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  Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly laughed to herself.

  'Well then we're all plucked apples,' said Hammond, rather acidly and petulantly.

  'So let's make cider of ourselves,' said Charlie.

  'But what do you think of Bolshevism?' put in the brown Berry, as if everything had led up to it.

  'Bravo!' roared Charlie. 'What do you think of Bolshevism?'

  'Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!' said Dukes.

  'I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question,' said Hammond, shaking his head seriously.

  'Bolshevism, it seems to me,' said Charlie, 'is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.

  'Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate…hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.'

  'Absolutely!' said Tommy. 'But also, it seems to me a perfect description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It's the factory-owner's ideal in a nut-shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these Midlands, if it isn't plainly written up…but it's all part of the life of the mind, it's a logical development.'

  'I deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the premisses,' said Hammond.

  'My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure mind…exclusively.'

  'At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,' said Charlie.

  'Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest mechanical equipment.

  'But this thing can't go on…this hate business. There must be a reaction…' said Hammond.

  'Well, we've been waiting for years…we wait longer. Hate's a growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula, like a machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the roost turns into pure hate. We're all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.'

  'But there are many other ways,' said Hammond, 'than the Soviet way. The Bolshevists aren't really intelligent.'

  'Of course not. But sometimes it's intelligent to be half-witted: if you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted. So I even consider our far-famed mental life half-witted. We're all as cold as cretins, we're all as passionless as idiots. We're all of us Bolshevists, only we give it another name. We think we're gods…men like gods! It's just the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist…for they are the same thing: they're both too good to be true.'

  Out of the disapproving silence came Berry's anxious question:

  'You do believe in love then, Tommy, don't you?'

  'You lovely lad!' said Tommy. 'No, my cherub, nine times out of ten, no! Love's another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property, make-a-success-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I don't believe in it at all!'

  'But you do believe in something?'

  'Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ''shit!'' in front of a lady.'

  'Well, you've got them all,' said Berry.

  Tommy Dukes roared with laughter. 'You angel boy! If only I had! If only I had! No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say ''shit!'' in front of my mother or my aunt…they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a ''mental-lifer''. It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do?—to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis…he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it.'

  'There are nice women in the world,' said Connie, lifting her head up and speaking at last.

  The men resented it…she should have pretended to hear nothing. They hated her admitting she had attended so closely to such talk.

  'My God! '' If they be not nice to me What care i how nice they be?''

  'No, it's hopeless! I just simply can't vibrate in unison with a woman. There's no woman I can really want when I'm faced with her, and I'm not going to start forcing myself to it…My God, no! I'll remain as I am, and lead the mental life. It's the only honest thing I can do. I can be quite happy talking to women; but it's all pure, hopelessly pure. Hopelessly pure! What do you say, Hildebrand, my chicken?'

  'It's much less complicated if one stays pure,' said Berry.

  'Yes, life is all too simple!'

  Chapter 5

  On a frosty morning with a little February sun, Clifford and Connie went for a walk across the park to the wood. That is, Clifford chuffed in his motor-chair, and Connie walked beside him.

  The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure, always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.

  The sheep coughed in the rough, sere grass of the park, where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts. Across the park ran a path to the wood-gate, a fine ribbon of pink. Clifford had had it newly gravelled with sifted gravel from the pit-bank. When the rock and refuse of the underworld had burned and given off its sulphur, it turned bright pink, shrimp-coloured on dry days, darker, crab-coloured on wet. Now it was pale shrimp-colour, with a bluish-white hoar of frost. It always pleased Connie, this underfoot of sifted, bright pink. It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.

  Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall, and Connie kept her hand on the chair. In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky.

  Connie opened the wood-gate, and Clifford puffed slowly through into the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets of the hazel. The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted, and this riding was an old, old thoroughfare coming across country. But now, of course, it was only a riding through the private wood. The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north.

  In the wood everything was motionless, the old leaves on the ground keeping the frost on their underside. A jay called harshly, many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now Clifford had got his game-keeper again.

  Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.

