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Look at yourselves! That’s workin’ for money!— Hark at yourselves! That’s working for money. You’ve been working for money! Look at Tevershall! It’s horrible. That’s because it was built while you was working for money. Look at your girls! They don’t care about you, you don’t care about them. It’s because you’ve spent your time working an’ caring for money. You can’t talk nor move nor live, you can’t properly be with a woman. You’re not alive. Look at yourselves!”
it’s a shame, what’s been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-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.”
Hilda did not like Clifford: his cool assurance that he was somebody! She thought he made use of Connie shamefully and impudently. She had hoped her sister would leave him. But, being solid Scotch middle class, she loathed any “lowering” of oneself, or the family.
“But you’ll be through with him in a while,” she said, “and then you’ll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.” “But you are such a socialist! you’re always on the side of the working classes.” “I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one’s life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”
Hilda looked to see what his table manners were like. She could not help realizing that he was instinctively much more delicate and well-bred than herself. She had a certain Scottish clumsiness. And moreover, he had all the quiet self-contained assurance of the English, no loose edges. It would be very difficult to get the better of him.
It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.
“I’ve never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I’m not keen on their self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I’m not content to be any man’s little petsywetsy, nor his chair à plaisir either. I wanted a complete intimacy, and I didn’t get it. That’s enough for me.”
When Jesus refused the devil’s money, he left the devil like a Jewish banker, master of the whole situation.
He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
“They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it’s not that. I’m not a woman because I don’t want to shoot birds, neither because I don’t want to make money, or get on.
I can’t stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That’s why I can’t get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?”
I’m something to myself at least. I can see the point of my own existence, though I can quite understand nobody else’s seeing it.”
“And what is the point of your existence?” “I tell you, it’s invisible. I don’t believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. If there’s got to be a future for humanity, there’ll have to he a very big change from what now is.”
“Shall I tell you what you have that other men don’t have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you?” “Tell me, then,” he replied. “It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is,
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half conscious, and half alive. We’ve got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.”
“I’ve a dread of puttin’ children i’ th’ world,” he said. “I’ve such a dread o’ th’ future for ’em.”
Thank God I’ve got a woman! Thank God I’ve got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me.
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn’t admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared himself for it! or if he would have admitted it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it wasn’t so.
“It comes,” she thought to herself, hating him a little, “because he always thinks of himself. He’s so wrapped up in his own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he’s like a mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!”
The curious thing was that when this child-man, which Clifford was now and which he had been becoming for years, emerged into the world, he was much sharper and keener than the real man he used to be. This perverted child-man was now a real business man; when it was a question of affairs, was an absolute he-man, sharp as a needle, and impervious as a bit of steel.
And in this Mrs. Bolton triumphed. “How he’s getting on!” she would say to herself in pride. “And that’s my doing! My word, he’d never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.”
He was to her the fallen beast, the squirming monster. And while she aided and abetted him all she could, away in the remotest corner of her ancient healthy womanhood she despised him with a savage contempt that knew no bounds. The merest tramp was better than he.
“Yes!” he said at last. “That proves what I’ve always thought about you is correct: you’re not normal, you’re not in your right senses. You’re one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.” Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil.
And that’s the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live, and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend. But you can’t do it. They’re all one-track minds nowadays. Whereas the mass of people oughtn’t even to try to think, because they can’t! They should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He’s the only god for the masses, forever. The few can go in for higher cults if they like. But let the mass be forever pagan.
Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.
I’m frightened, really. I feel the devil in the air, and he’ll try to get us. Or not the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of people, wanting money and hating life. Anyhow I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.
If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.
All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won’t be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me.
You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world.
But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That’s what I abide by, and will abide by, Cliffords and Berthas, colliery companies and governments and the money-mass of people all notwithstanding.
But this winter I’ll stick to my little pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won’t let the breath of people blow it out.
My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.
I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander! What a misery to be like Don Juan,
“But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon.
Late in 1927 and during January of 1928, after a long and desperate siege of illness, he wrote the third and present version. With the help of Mrs. Aldous Huxley, a typescript was prepared for private publication under the imprint of the Florentine bookseller, Giuseppe Orioli;
