,
used  by all  the  other R.  A.s who  sold their pictures. Whereas  Clifford
discovered new channels of publicity, all kinds. He  had all kinds of people
at  Wragby, without  exactly lowering  himself.  But,  determined  to  build
himself a monument of a  reputation quickly, he used any handy rubble in the
making.
     Michaelis  arrived duly, in a very  neat car,  with  a chauffeur  and a
manservant. He was absolutely Bond Street! But at right  of him something in
Clifford's county soul recoiled. He wasn't exactly... not exactly...in fact,
he wasn't at all, well,  what his appearance intended to imply. To  Clifford
this was final and enough. Yet he was very polite to the man; to the amazing
success  in him.  The  bitch-goddess, as she is  called, of Success, roamed,
snarling  and  protective,  round  the half-humble,  half-defiant Michaelis'
heels,  and intimidated  Clifford  completely:  for he wanted to  prostitute
himself to the bitch-goddess, Success also, if only she would have him.
     Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman,  in spite of all the tailors,
hatters,  barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London.  No,  no,  he
obviously  wasn't an Englishman: the wrong sort  of  flattish, pale face and
bearing; and the wrong  sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a  grievance:
that was obvious  to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let
such a  thing  appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis  had been
much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look  even now.
He had pushed his  way by  sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery  on  to the
stage and to the front of it, with  his plays. He had caught the public. And
he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas,  they weren't... They never
would be. For he,  in a sense, asked to be kicked.  He pined  to be where he
didn't belong...among the English  upper classes. And how  they  enjoyed the
various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!
     Nevertheless he  travelled with  his manservant and his very  neat car,
this Dublin mongrel.
     There was something about him that Connie  liked. He didn't put on airs
to  himself, he  had no  illusions  about  himself.  He talked  to  Clifford
sensibly, briefly,  practically,  about all the things  Clifford  wanted  to
know. He  didn't expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to
Wragby to  be  made  use  of, and like an  old,  shrewd,  almost indifferent
business man, or big-business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he
answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
     `Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of  nature  in a  man to make money.  It's nothing you do. It's no trick you
play. It's a sort  of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'
     `But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.
     `Oh, quite! You've got  to  get in. You can do nothing if  you are kept
outside. You've got  to beat your way in. Once  you've  done that, you can't
help it.'
     `But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.
     `Oh, probably not! I may be a  good writer or I may be a bad one, but a
writer  and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be.  There's  no
question of that.'
     `And you think it's  a writer of  popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.
     `There, exactly!' he said, turning  to her in  a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public,
if it  comes  to  that.  There's  nothing really  in my  plays  to make them
popular. It's not  that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will
have to be...for the time being.'
     He turned  his slow, rather  full eyes, that  had been drowned in  such
fathomless disillusion,  on Connie,  and she trembled a little. He seemed so
old...endlessly old, built up  of  layers of disillusion, going  down in him
generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he
was forlorn like  a child. An  outcast, in a  certain  sense;  but with  the
desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
     `At least it's wonderful what  you've done at your time of life,'  said
Clifford contemplatively.
     `I'm  thirty...yes,  I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
     `And are you alone?' asked Connie.
     `How do you mean? Do  I live alone? I've got my  servant. He's a Greek,
so he says,  and quite  incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry.
Oh, yes, I must marry.'
     `It sounds like going  to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'
     He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I
find... excuse me...  I  find  I  can't marry  an Englishwoman, not even  an
Irishwoman...'
     `Try an American,' said Clifford.
     `Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he
will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
     Connie   really   wondered  at   this  queer,  melancholy  specimen  of
extraordinary  success;  it was said  he  had an  income of  fifty  thousand
dollars from America  alone.  Sometimes he  was  handsome: sometimes  as  he
looked  sideways,  downwards, and the light fell on  him, he had the silent,
enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and
the  strong  queerly-arched  brows,  the  immobile,  compressed mouth;  that
momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility,  a timelessness which  the
Buddha aims at, and which  Negroes express sometimes  without ever aiming at
it; something old, old, and acquiescent  in the race! Aeons of  acquiescence
in race destiny,  instead of our individual resistance. And  then a swimming
through,  like  rats  in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of
sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion,
amounting almost to  love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a
bounder! How much  more bounderish and assertive Clifford  looked!  How much
stupider!
