We live in a tragic age, but we refuse to take it tragically. We are among the ruins, but we start to have new little hopes. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn[1].
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month’s honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders[2]: to be shipped over to England again six months later, in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn’t die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor’s hands. Then he could return to life again, with the lower half of his body paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the family ‘seat’. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather abandoned home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the Midlands[3] to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the park, of which he was really proud.
He remained bright and cheerful, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the brightness of his eyes, how proud he was of being alive.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown hair and strong body. She had big, wondering eyes, and a 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 R. A.[4], old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians[5]. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had an unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to learn art, and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague[6] and Berlin, to great Socialist conventions.
The two girls therefore were at once cosmopolitan and provincial.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they went to the forests with strong youths bearing guitars. They sang the Wandervogel[7] songs, and they were free. Free! to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered most. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their love-affairs by the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and anxious. Why couldn’t a girl be generous, and give the gift of herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most intimate arguments.
The sex business was glorified by poets who were mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew definitely that the beautiful freedom of a woman was much more wonderful than any sexual love. But men insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would turn nasty and spoil what was a very pleasant connexion. But a woman could take a man without really giving herself away. She could use this sex thing to have power over him. Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience. But he was a man of experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be ‘free’, and to ‘fulfil themselves’. She had never been able to be altogether herself. She blamed her husband.
