Connie would come home from the blazing light of the lagoon in a kind of stupor, to find 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 naturalibu; or one should say, in impuris naturalibus. She had broken a window and got in that way. Unable to evict the somewhat manhandled 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 the 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 well-being with vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she had 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. Because it seems Mr. Mellors was trying for a divorce. 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 Dan’s at Beggarlee, swearing and carrying on, saying she was his legal wife, and that he’d been having women at the cottage, because she’d found a scent-bottle in his drawer, and gold-tipped cigarette-ends on the ashheap, and I don’t know what
