'Yes,'she said slowly,thinking of him listening with vacant face to the emotional idiocy of the radio.'People pretend to have emotions,and they really feel nothing.I suppose that is being romantic.'
'Exactly!'he said.
As a matter of fact,he was tired.This evening had tired him.He would rather have been with his technical books,or his pit-manager,or listening-in to the radio.
Mrs Bolton came in with two glasses of malted milk:for Clifford,to make him sleep,and for Connie,to fatten her again.It was a regular night-cap she had introduced.
Connie was glad to go,when she had drunk her glass,and thankful she needn't help Clifford to bed.She took his glass and put it on the tray,then took the tray,to leave it outside.
'Goodnight Clifford!Do sleep well!The Racine gets into one like a dream.Goodnight!'
She had drifted to the door.She was going without kissing him goodnight.
He watched her with sharp,cold eyes.So!She did not even kiss him goodnight,after he had spent an evening reading to her.Such depths of callousness in her!Even if the kiss was but a formality,it was on such formalities that life depends.She was a Bolshevik,really.Her instincts were Bolshevistic!
He gazed coldly and angrily at the door whence she had gone.Anger!
And again the dread of the night came on him.He was a network of nerves,anden he was not braced up to work,and so full of energy:or when he was not listening-in,and so utterly neuter:then he was haunted by anxiety and a sense of dangerous impending void.He was afraid.And Connie could keep the fear off him,if she would.But it was obvious she wouldn't,she wouldn't.She was callous,cold and callous to all that he did for her.
He gave up his life for her,and she was callous to him.She only wanted her own way.'The lady loves her will.'
Now it was a baby she was obsessed by.Just so that it should be her own,all her own,and not his!
Clifford was so healthy,considering.He looked so well and ruddy in the face,his shoulders were broad and strong,his chest deep,he had put on flesh.And yet,at the same time,he was afraid of death.A terrible hollow seemed to menace him somewhere,somehow,a void,and into this void his energy would collapse.Energyless,he felt at times he was dead,really dead.
So his rather prominent pale eyes had a queer look,furtive,and yet a little cruel,so cold:and at the same time,almost impudent.It was a very odd look,this look of impudence:as if he were triumphing over life in spite of life.'Who knoweth the mysteries of the will--for it can triumph even against the angels--'
But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep.Then it was awful indeed,when annihilation pressed in on him on every side.Then it was ghastly,to exist without having any life:lifeless,in the night,to exist.
But now he could ring for Mrs Bolton.And she would always come.That was a great comfort.She would come in her dressing gown,with her hair in a plait down her back,curiously girlish and dim,though the brown plait was streaked with grey.And she would make him coffee or camomile tea,and she would play chess or piquet with him.She had a woman's queer faculty of playing even chess well enough,when she was three parts asleep,well enough to make her worth beating.So,in the silent intimacy of the night,they sat,or she sat and he lay on the bed,with the reading-lamp shedding its solitary light on them,she almost gone in sleep,he almost gone in a sort of fear,and they played,played together--then they had a cup of coffee and a biscuit together,hardly speaking,in the silence of night,but being a reassurance to one another.
And this night she was wondering who Lady Chatterley's lover was.And she was thinking of her own Ted,so long dead,yet for her never quite dead.And when she thought of him,the old,old grudge against the world rose up,but especially against the masters,that they had killed him.
They had not really killed him.Yet,to her,emotionally,they had.And somewhere deep in herself because of it,she was a nihilist,and really anarchic.
In her half-sleep,thoughts of her Ted and thoughts of Lady Chatterley's unknown lover commingled,and then she felt she shared with the other woman a great grudge against Sir Clifford and all he stood for.At the same time she was playing piquet with him,and they were gambling sixpences.And it was a source of satisfaction to be playing piquet with a baronet,and even losing sixpences to him.
When they played cards,they always gambled.It made him forget himself.
And he usually won.Tonight too he was winning.So he would not go to sleep till the first dawn appeared.Luckily it began to appear at half past four or thereabouts.
Connie was in bed,and fast asleep all this time.But the keeper,too,could not rest.He had closed the coops and made his round of the wood,then gone home and eaten supper.But he did not go to bed.Instead he sat by the fire and thought.
He thought of his boyhood in Tevershall,and of his five or six years of married life.He thought of his wife,and always bitterly.She had seemed so brutal.But he had not seen her now since 1915,in the spring when he joined up.Yet there she was,not three miles away,and more brutal than ever.He hoped never to see her again while he lived.
He thought of his life abroad,as a soldier.India,Egypt,then India again:the blind,thoughtless life with the horses:the colonel who had loved him and whom he had loved:the several years that he had been an officer,a lieutenant with a very fair chance of being a captain.Then the death of the colonel from pneumonia,and his own narrow escape from death:his damaged health:his deep restlessness:his leaving the army and coming back to England to be a working man again.
He was temporizing with life.He had thought he would be safe,at least for a time,in this wood.There was no shooting as yet:he had to rear the pheasants.He would have no guns to serve.He would be alone,and apart from life,which was all he wanted.He had to have some sort of a background.