     Michaelis knew at once he had made an  impression on her. He turned his
full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He
was estimating her, and the extent of the impression  he had made.  With the
English nothing  could save him from being the eternal  outsider,  not  even
love. Yet women sometimes fell for him...Englishwomen too.
     He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which
would  have liked  to  snarl  at  one another,  but  which  smiled  instead,
perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.
     Breakfast  was served in the bedrooms;  Clifford  never appeared before
lunch,  and the  dining-room was a little  dreary. After  coffee  Michaelis,
restless and  ill-sitting soul, wondered what  he  should do. It was a  fine
November...day fine  for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God!
What a place!
     He sent  a  servant  to ask,  could  he  be  of  any  service  to  Lady
Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer  came, would he
care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room.
     Connie  had a  sitting-room  on the third floor, the top  floor  of the
central portion of  the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of
course. Michaelis was flattered by being  asked up to Lady Chatterley's  own
parlour. He followed blindly after the servant...he never noticed things, or
had contact  with Isis surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round
at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cèzanne.
     `It's very pleasant up here,'  he said, with his queer  smile, as if it
hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. `You are wise to get up to the top.'
     `Yes, I think so,' she said.
     Her room was the only  gay, modern one in  the  house, the only spot in
Wragby  where her personality  was  at all revealed. Clifford had never seen
it, and she asked very few people up.
     Now she and Michaelis sit on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She
asked him about himself,  his mother and father, his brothers...other people
were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened
she  was quite  devoid of  class  feeling.  Michaelis  talked frankly  about
himself,  quite frankly, without  affectation,  simply revealing his bitter,
indifferent,  stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride  in
his success.
     `But why are you  such a lonely bird?' Connie  asked him; and  again he
looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.
     `Some birds are  that way,' he replied.  Then, with a touch of familiar
irony: `but, look here,  what about yourself? Aren't you  by way of being  a
lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few
moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'
     `Am  I altogether  a lonely  bird?' he asked, with  his queer grin of a
smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly
unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.
     `Why?' she said, a little  breathless, as she looked at him. `You  are,
aren't you?'
     She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost
lose her balance.
     `Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his  head  away, and looking
sideways, downwards,  with that strange immobility of an  old race  that  is
hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her
power to see him detached from herself.
     He  looked  up  at  her  with  the  full  glance  that saw  everything,
registered everything. At the same time, the  infant crying in the night was
crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.
     `It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.
     `Why shouldn't  I think of you?' she exclaimed,  with  hardly breath to
utter it.
     He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.
     `Oh,  in that  way!...May I  hold  your hand  for  a  minute?' he asked
suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out
an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.
     She stared at  him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and  kneeled
beside her,  and took  her two  feet close in his two hands, and buried  his
face  in her lap,  remaining motionless. She  was  perfectly dim and  dazed,
looking  down in  a sort of amazement at the rather tender nape of his neck,
feeling his face  pressing  her thighs. In all her burning dismay, she could
not  help  putting  her   hand,  with  tenderness  and  compassion,  on  the
defenceless nape of his neck, and he trembled, with a deep shudder.
     Then he looked up at her with that awful  appeal  in his full,  glowing
eyes. She was  utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the
answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
     He  was a curious and  very gentle lover, very  gentle with  the woman,
trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of
every sound outside.
     To her it  meant nothing  except  that she gave herself to  him. And at
length he ceased to quiver any more, and lay quite still, quite still. Then,
with dim, compassionate fingers,  she  stroked  his  head, that  lay  on her
breast.
     When he rose, he  kissed both her  hands, then both her feet, in  their
suõde slippers, and  in  silence went  away to the end of the room, where he
stood  with  his back to  her.  There  was silence for some minutes. Then he
turned and came to her again as she sat in her old place by the fire.
     `And  now,  I suppose you'll hate  me!' he said in  a quiet, inevitable
way. She looked up at him quickly.
