第4章

They were rather earnest about the Tommies,and the threat of conion,and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children.In all these things,of course,the authorities were ridiculously at fault.But Clifford could not take it to heart.To him the authorities were ridiculous ab ovo ,not because of toffee or Tommies.

And the authorities felt ridiculous,and behaved in a rather ridiculous fashion,and it was all a mad hatter's tea-party for a while.Till things developed over there,and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here.And this surpassed even ridicule,the flippant young laughed no more.

In 1916Herbert Chatterley was killed,so Clifford became heir.He was terrified even of this.His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey,and child of Wragby,was so ingrained in him,he could never escape it.And yet he knew that this too,in the eyes of the vast seething world,was ridiculous.

Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby.Was that not terrible?and also splendid and at the same time,perhaps,purely absurd?

Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity.He was pale and tense,withdrawn into himself,and obstinately determined to save his country and his own position,let it be Lloyd George or who it might.So cut off he was,so divorced from the England that was really England,so utterly incapable,that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley.Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St George:and he never knew there was a difference.So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for Lloyd George and England,England and Lloyd George.

And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir.Clifford felt his father was a hopeless anachronism.But wherein was he himself any further ahead,except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything,and the paramount ridiculousness of his own position?For willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.

The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead.Too much death and horror.A man needed support arid comfort.A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world.A man needed a wife.

The Chatterleys,two brothers and a sister,had lived curiously isolated,shut in with one another at Wragby,in spite of all their connexions.Asense of isolation intensified the family tie,a sense of the weakness of their position,a sense of defencelessness,in spite of,or because of,the title and the land.They were cut off from those industrial Midlands in which they passed their lives.And they were cut off from their own class by the brooding,obstinate,shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey,their father,whom they ridiculed,but whom they were so sensitive about.

The three had said they would all live together always.But now Herbert was dead,and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry.Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it:he spoke very little.But his silent,brooding insistence that it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.

But Emma said No!She was ten years older than Clifford,and she felt his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of the family had stood for.

Clifford married Connie,nevertheless,and had his month's honeymoon with her.It was the terrible year 1917,and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship.He had been virgin when he married:and the sex part did not mean much to him.They were so close,he and she,apart from that.And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex,and beyond a man's 'satisfaction'.Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his 'satisfaction',as so many men seemed to be.No,the intimacy was deeper,more personal than that.And sex was merely an accident,or an adjunct,one of the curious obsolete,organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness,but was not really necessary.Though Connie did want children:if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law Emma.

But early in 1918Clifford was shipped home smashed,and there was no child.And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.