sterile want of common sympathy is in the worst taste imaginable. Noblesse Oblige! You and your ruling class!”
“And to what should it oblige me? To have a lot of unnecessary emotions about my gamekeeper? I refuse. I leave it all to my evangelist.”
“As if he weren’t a man as much as you are, my word!”
“My gamekeeper to boot, and I pay him two pounds a week and give him a house.”
“Pay him! What do you think you pay for, with two pounds a week and a house?”
“His services.”
“Bah! I would tell you to keep your two pounds a week and your house.”
“Probably he would like to: but can’t afford the luxury!”
“You, and rule!” she said. “You don’t rule, don’t flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why you’re dried up! You only bully with your money, like any Jew or any Schieber!”
“You are very elegant in your speech, Lady Chatterley!”
“I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why my father is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!”
He reached and rang the bell for Mrs. Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.
She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: “Him and buying people! Well, he doesn’t buy me, and therefore there’s no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They’ve got about as much feeling as celluloid has.”
She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn’t want to hate him. She didn’t want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and india rubbery where other people were concerned.
She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinnertime. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer. He was reading a French book.
“Have you ever read Proust?” he asked her.
“I’ve tried, but he bores me.”
“He’s really very extraordinary.”
“Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I’m tired of self-important mentalities.”
“Would you prefer self-important animalities?”
“Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn’t self-important.”
“Well, I like Proust’s subtlety and his well-bred anarchy.”
“It makes you very dead, really.”
“There speaks my evangelical little wife.”
They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn’t help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton’s cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He too was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him.
She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half-past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs. Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.
Connie returned to her room, threw her pyjamas on the tossed bed, put on a thin night dress and over that a woolen day dress, put on rubber tennis shoes, and then a light coat. And she was ready. If she met anybody, she was just going out for a few minutes. And in the morning, when she came in again, she would just have been for a little walk in the dew, as she fairly often did before breakfast. For the rest, the only danger was that someone should go into her room during the night. But that was most unlikely: not one chance in a hundred.
Betts had not yet locked up. He fastened up the house at ten o’clock, and unfastened it again at seven in the morning. She slipped out silently and unseen. There was a half-moon shining, enough to make a little light in the world, not enough to show her up in her dark-grey coat. She walked quickly across the park, not really in the thrill of the assignation, but with a certain anger and rebellion burning in her heart. It was not the right sort of heart to take to a love-meeting. But à la guerre comme à la guerre!
XIV
When she got near the park gate, she heard the click of the latch. He was there, then, in the darkness of the wood, and had seen her!
“You are good and early,” he said out of the dark. “Was everything all right?”
“Perfectly easy.”
He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open
