D H Lawrence [Lawrence - John Thomas and Lady Jane

CHAPTER I

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take ittragically. The cataclysm has fallen, weve got used to the ruins, and we start to build up new little habitats, new little hopes. If we cant make a road through the obstacles, we go round, or climb over the top. Weve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. Having tragically wrung our hands, we now proceed to peel the potatoes, or to put on the wireless.

This was Constance Chatterleys position. The war landed her in a very tight situation. But she made up her mind to live and learn.

She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917,when he was home for a month on leave. They had a months 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 didnt die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years, he remained in the doctors 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 1920.They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, the home of his family, Wragby Hall. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance wasLady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and a married life in the rather dilapidated home of the Chatterleys. Clifford had no near relatives. His mother had died when he was a boy. His brother, older than himself, was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any family, Clifford came home with his young wife, to keep the Chatterley name alive as long as he could, on a rather inadequate income.

He was not downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath chair with a small motor attached, so that he could drive himself slowly round the garden and out into the fine, melancholy park of which he was so proud, and about which he was so ironical.

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, handsome face, and his bright, challenging blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively tailored, and wore very handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet even in his face one saw the watchful look, the intangible vacancy also, of a cripple.

He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained to him seemed to him inordinately precious. One saw it in the brightness of his eyes, how proud he was of himself, for being alive. And he had been so much hurt, that something inside him had gone insentient, and could feel no more.

Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl, with soft brown hair and sturdy body and slow movements full of unused energy. She had big, wondering blue eyes and a slow, soft voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village.

It was not so at all. Her father was the once well-known Scotch R.A., old Sir Malcolm Reid, and her mother had been an active Fabian, in the palmy days. Between artists and highbrow reformers, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be called a cultured-unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome, artistically, and they had been taken in the other direction, to The Hague, and to Berlin, to great socialist conventions, when speakers spoke in every language, and no one was daunted. The two girls were not in the least abashed, neither by art nor by harangues. It was part of their world. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial with the high-brow provincialism and the high-brow cosmopolitanism.

Clifford too had had a year at a German university, at Bonn, studying chemistry and metallurgy, and things connected with coal and coal-mines. Because the Chatterley money all came out of coal royalties, and out of their interest in the Tevershall Colliery Company, Clifford wanted to be up-to-date. The mines were rather poor, unprofitable. He was second son. It behoved him to give the family fortunes a shove.

In the war, he forgot all that. His father, Sir Geoffrey, spent recklessly for his country. Clifford was reckless too. Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for itself.

Well, this is the morrow of that day!

But Clifford, first lieutenant in a smart regiment or what had been so knew most of the people in Headquarters, and he was full of beans. He liked Constance at once: first, because of her modest-maiden, ruddy appearance, then for the daring that underlay her softness and her stillness. He managed to get the modern German books, and he read them aloud to her. It was so thrilling to know how they felt, to have a feeler into the other camp. He had relatives in the know and he himself therefore was in quite a lot of this same know. It didnt amount to a great deal, but itwas something to feel mocking and superior about, for young people who, like Clifford and Constance, were above narrow patriotism. And they were well above it.

But by the time the Untergang des Abendlands appeared, Clifford was a smashed man, and by the time Constance became mistress of Wragby, cold ash had begun to blanket the war fervour. It was the day after, the grey morrow for which no thought had been taken.

Wragby was a low, long old house in brown stone, rather dismal, standing on an elevation and overlooking a fine park beyond which, however, one could see the tall chimney and the spinning wheels of the colliery at Tevershall. But Constance did not mind this. She did not mind even the queer rattling of the sifting screens, and the whistle of the locomotives, heard across the silence. Only sometimes, when the wind blew from the west, which itoften did, Wragby Hall was full of the sulphurous smell of a burning pit-bank, very disagreeable. And when the nights were dark, and the clouds hung low and level, the great red burning places on the sky, reflected from the furnaces at Clay Cross, gave her a strange, deep sense of dread, of mysterious fear.

She had never been used to an industrial district, only to the Sussex downs, and Scotch hills, and Kensington, and other sufficiently aesthetic surroundings. Here at Wragby, she was within the curious sphere of influence of Sheffield. The skies were often very dark, there seemed to be no daylight, there was a sense of underworld. Even the flowers were often a bit smutty, growing in the dark air. And there was always a faint, or strong smell of something uncanny, something of the under-earth, coal or sulphur or iron, whatever it was, on the breath one breathed in.