     `Why should I?' she asked.
     `They mostly do,' he said; then he caught himself up. `I mean...a woman
is supposed to.'
     `This  is  the  last  moment  when  I  ought  to  hate you,'  she  said
resentfully.
     `I know!  I know! It should be so! You're frightfully good to me...' he
cried miserably.
     She wondered  why  he should be miserable.  `Won't you sit down again?'
she said. He glanced at the door.
     `Sir Clifford!'  he  said,  `won't he...won't  he  be...?' She paused a
moment to  consider. `Perhaps!' she said. And she looked up at him. `I don't
want Clifford to know not even to suspect. It  would hurt him so much. But I
don't think it's wrong, do you?'
     `Wrong! Good God, no!  You're only  too  infinitely good  to me...I can
hardly bear it.'
     He  turned aside,  and she  saw  that  in  another moment  he  would be
sobbing.
     `But we  needn't let Clifford  know,  need we?'  she pleaded. `It would
hurt him so. And if he never knows, never suspects, it hurts nobody.'
     `Me!' he said, almost fiercely; `he'll know nothing from me! You see if
he does. Me  give myself away! Ha! Ha!' he  laughed  hollowly, cynically, at
such an  idea. She  watched him in wonder. He said  to her: `May I kiss your
hand arid go? I'll  run into  Sheffield I think, and  lunch there, if I may,
and be back to tea. May I do anything for you? May I be sure you  don't hate
me?---and that you won't?'---he ended with a desperate note of cynicism.
     `No, I don't hate you,' she said. `I think you're nice.'
     `Ah!' he said to her fiercely, `I'd  rather  you said  that to me  than
said you  love  me!  It means such  a lot more...Till  afternoon then.  I've
plenty to think about till then.' He kissed her hands humbly and was gone.
     `I don't think I can stand that young man,' said Clifford at lunch.
     `Why?' asked Connie.
     `He's  such a bounder  underneath  his veneer...just waiting to  bounce
us.'
     `I think people have been so unkind to him,' said Connie.
     `Do you  wonder?  And do you think he  employs his  shining hours doing
deeds of kindness?'
     `I think he has a certain sort of generosity.'
     `Towards whom?'
     `I don't quite know.'
     `Naturally  you  don't.  I'm  afraid  you mistake unscrupulousness  for
generosity.'
     Connie paused. Did she? It  was just possible. Yet the unscrupulousness
of Michaelis had  a certain fascination for her. He went whole lengths where
Clifford only  crept a  few timid paces. In  his way  he  had conquered  the
world, which  was what Clifford wanted to do. Ways  and means...? Were those
of Michaelis more  despicable than those of  Clifford? Was the way the  poor
outsider had shoved and bounced himself  forward in person,  and by the back
doors, any worse than Clifford's way of advertising himself into prominence?
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of  gasping, dogs  with
lolling tongues. The one  that got her first was the real dog among dogs, if
you go by success! So Michaelis could keep his tail up.
     The  queer thing was, he didn't.  He came back  towards tea-time with a
large  handful  of  violets and lilies,  and  the same hang-dog  expression.
Connie wondered sometimes if  it  were a sort  of mask to disarm opposition,
because it was almost too fixed. Was he really such a sad dog?
     His sad-dog sort of extinguished self persisted all the evening, though
through  it  Clifford  felt the inner  effrontery. Connie  didn't  feel  it,
perhaps because  it was  not directed against women;  only  against men, and
their presumptions and  assumptions. That  indestructible, inward effrontery
in  the meagre fellow was what  made  men  so down on  Michaelis.  His  very
presence was an affront to  a man  of society,  cloak it as he might  in  an
assumed good manner.
     Connie was in love with him, but she managed to sit with her embroidery
and let the men talk, and not give herself away. As  for  Michaelis, he  was
perfect; exactly the same melancholic, attentive,  aloof young fellow of the
previous evening, millions of degrees remote from his hosts, but laconically
playing up to them  to the required  amount,  and never coming forth to them
for a moment. Connie felt he  must have forgotten  the  morning. He  had not
forgotten. But he knew where he was...in  the same old place  outside, where
the  born  outsiders  are.  He   didn't  take   the  love-making  altogether
personally. He knew  it  would not  change him  from an ownerless dog,  whom
everybody begrudges its golden collar, into a comfortable society dog.