  The chair chuffed slowly up the incline, rocking and jolting on the frozen clods. And suddenly, on the left, came a clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps
, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless. And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish.

  This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose softly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness; and from there you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway, and the new works at Stacks Gate. Connie had stood and looked, it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood. It let in the world. But she didn't tell Clifford.

  This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey.

  Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted. When they came to the top of the rise he stopped; he would not risk the long and very jolty down-slope. He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding downwards, a clear way through the bracken and oaks. It swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared; but it had such a lovely easy curve, of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

  'I consider this is really the heart of England,' said Clifford to Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.

  'Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a stump by the path.

  'I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep it intact.'

  'Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to notice.

  'I want this wood perfect…untouched. I want nobody to trespass in it,' said Clifford.

  There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered, still remembered.

  Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.

  'I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,' he said.

  'But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.

  'Quite!' said Clifford. 'But we've preserved it. Except for us it would go…it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must preserve some of the old England!'

  'Must one?' said Connie. 'If it has to be preserved, and preserved against the new England? It's sad, I know.'

  'If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at all,' said Clifford. 'And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling for it, must preserve it.'

  There was a sad pause. 'Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.

  'For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was a pause.

  'What tradition?' asked Connie.

  'The tradition of England! of this!'

  'Yes,' she said slowly.

  'That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he said.

  Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.

  'I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.

  He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.

  'It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he said. 'If we brought it up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the place. I don't believe very intensely in fatherhood. If we had the child to rear, it would be our own, and it would carry on. Don't you think it's worth considering?'

  Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an 'it' to him. It…it…it!

  'But what about the other man?' she asked.

  'Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very deeply?…You had that lover in Germany…what is it now? Nothing almost. It seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connexions we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where…Where are the snows of yesteryear?…It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connexions matter? And the occasional sexual connexions especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing…that's what we live by…not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.'

  Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

  'And wouldn't you mind what man's child I had?' she asked.

  'Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and selection. You just wouldn't let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.'

  She thought of Michaelis! He was absolutely Clifford's idea of the wrong sort of fellow.

  'But men and women may have different feelings about the wrong sort of fellow,' she said.

  'No,' he replied. 'You care for me. I don't believe you would ever care for a man who was purely antipathetic to me. Your rhythm wouldn't let you.'

  She was silent. Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

  'And should you expect me to tell you?' she asked, glancing up at him almost furtively.

  'Not at all, I'd better not know…But you do agree with me, don't you, that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven to? After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole problem of life the slow building up of an integral personality, through the years? living an integrated life? There's no point in a disintegrated life. If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love-affair. If lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together…don't you think?…if we adapt ourselves to the necessities, and at the same time weave the adaptation together into a piece with our steadily-lived life. Don't you agree?'

  Connie was a little overwhelmed by his words. She knew he was right theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived life with him she…hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself into his life all the rest of her life? Nothing else?

  Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gon
e on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.

  'I think you're right, Clifford. And as far as I can see I agree with you. Only life may turn quite a new face on it all.'

  'But until life turns a new face on it all, you do agree?'

  'Oh yes! I think I do, really.'

  She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and was looking towards them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark. A man with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning downhill. It was only the new game-keeper, but he had frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift menace. That was how she had seen him, like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.

  He was a man in dark green velveteens and gaiters…the old style, with a red face and red moustache and distant eyes. He was going quickly downhill.

  'Mellors!' called Clifford.

  The man faced lightly round, and saluted with a quick little gesture, a soldier!

  'Will you turn the chair round and get it started? That makes it easier,' said Clifford.

  The man at once slung his gun over his shoulder, and came forward with the same curious swift, yet soft movements, as if keeping invisible. He was moderately tall and lean, and was silent. He did not look at Connie at all, only at the chair.

  'Connie, this is the new game-keeper, Mellors. You haven't spoken to her ladyship yet, Mellors?'

  'No, Sir!' came the ready, neutral words.

  The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless, impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like. He made her feel shy. She bent her head to him shyly, and he changed his hat to his left hand and made her a slight bow, like a gentleman; but he said nothing at all. He remained for a moment still, with his hat in his hand.