So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep … the bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.
Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness. In her life that affected her. Clifford’s mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
There was Clifford’s success: the bitch-goddess! It was true he was almost famous, and his books brought him in a thousand pounds. His photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had become in four or five years one of the best known of the young ‘intellectuals’. Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see. Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird and it was nothing. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of Connie’s soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of nothingness; At the same time a display. A display! A display! A display!
Michaelis had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for a play; already he had sketched in the plot, and written the first act. For Michaelis was even better than Clifford at making a display of nothingness. It was the last bit of passion left in these men: the passion for making a display. Sexually they were passionless, even dead. And now it was not money that Michaelis was after. Clifford had never been primarily out for money, though he made it where he could, for money is the seal and stamp of success. And success was what they wanted. They wanted, both of them, to make a real display … a man’s own very display of himself that should capture for a time the vast populace.
It was strange … the prostitution to the bitch-goddess. To Connie, since she was really outside of it, and since she had grown numb to the thrill of it, it was again nothingness. Even the prostitution to the bitch-goddess was nothingness, though the men prostituted themselves innumerable times. Nothingness even that.
Michaelis wrote to Clifford about the play. Of course she knew about it long ago. And Clifford was again thrilled. He was going to be displayed again this time, somebody was going to display him, and to advantage. He invited Michaelis down to Wragby with Act I.
Michaelis came: in summer, in a pale-coloured suit and white suede gloves, with mauve orchids for Connie, very lovely, and Act I was a great success. Even Connie was thrilled … thrilled to what bit of marrow she had left. And Michaelis, thrilled by his power to thrill, was really wonderful … and quite beautiful, in Connie’s eyes. She saw in him that ancient motionlessness of a race that can’t be disillusioned any more, an extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is pure. On the far side of his supreme prostitution to the bitch-goddess he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory mask that dreams impurity into purity, in its ivory curves and planes.
His moment of sheer thrill with the two Chatterleys, when he simply carried Connie and Clifford away, was one of the supreme moments of Michaelis’ life. He had succeeded: he had carried them away. Even Clifford was temporarily in love with him … if that is the way one can put it.
So next morning Mick was more uneasy than ever; restless, devoured, with his hands restless in his trousers pockets. Connie had not visited him in the night … and he had not known where to find her. Coquetry! … at his moment of triumph.
He went up to her sitting-room in the morning. She knew he would come. And his restlessness was evident. He asked her about his play … did she think it good? He had to hear it praised: that affected him with the last thin thrill of passion beyond any sexual orgasm. And she praised it rapturously. Yet all the while, at the bottom of her soul, she knew it was nothing.
‘Look here!’ he said suddenly at last. ‘Why don’t you and I make a clean thing of it? Why don’t we marry?’
‘But I am married,’ she said, amazed, and yet feeling nothing.
‘Oh that! … he’ll divorce you all right … Why don’t you and I marry? I want to marry. I know it would be the best thing for me … marry and lead a regular life. I lead the deuce of a life, simply tearing myself to pieces. Look here, you and I, we’re made for one another … hand and glove. Why don’t we marry? Do you see any reason why we shouldn’t?’
Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing. These men, they were all alike, they left everything out. They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.
‘But I am married already,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave Clifford, you know.’
‘Why not? but why not?’ he cried. ‘He’ll hardly know you’ve gone, after six months. He doesn’t know that anybody exists, except himself. Why the man has no use for you at all, as far as I can see; he’s entirely wrapped up in himself.’
Connie felt there was truth in this. But she also felt that Mick was hardly making a display of selflessness.
‘Aren’t all men wrapped up in themselves?’ she asked.
‘Oh, more or less, I allow. A man’s got to be, to get through. But that’s not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can’t he? If he can’t he’s no right to the woman…’ He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes, almost hypnotic. ‘Now I consider,’ he added, ‘I can give a woman the darndest good time she can ask for. I think I can guarantee myself.’
‘And what sort of a good time?’ asked Connie, gazing on him still with a sort of amazement, that looked like thrill; and underneath feeling nothing at all.
‘Every sort of a good time, damn it, every sort! Dress, jewels up to a point, any nightclub you like, know anybody you want to know, live the pace … travel and be somebody wherever you go … Darn it, every sort of good time.’
He spoke it almost in a brilliancy of triumph, and Connie looked at him as if dazzled, and really feeling nothing at all. Hardly even the surface of her mind was tickled at the glowing prospects he offered her. Hardly even her most outside self responded, that at any other time would have been thrilled. She just got no feeling from it, she couldn’t ‘go off’. She just sat and stared and looked dazzled, and felt nothing, only somewhere she smelt the extraordinarily unpleasant smell of the bitch-goddess.
Mick sat on tenterhooks, leaning forward in his chair, glaring at her almost hysterically: and whether he was more anxious out of vanity for her to say Yes! or whether he was more panic-stricken for fear she should say Yes! – who can tell?
‘I should have to think about it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t say now. It may seem to you Clifford doesn’t count, but he does. When you think how disabled he is…’
‘Oh damn it all! If a fellow’s going to trade on his disabilities, I might begin to say how lonely I am, and always have been, and all the rest of the my-eye-Betty-Martin sob-stuff! Damn it all, if a fellow’s got nothing but disabilities to recommend him…’
He turned aside, working his hands furiously in his trousers pockets. That