     The  final fact being that  at  the  very bottom of his  soul he was an
outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact  inwardly, no matter how
Bond-Streety he was  on the outside. His isolation was  a necessity to  him;
just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was
also a necessity.
     But occasional love, as a comfort arid soothing, was also a good thing,
and he  was not ungrateful. On  the contrary, he  was  burningly, poignantly
grateful for  a piece  of natural,  spontaneous  kindness: almost to  tears.
Beneath his pale, immobile, disillusioned face, his child's soul was sobbing
with gratitude to the  woman, and burning  to come to her again; just as his
outcast soul was knowing he would keep really clear of her.
     He  found an opportunity to  say  to  her, as  they  were  lighting the
candles in the hall:
     `May I come?'
     `I'll come to you,' she said.
     `Oh, good!'
     He waited for her a long time...but she came.
     He was the trembling excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and
was  finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about
his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and
cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were  in abeyance  he
seemed  doubly  naked and like  a  child, of  unfinished, tender flesh,  and
somehow struggling helplessly.
     He  roused in the woman a wild sort  of compassion and yearning,  and a
wild, craving physical desire.  The physical desire  he did not  satisfy  in
her; he was always come  and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her
breast,  and  recovering  somewhat  his  effrontery  while  she  lay  dazed,
disappointed, lost.
     But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when
his  crisis  was over.  And  there  he was generous and curiously potent; he
stayed  firm  inside  her, giving to  her,  while  she was  active...wildly,
passionately active, coming to  her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of
her achieving her  own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity,
he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction.
     `Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously, and  she became quite still,
clinging to him. And he lay there in his own isolation, but somehow proud.
     He  stayed that time  only the three  days, and to Clifford was exactly
the same as on the first evening; to Connie also. There was no breaking down
his external man.
     He wrote to  Connie with the  same plaintive melancholy note  as  ever,
sometimes witty,  and touched  with a  queer, sexless affection.  A  kind of
hopeless  affection he seemed to feel for her, and the  essential remoteness
remained the same. He was hopeless at the very core of him, and he wanted to
be hopeless. He rather hated  hope. `Une  immense  espèrance  a traversè  la
terre', he read  somewhere, and  his  comment  was:`---and  it's darned-well
drowned everything worth having.'
     Connie never really understood him, but, in her way, she loved him. And
all  the  time  she  felt the reflection  of his  hopelessness in  her.  She
couldn't quite, quite love in hopelessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't
ever quite love at all.
     So they went on for quite a time, writing,  and meeting occasionally in
London. She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she  could get with him
by her  own  activity, his  little orgasm being over. And he still wanted to
give it her. Which was enough to keep them connected.
     And enough to give her a subtle sort of self-assurance, something blind
and a little  arrogant. It was  an  almost mechanical confidence in  her own
powers, and went with a great cheerfulness.
     She  was terrifically cheerful at Wragby. And she used  all her aroused
cheerfulness  and satisfaction to  stimulate Clifford,  so that he wrote his
best at this time, and was almost happy in his  strange blind way. He really
reaped the fruits of the sensual satisfaction she got out of Michaelis' male
passivity erect inside her. But of course he  never knew it, and if  he had,
he wouldn't have said thank you!
     Yet when those days of her grand joyful  cheerfulness and stimulus were
gone, quite gone, and  she was depressed and  irritable, how Clifford longed
for them again!  Perhaps if he'd known he might  even have wished to get her
and Michaelis together again.

        Chapter 4

     Connie  always had a foreboding of  the hopelessness of her affair with
Mick, as people called him. Yet other men seemed to mean nothing to her. She
was attached to Clifford. He  wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it
to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford
did not give her; could not. There were occasional spasms of Michaelis. But,
as she knew  by foreboding,  that would  come to an end. Mick couldn't  keep
anything  up. It was part  of  his very being that  he  must  break off  any
connexion, and  be  loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again. It  was  his
major necessity, even though he always said: She turned me down!
