Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. Thecataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up newlittle habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is nowno smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over theobstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war hadbrought the roof down over her head. And she had realised that one mustlive and learn.
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 orless in bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and hewas twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemedto grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands.Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with thelower 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, Clifford wasnow a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. Theycame to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn homeof the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister,but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elderbrother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could neverhave any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep theChatterley name alive while he could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in awheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment,so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the linemelancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended tobe 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-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, hishands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and wore handsomeneckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look,the slight vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained waswonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness ofhis eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But hehad been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some ofhis feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with softbrown hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy.She had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just tohave come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father wasthe once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had beenone of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days.Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda hadwhat might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. Theyhad been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and theyhad been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, togreat Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilisedtongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least dauntedby either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They wereat once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialismof art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music amongother things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely amongthe students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociologicaland artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: onlybetter, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests withsturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogelsongs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in theopen world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and--above all--to saywhat they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
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