Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 476
He had heard already the sound of the light drum at Jamiltepec. The boat rowed softly: and there came a sound of a man’s voice singing in the morning.
Her boatman lifted an oar, as a signal to the house. And as the boat rounded the curve into the basin, a man-servant in white clothes came running down to the little jetty. In the changeless sunshine was a scent, perhaps of datura and of roses, and an eternal Mexican silence, which the noise of the drum, and the voice of singing, did not disturb.
‘Is Don Cipriano here?’ asked Kate.
‘Está!’ murmured the man, with a slight motion towards Ramón’s balcony, whence the singing came. ‘Shall I say you have come?’
He did not lift his voice above the murmur.
‘No!’ said Kate. ‘I shall sit here in the garden a while, before I come up.’
‘Then I will leave open the door,’ said the man, ‘and you can come up when you will.’
Kate sat on a seat under a big tree. A creeping plant, with great snake-like cords, and big sulphur-and-brown trumpet flowers, hung above. She listened to the singing. It was Ramón teaching one of the singers.
Ramón had not a very good voice. He sang quietly, as if to the inner air, with very beautiful, simple expression. But Kate could not catch the words.
‘Ya?’ said Ramón, when he had finished.
‘Ya, Patrón!’ said the man, the singer.
And he began, in his strong, pure voice that caught at the very bowels, to sing another of the Hymns.
‘My way is not thy way, and thine is not mine.
But come, before we part
Let us separately go to the Morning Star,
And meet there.
I do not point you to my road, nor yet
Call: “Oh come!”
But the Star is the same for both of us,
Winsome.
The good ghost of me goes down the distance
To the Holy Ghost.
Oh you, in the tent of the cloven flame
Meet me, you I like most.
Each man his own way forever, but towards
The hoverer between;
Who opens his flame like a tent-flap,
As we slip in unseen.
A man cannot tread like a woman,
Nor a woman step out like a man.
The ghost of each through the leaves of shadow
Moves as it can.
But the Morning Star and the Evening Star
Pitch tents of flame
Where we foregather like gypsies, none knowing
How the other came.
I ask for nothing except to slip
In the tent of the Holy Ghost
And be there in the house of the cloven flame,
Guest of the Host.
Be with me there, my woman,
Be bodily there.
Then let the flame wrap round us
Like a snare.
Be there along with me, O men!
Reach across the hearth,
And laugh with me while the woman rests
For all we are worth.’
The man had sung this hymn over several times, halting and forgetting, his pure, burning voice faltering out; then the low, rather husky voice of Ramón, with a subtler intensity, coming in, as if heard from the centre of a shell; then again the sudden ripping sound of the true singer’s tenor, going like a flame through the blood.
Her mozo, a man-servant, had followed her into the garden, and sat at a distance on his heels, under a tree, with his back to the trunk, like a crouching shadow clothed in white. His toes spread dark and hard, in his open huaraches, and the black braid of his hat-string hung against his dark cheek. For the rest he was pure white, the white cotton tight on his thighs.
When the singing had finished above, and the drum was silent, and even the voices speaking in low tones were silent, her mozo looked up at Kate, with his black hat-string dangling at his chin, his black eyes shining, and a timid sort of smile on his face.
‘Está muy bien, Patrona?’ he said shyly. ‘It is good, isn’t it, Mistress?’
‘It is very good,’ she replied, with the infallible echo. But there were conflicting feelings in her breast, and the man knew it.
He looked so young, when he smiled that gay, shy, excited little smile. Something of the eternal child in him. But a child that could harden in an instant into a savage man, revengeful and brutal. And a man always fully sex-alive, for the moment innocent in the fulness of sex, not in the absence. And Kate thought to herself, as she had thought before, that there were more ways than one of ‘becoming again as a little child.’
But the man had a sharp, watchful look in the corner of his eye: to see if she were feeling some covert hostility. He wanted her to acquiesce in the hymn, in the drum, in the whole mood. Like a child he wanted her to acquiesce. But if she were going to be hostile, he would be quick to be first in the hostility. Her hostile judgment would make a pure enemy of him.
Ah, all men were alike!
At that moment the man stood up, with soft suddenness, and she heard Cipriano’s voice from the balcony above:
‘What is it, Lupe?’