     The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down
to pretty few in  most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the
sea...maybe...but the  vast  masses seem to  be  mackerel or herring, and if
you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good
fish in the sea.
     Clifford was making  strides into fame,  and even money. People came to
see  him. Connie  nearly always had somebody  at Wragby. But if they weren't
mackerel they were herring, with an occasional cat-fish, or conger-eel.
     There were a few regular men, constants;  men who had been at Cambridge
with Clifford. There was Tommy Dukes, who had  remained in the army, and was
a Brigadier-General. `The army leaves me  time  to think, and  saves me from
having to face the battle of life,' he said.
     There  was  Charles  May,  an Irishman, who  wrote scientifically about
stars.  There was Hammond,  another writer.  All were  about the same age as
Clifford;  the young intellectuals of the day. They all believed in the life
of the  mind. What you  did  apart from that  was your  private affair,  and
didn't much matter.  No one thinks  of  inquiring of another  person at what
hour he retires to the  privy. It isn't interesting to anyone but the person
concerned.
     And so with  most  of the matters of ordinary life...how  you make your
money, or  whether  you love your wife, or  if you have `affairs'. All these
matters  concern only the person concerned, and,  like  going  to the privy,
have no interest for anyone else.
     `The whole  point about  the sexual problem,' said  Hammond, who was  a
tall  thin fellow with  a  wife  and two  children,  but  much  more closely
connected with  a typewriter, `is that  there  is no point  to  it. Strictly
there  is  no problem. We don't want  to follow a man into the w.c., so  why
should  we want to  follow  him into bed with  a  woman? And  therein  liehe
problem. If we took no more notice of the one  thing than the other, there'd
be  no  problem.  It's  all utterly senseless  and  pointless;  a  matter of
misplaced curiosity.'
     `Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you
begin to simmer; and if he goes  on, you are soon at boiling point.'...Julia
was Hammond's wife.
     `Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in  a corner of my
drawing-room. There's a place for all these things.'
     `You mean  you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some  discreet
alcove?'
     Charlie May was slightly  satirical,  for he had  flirted a very little
with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly.
     `Of course I should  mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia;
and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in.'
     `As  a matter  of  fact,' said the lean  and freckled  Tommy Dukes, who
looked much more Irish than May,  who was pale and rather fat: `As  a matter
of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will  to
self-assertion,   and  you  want  success.  Since  I've  been  in  the  army
definitely,  I've  got  out of the way  of  the  world,  and  now I  see how
inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It
is enormously  overdeveloped. All our individuality has run that way. And of
course  men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing.
That's  why you're so  jealous. That's  what sex is to  you...a vital little
dynamo  between  you  and Julia,  to bring  success.  If  you  began  to  be
unsuccessful  you'd begin  to flirt,  like  Charlie,  who isn't  successful.
Married people  like  you and Julia  have labels on  you,  like  travellers'
trunks. Julia is labelled Mrs  Arnold B. Hammond---just like a trunk on  the
railway that belongs  to  somebody. And you are labelled Arnold B.  Hammond,
c/o Mrs Arnold B.  Hammond. Oh, you're quite right,  you're quite right! The
life of the mind  needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite
right.  It even  needs posterity. But it  all hinges  on  the  instinct  for
success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.'
     Hammond looked rather piqued.  He was rather proud  of the integrity of
his  mind, and of his  not being a  time-server.  None the less, he did want
success.
     `It's  quite true,  you can't live without cash,' said May. `You've got
to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along...even to be
free to think you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops
you. But it seems to  me you might  leave the labels  off sex. We're free to
talk  to  anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who
inclines us that way?'
     `There speaks the lascivious Celt,' said Clifford.
     `Lascivious! well, why not---? I can't see I  do a  woman any more harm
by sleeping with her than by dancing with her...or even talking to her about
the weather. It's just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why
not?'
     `Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond.
     `Why  not?  What's  wrong with  rabbits? Are  they  any  worse  than  a
neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?'
     `But we're not rabbits, even so,' said Hammond.
