Cold Blooded Lover (Don't Call Me Hero Book 3) Download Epub Mobi Pdf Fb2
Gaynelle Alnutt
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take ittragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, westart to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. Itis rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future:but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live,no matter how many skies have fallen.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for amonth on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back toFlanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later,more or less in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-threeyears old, and he was twenty-nine.
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His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bitsseemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in thedoctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return tolife again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down,paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to hishome, Wragby Hall, the family 'seat'. His father had died, Cliffordwas now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley.They came to start housekeeping and married life in the ratherforlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income.Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there wereno near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippledfor ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford camehome to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive whilehe could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in awheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motorattachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden andinto the fine melancholy park, of which he was really so proud,though he pretended to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to someextent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful,almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-lookingface, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulderswere broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He wasexpensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street.Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight vacancyof a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained waswonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxiousbrightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, ofbeing alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside himhad perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank ofinsentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with softbrown hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusualenergy. She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, andseemed just to have come from her native village. It was not so atall. Her father was the once well-known R. A., old Sir MalcolmReid. Her mother had been one of the cultivated Fabians in thepalmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists and culturedsocialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might becalled an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had beentaken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and theyhad been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague andBerlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke inevery civilized tongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the leastdaunted by either art or ideal politics. It was their naturalatmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with thecosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure socialideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for musicamong other things. And they had had a good time there. They livedfreely among the students, they argued with the men overphilosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just asgood as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. Andthey tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars,twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free.Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in theforests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated youngfellows, free to do as they liked, and--above all--to say what theyliked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassionedinterchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs bythe time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked sopassionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in suchfreedom wanted, of course, the love connexion. The girls weredoubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it wassupposed to be so important. And the men were so humble andcraving. Why couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift ofherself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth withwhom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments,the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connexionwere only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of ananti-climax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and alittle inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one'sprivacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one'swhole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement ofan absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did agirl's life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connexions andsubjections.
And however one might sentimentalize it, this sex business wasone of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subjections. Poetswho glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there wassomething better, something higher. And now they knew it moredefinitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman wasinfinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The onlyunfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in thematter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with hisappetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a childhe would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was avery pleasant connexion. But a woman could yield to a man withoutyielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sexdid not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman couldtake a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she couldtake him without giving herself into his power. Rather she coulduse this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to holdherself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expendhimself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she couldprolong the connexion and achieve her orgasm and her crisis whilehe was merely her tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the warcame, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with ayoung man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unlessthey were profoundly interested, talking to one another. Theamazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was inpassionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour,resuming day after day for months...this they had never realizedtill it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men totalk to!--had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knewwhat a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid andsoul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or lessinevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had athrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, afinal spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, andvery like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of aparagraph, and a break in the theme.
L'amour avait passe par la, as somebody puts it. But hewas a man of experience himself, and let life take its course. Asfor the mother, a nervous invalid in the last few months of herlife, she wanted her girls to be 'free', and to 'fulfilthemselves'. She herself had never been able to be altogetherherself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was awoman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed herhusband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old impression ofauthority on her own mind or soul that she could not get rid of. Ithad nothing to do with Sir Malcolm, who left his nervously hostile,high-spirited wife to rule her own roost, while he went his ownway.
So the girls were 'free', and went back to Dresden, and theirmusic, and the university and the young men. They loved theirrespective young men, and their respective young men loved themwith all the passion of mental attraction. All the wonderful thingsthe young men thought and expressed and wrote, they thought andexpressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's young man wasmusical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for theiryoung women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did notknow it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: thatis, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle butunmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men andwomen: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her youngangularities softened, and her expression either anxious ortriumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes ofhis shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearlysuccumbed to the strange male power. But quickly they recoveredthemselves, took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free.Whereas the men, in gratitude to the woman for the sex experience,let their souls go out to her. And afterwards looked rather as ifthey had lost a shilling and found sixpence. Connie's man could bea bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is how men are!Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hateyou because you won't; and when you do have them they hate youagain, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except thatthey are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whateverthey get, let a woman do what she may.
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