Connie was a good deal alone now,fewer people came to Wragby.Clifford no longer wanted them.He had turned against even the cronies.He was queer.
He preferred the radio,which he had installed at some expense,with a good deal of success at last.He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt,even there in the uneasy Midlands.
And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loudspeaker bellowing forth.It amazed and stunned Connie.But there he would sit,with a blank entranced expression on his face,like a person losing his mind,and listen,or seem to listen,to the unspeakable thing.
Was he really listening?Or was it a sort of soporific he took,whilst something else worked on underneath in him?Connie did now know.She fled up to her room,or out of doors to the wood.A kind of terror filled her sometimes,a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilized species.
But now that Clifford was drifting off to this other weirdness of industrial activity,becoming almost a creature ,with a hard,efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior,one of the amazing crabs and lobsters of the modern,industrial and financial world,invertebrates of the crustacean order,with shells of steel,like machines,and inner bodies of soft pulp,Connie herself was really completely stranded.
She was not even free,for Clifford must have her there.He seemed to have a nervous terror that she should leave him.The curious pulpy part of him,the emotional and humanly-individual part,depended on her with terror,like a child,almost like an idiot.She must be there,there at Wragby,a Lady Chatterley,his wife.Otherwise he would be lost like an idiot on a moor.
This amazing dependence Connie realized with a sort of horror.She heard him with his pit managers,with the members of his Board,with young scientists,and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things,his power,his uncanny material power over what is called practical men.He had become a practical man himself and an amazingly astute and powerful one,a master.Connie attributed it to Mrs Bolton's influence upon him,just at the crisis in his life.
But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone to his own emotional life.He worshipped Connie.She was his wife,a higher being,and he worshipped her with a queer,craven idolatry,like a savage,a worship based on enormous fear,and even hate of the power of the idol,the dread idol.All he wanted was for Connie to swear,to swear not to leave him,not to give him away.
'Clifford,'she said to him--but this was after she had the key to the hut--'Would you really like me to have a child one day?'
He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent pale eyes.
'I shouldn't mind,if it made no difference between us,'he said.
'No difference to what?'she asked.
'To you and me;to our love for one another.If it's going to affect that,then I'm all against it.Why,I might even one day have a child of my own!'
She looked at him in amazement.
'I mean,it might come back to me one of these days.'
She still stared in amazement,and he was uncomfortable.
'So you would not like it if I had a child?'she said.
'I tell you,'he replied quickly,like a cornered dog,'I am quite willing,provided it doesn't touch your love for me.If it would touch that,I am dead against it.'
Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt.Such talk was really the gabbling of an idiot.He no longer knew what he was talking about.
'Oh,it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you,'she said,with a certain sarca**.
'There!'he said.'That is the point!In that case I don't mind in the least.I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about the house,and feel one was building up a future for it.I should have something to strive for then,and I should know it was your child,shouldn't I,dear?
And it would seem just the same as my own.Because it is you who count in these matters.You know that,don't you,dear?I don't enter,I am a cypher.You are the great I-am!as far as life goes.You know that,don't you?I mean,as far as I am concerned.I mean,but for you I am absolutely nothing.I live for your sake and your future.I am nothing to myself'
Connie heard it all with deepening dismay and repulsion.It was one of the ghastly half-truths that poison human existence.What man in his senses would say such things to a woman!But men aren't in their senses.
What man with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility upon a woman,and leave her there,in the void?
Moreover,in half an hour's time,Connie heard Clifford talking to Mrs Bolton,in a hot,impulsive voice,revealing himself in a sort of passionless passion to the woman,as if she were half mistress,half foster-mother to him.And Mrs Bolton was carefully dressing him in evening clothes,for there were important business guests in the house.
Connie really sometimes felt she would die at this time.She felt she was being crushed to death by weird lies,and by the amazing cruelty of idiocy.Clifford's strange business efficiency in a way over-awed her,and his declaration of private worship put her into a panic.There was nothing between them.She never even touched him nowadays,and he never touched her.He never even took her hand and held it kindly.No,and because they were so utterly out of touch,he tortured her with his declaration of idolatry.It was the cruelty of utter impotence.And she felt her reason would give way,or she would die.
She fled as much as possible to the wood.One afternoon,as she sat brooding,watching the water bubbling coldly in John's Well,the keeper had strode up to her.
'I got you a key made,my Lady!'he said,saluting,and he offered her the key.
'Thank you so much!'she said,startled.
'The hut's not very tidy,if you don't mind,'he said.'I cleared it what I could.'
'But I didn't want you to trouble!'she said.