     `Precisely!  I have  my mind:  I have certain calculations  to make  in
certain astronomical matters that concern me almost more than life or death.
Sometimes  indigestion interferes with me. Hunger would  interfere  with  me
disastrously. In the same way starved sex interferes with me. What then?'
     `I  should  have thought sexual  indigestion from  surfeit  would  have
interfered with you more seriously,' said Hammond satirically.
     `Not it! I don't over-eat myself and I don't  over-fuck myself. One has
a choice about eating too much. But you would absolutely starve me.'
     `Not at all! You can marry.'
     `How  do  you know I  can?  It  may  not suit the process  of my  mind.
Marriage might...and would...stultify my mental processes. I'm not  properly
pivoted that way...and so must I be chained in a kennel like a monk? All rot
and  funk, my  boy.  I  must live  and  do  my  calculations.  I  need women
sometimes.  I refuse to make a mountain of  it, and I refuse anybody's moral
condemnation or prohibition.  I'd be ashamed to see a  woman  walking around
with my  name-label  on her,  address  and  railway station, like a wardrobe
trunk.'
     These two men had not forgiven each other about the Julia flirtation.
     `It's an amusing idea, Charlie,' said Dukes,  `that sex is just another
form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it's
quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with
women as we do ideas about the weather, and  so on. Sex might be  a sort  of
normal physical conversation  between a man and a woman. You don't talk to a
woman unless  you have  ideas  in common: that is you  don't talk  with  any
interest.  And  in the same way, unless you had  some emotion or sympathy in
common with a woman you wouldn't sleep with her. But if you had...'
     `If  you have the proper sort of  emotion or sympathy with a woman, you
ought to  sleep with her,' said  May. `It's the only decent thing, to go  to
bed with her. Just as, when  you are interested talking to someone, the Only
decent  thing is to have the  talk out.  You don't prudishly put your tongue
between your teeth and bite it. You just say out your say.  And the same the
other way.'
     `No,' said Hammond.  `It's wrong. You,  for example,  May, you squander
half your force with women. You'll never really do  what you should do, with
a fine mind such as yours. Too much of it goes the other way.'
     `Maybe it does...and too little of  you goes that way, Hammond, my boy,
married or not. You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's
going  damned dry. Your pure mind is going as dry as fiddlesticks, from what
I see of it. You're simply talking it down.'
     Tommy Dukes burst into a laugh.
     `Go it, you two minds!' he said. `Look at me...I  don't do any high and
pure mental work, nothing  but jot down a few ideas. And yet I neither marry
nor run after women. I think Charlie's quite right; if he wants to run after
the women, he's quite free not to run too often. But I wouldn't prohibit him
from running. As for Hammond, he's got a property instinct, so naturally the
straight road and the narrow  gate are right for him. You'll see he'll be an
English Man  of  Letters  before  he's  done.  A.B.C. from  top to toe. Then
there's me. I'm nothing. Just a squib. And what about you, Clifford?  Do you
think sex is a dynamo to help a man on to success in the world?'
     Clifford  rarely talked much at these times.  He  never held forth; his
ideas  were  really  not  vital  enough  for  it,  he was  too confused  and
emotional. Now he blushed and looked uncomfortable.
     `Well!' he  said,  `being  myself hors  de  combat,  I don't  see  I've
anything to say on the matter.'
     `Not at all,' said Dukes; `the top of you's by no means hors de combat.
You've got  the  life of  the  mind  sound and  intact. So let  us hear your
ideas.'
     `Well,'  stammered Clifford, `even  then  I  don't suppose  I have much
idea...I  suppose  marry-and-have-done-with-it would pretty  well stand  for
what I  think. Though of course between a  man  and  woman  who care for one
another, it is a great thing.'
     `What sort of great thing?' said Tommy.
     `Oh...it perfects the  intimacy,' said Clifford, uneasy as a  woman  in
such talk.
     `Well,  Charlie and I believe that  sex is a sort of communication like
speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it's natural for
me to go to bed with her to finish it,  all in due season.  Unfortunately no
woman makes any particular start with me, so I go to bed by myself;  and  am
none the  worse for it...I hope so, anyway,  for how should  I know?  Anyhow
I've no starry calculations to be interfered with, and no immortal works  to
write. I'm merely a fellow skulking in the army...'
     Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another
stitch in her sewing...Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be
quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations
of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she  had to be there.  They didn't get
on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much
more hedgy  and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker  in Connie's absence,
and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired
by her  presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish  in a
mental way.  And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a
little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars.
     How many evenings had Connie  sat and listened to the manifestations of
these four men! these, and one or two others. That they  never seemed to get
anywhere didn't trouble her  deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say,
especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and
touching you  with  their bodies, they revealed  their minds to you. It  was
great fun! But what cold minds!
     And  also  it  was  a  little  irritating.  She  had  more  respect for
Michaelis,  on  whose  name  they  all poured such withering  contempt, as a
little  mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel
and bounder or not,  he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk
round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind.
     Connie quite  liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of
it.  But she did  think it  overdid  itself a little. She loved being there,
amidst  the tobacco smoke of  those famous  evenings of  the cronies, as she
called them privately to herself.  She was infinitely amused, and proud too,
that even their talking they could  not do, without her silent presence. She
had an immense respect for thought...and these men, at least, tried to think
honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't  jump. They all alike
talked at something, though  what it  was, for the  life of her she couldn't
say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either.
     But  then  Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get  through his
life, and put as much  across  other people as they tried to put across him.
He  was really  anti-social,  which was  what  Clifford and  his cronies had
against  him.  Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more
or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least.
     There was a  gorgeous  talk on  Sunday  evening, when the  conversation
drifted again to love.
     `Blest be the tie that binds
     Our hearts in kindred something-or-other'---
     said  Tommy Dukes. `I'd  like to know what  the tie is...The  tie  that
binds us just now is mental friction  on one  another. And, apart from that,
there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things
about one another,  like all the other  damned  intellectuals in the  world.
Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all  do it. Else  we  bust
apart,  and cover  up  the  spiteful things we feel against  one  another by
saying false sugaries. It's a  curious thing that the mental  life seems  to
flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has
been so! Look at  Socrates,  in Plato,  and  his  bunch round him! The sheer
spite   of   it  all,  just   sheer  joy  in   pulling   somebody   else  to
bits...Protagoras, or whoever it  was!  And  Alcibiades, and  all  the other
little disciple dogs joining  in  the fray!  I  must say it makes one prefer
Buddha, quietly sitting  under  a bo-tree, or  Jesus,  telling his disciples
little Sunday  stories,  peacefully, and without any mental  fireworks.  No,
there's  something wrong  with the  mental life,  radically. It's rooted  in
spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.'
     `I don't think we're altogether so spiteful,' protested Clifford.
     `My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us.
I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I  infinitely prefer the
spontaneous spite to the  concocted  sugaries;  now  they are poison; when I
begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then  poor Clifford
is to be  pitied. For God's  sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me,
then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done.'
     `Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,' said Hammond.
     `I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about
one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst.'
     `And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity.
I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity  a grand start, but he
did more than that,' said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had
such  a curious pomposity under  their assumed modesty.  It  was  all so  ex
cathedra, and it all pretended to be so humble.
     Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
     `That's quite true, criticism and  knowledge  are not the  same thing,'
said Hammond.
     `They aren't, of course,' chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man,  who
had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
     They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
     `I wasn't talking  about knowledge...I was  talking  about  the  mental
life,'  laughed Dukes. `Real knowledge  comes out of the whole corpus of the
consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain
and  mind. The mind can  only analyse  and rationalize. Set the mind and the
reason  to cock it over the rest, and all they can  do is to  criticize, and
make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is  vastly important. My God, the
world needs  criticizing  today...criticizing to death. Therefore let's live
the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But,
mind you, it's like this: while  you live your life, you  are in some way an
Organic whole with all life.  But once you  start the mental  life you pluck
the apple. You've severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the
organic  connexion. And  if you've  got nothing in your life but the  mental
life,  then  you yourself are a plucked apple...you've  fallen off the tree.
And then  it is a logical necessity  to be spiteful, just as it's a  natural
necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.'
     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