‘Está la Patrona,’ answered the servant.
Kate rose to her feet and looked up. She saw the head and the naked shoulders of Cipriano above the parapet of the balcony.
‘I will come up,’ she said.
And slowly she went through the great iron gates into the passage-way. Lupe, following, bolted the doors behind her.
On the terrace above she found Ramón and Cipriano both with their upper bodies naked, waiting for her in silence. She was embarrassed.
‘I waited to hear the new hymn,’ she said.
‘And how does it seem to you?’ said Ramón, in Spanish.
‘I like it,’ she said.
‘Let us sit down,’ said Ramón, still in Spanish. He and she sat in the cane rocking-chairs: Cipriano stood by the wall of the terrace.
She had come to make a sort of submission: to say she didn’t want to go away. But finding them both in the thick of their Quetzalcoatl mood, with their manly breasts uncovered, she was not very eager to begin. They made her feel like an intruder. She did not pause to realize that she was one.
‘We don’t meet in your Morning Star, apparently, do we?’ she said, mocking, but with a slight quaver.
A deeper silence seemed suddenly to hold the two men.
‘And I suppose a woman is really de trop, even there, when two men are together.’
But she faltered a bit in the saying. Cipriano, she knew, was baffled and stung when she taunted him.
Ramón answered her, with the gentleness that could come straight out of his heart: but still in Spanish:
‘Why, Cousin, what is it?’
Her lip quivered, as she suddenly said:
‘I don’t really want to go away from you.’
Ramón looked swiftly at Cipriano, then said:
‘I know you don’t.’
But the gentle protective tone of his voice only made Kate rebel again. She brimmed over with sudden tears, crying:
‘You don’t really want me.’
‘Yes, I want you! — Verdad! Verdad!’ exclaimed Cipriano, in his low, secret, almost muttering voice.
And even amid her tears, Kate was thinking to herself: What a fraud I am! I know all the time it is I who don’t altogether want them. I want myself to myself. But I can fool them so that they shan’t find out.
For she heard the hot, phallic passion in Cipriano’s voice.
Then came the voice of Ramón, like a chill:
‘It is you who don’t want,’ he said, in English this time. ‘You needn’t commit yourself to us. Listen to your own best desire.’
‘And if it tells me to go away?’ she flashed, defiant through the end of her tears.
‘Then go! Oh certainly go!’
Suddenly her tears came afresh.
‘I knew you didn’t really want me,’ she wept.
Then Cipriano’s voice said, with a hot, furtive softness of persuasion:
‘You are not his! He would not tell you!’
‘That is very true,’ said Ramón. ‘Don’t listen to me!’
He spoke in Spanish. And Kate glanced up sharply through her tears, to see him going quietly, but swiftly, away.
She wiped her face, suddenly calm. Then she looked with wet eyes at Cipriano. He was standing erect and alert, like a little fighting male, and his eyes glowed black and uncannily as he met her wet, limpid glance.
Yes, she was a bit afraid of him too, with his inhuman black eyes.
‘You don’t want me to go, do you?’ she pleaded.
A slow, almost foolish smile came over his face, and his body was slightly convulsed. Then came his soft-tongued Indian speech, as if all his mouth were soft, saying in Spanish, but with the ‘r’ sound almost lost:
‘Yo! Yo!’ — his eyebrows lifted with queer mock surprise, and a little convulsion went through his body again. ‘Te quiero mucho! Mucho te quiero! Mucho! Mucho! I like you very much! Very much!’
It sounded so soft, so soft-tongued, of the soft, wet, hot blood, that she shivered a little.
‘You won’t let me go!’ she said to him.
THE END
LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence’s last novel, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy, as it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. It soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman, with explicit sexual descriptions and what was deemed frequent uses of vulgar language. The story is believed to have originated from events in Lawrence’s own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with “Tiger”, a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
The 1955 French movie adaptation
Ken Russell’s 1993 TV series
CHAPTER 1
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month’s honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn’t die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor’s hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the family ‘seat’. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and — above all — to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and craving. Why couldn’t a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexion were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one’s privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions and subjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poets who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, talking to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to! — had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
