Lady Chatterley's Lover - Annotated: Reawakening Desire - Unexpurgated Edition

by D.H. Lawrence

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.

`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.

`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.

`Look here, my dear child'−−and Lady Bennerley laid her thin hand on Connie's arm. `A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it. Believe me!' And she took another sip of brandy, which maybe was her form of repentance.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths, she wasn't all tough rubber−goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today. But he would protect her with his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.

But when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds−−it was nearly a five−mile walk−−he was tired. He went to the top of the knoll and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works. The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half past two. But even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with some rosy lightning flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep.

He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one moment of completeness and sleep.

`That's it, my Lady, the touch of him! I've never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there's a heaven above, he'll be there, and will lie up against me so I can sleep.'

`Have you ever read Proust?' he asked her. `I've tried, but he bores me.' `He's really very extraordinary.' `Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self−important mentalities.' `Would you prefer self−important animalities?' `Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self−important.' `Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well−bred anarchy.' `It makes you very dead, really.' `There speaks my evangelical little wife.'

`And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?' `No! They were a mingy lot.' He laughed suddenly. `The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of ladylike snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot−laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow−tow, kow−tow, arse−licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of ladylike prigs with half a ball each−−' Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down.

`All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor−cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine−fucking!−−It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines.' He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone.

`Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta−tah! to the human species! Goodbye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit−ponies stamp on Tevershall pit−bank! te deum laudamus!' Connie laughed, but not very happily.

`But if you have a child?' she said. He dropped his head. `Why,' he said at last. `It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.' `No! Don't say it! Don't say it!' she pleaded. `I think I'm going to have one. Say you'll he pleased.' She laid her hand on his. `I'm pleased for you to be pleased,' he said. `But for me it seems a ghastly treachery to the unborn creature. `Ah no!' she said, shocked. `Then you can't ever really want me! You can't want me, if you feel that!' Again he was silent, his face sullen. Outside there was only the threshing of the rain.

`Ay! That's where to put forget−me−nots, in the man−hair, or the maiden−hair. But don't you care about the future?' She looked up at him. `Oh, I do, terribly!' she said. `Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour−insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather doubt.'

`Supreme pleasure?' she said, looking up at him. `Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind−machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.' He looked at her in wonder. `The life of the body,' he said, `is just the life of the animals.' `And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But it's not true! the human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And It will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.'

`After all, Hilda,' she said, `love can be wonderful: when you feel you live, and are in the very middle of creation.' It was almost like bragging on her part. `I suppose every mosquito feels the same,' said Hilda. `Do you think it does? How nice for it!'