‘Beer!’ said Connie.

  ‘Beer for me, please!’ said Hilda, with a mock sort of shyness. He looked at her and blinked.

  He took a blue jug and tramped to the scullery. When he came back with the beer, his face had changed again.

  Connie sat down by the door, and Hilda sat in his seat, with the back to the wall, against the window corner.

  ‘That is his chair,’ said Connie softly.’ And Hilda rose as if it had burnt her.

  ‘Sit yer still, sit yer still! Ta’e ony cheer as yo’n a mind to, none of us is th’ big bear,’ he said, with complete equanimity.

  And he brought Hilda a glass, and poured her beer first from the blue jug.

  ‘As for cigarettes,’ he said, ‘I’ve got none, but ‘appen you’ve got your own. I dunna smoke, mysen. Shall y’ eat summat?’ He turned direct to Connie. ‘Shall t’eat a smite o’ summat, if I bring it thee? Tha can usually do wi’ a bite.’ He spoke the vernacular with a curious calm assurance, as if he were the landlord of the Inn.

  ‘What is there?’ asked Connie, flushing.

  ‘Boiled ham, cheese, pickled wa’nuts, if yer like. — Nowt much.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Connie. ‘Won’t you, Hilda?’

  Hilda looked up at him.

  ‘Why do you speak Yorkshire?’ she said softly.

  ‘That! That’s non Yorkshire, that’s Derby.’

  He looked back at her with that faint, distant grin.

  ‘Derby, then! Why do you speak Derby? You spoke natural English at first.’

  ‘Did Ah though? An’ canna Ah change if Ah’m a mind to ‘t? Nay, nay, let me talk Derby if it suits me. If yo’n nowt against it.’

  ‘It sounds a little affected,’ said Hilda.

  ‘Ay, ‘appen so! An’ up i’ Tevershall yo’d sound affected.’ He looked again at her, with a queer calculating distance, along his cheek-bone: as if to say: Yi, an’ who are you?

  He tramped away to the pantry for the food.

  The sisters sat in silence. He brought another plate, and knife and fork. Then he said:

  ‘An’ if it’s the same to you, I s’ll ta’e my coat off like I allers do.’

  And he took off his coat, and hung it on the peg, then sat down to table in his shirt-sleeves: a shirt of thin, cream-coloured flannel.

  ‘‘Elp yerselves!’ he said. ‘‘Elp yerselves! Dunna wait f’r axin’!’ He cut the bread, then sat motionless. Hilda felt, as Connie once used to, his power of silence and distance. She saw his smallish, sensitive, loose hand on the table. He was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! acting!

  ‘Still!’ she said, as she took a little cheese. ‘It would be more natural if you spoke to us in normal English, not in vernacular.’

  He looked at her, feeling her devil of a will.

  ‘Would it?’ he said in the normal English. ‘Would it? Would anything that was said between you and me be quite natural, unless you said you wished me to hell before your sister ever saw me again: and unless I said something almost as unpleasant back again? Would anything else be natural?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Hilda. ‘Just good manners would be quite natural.’

  ‘Second nature, so to speak!’ he said: then he began to laugh. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I’m weary o’ manners. Let me be!’

  Hilda was frankly baffled and furiously annoyed. After all, he might show that he realized he was being honoured. Instead of which, with his play-acting and lordly airs, he seemed to think it was he who was conferring the honour. Just impudence! Poor misguided Connie, in the man’s clutches!

  The three ate in silence. Hilda looked to see what his table-manners were like. She could not help realizing that he was instinctively much more delicate and well-bred than herself. She had a certain Scottish clumsiness. And moreover, he had all the quiet self-contained assurance of the English, no loose edges. It would be very difficult to get the better of him.

  But neither would he get the better of her.

  ‘And do you really think,’ she said, a little more humanly, ‘it’s worth the risk.’

  ‘Is what worth what risk?’

  ‘This escapade with my sister.’

  He flickered his irritating grin.

  ‘Yo’ maun ax ‘er!’ Then he looked at Connie.

  ‘Tha comes o’ thine own accord, lass, doesn’t ter? It’s non me as forces thee?’

  Connie looked at Hilda.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t cavil, Hilda.’

  ‘Naturally I don’t want to. But someone has to think about things. You’ve got to have some sort of continuity in your life. You can’t just go making a mess.’

  There was a moment’s pause.

  ‘Eh, continuity!’ he said. ‘An’ what by that? What continuity ave yer got i’ your life? I thought you was gettin’ divorced. What continuity’s that? Continuity o’ yer own stubbornness. I can see that much. An’ what good’s it goin’ to do yer? You’ll be sick o’ yer continuity afore yer a fat sight older. A stubborn woman an er own self-will: ay, they make a fast continuity, they do. Thank heaven, it isn’t me as ‘as got th’ ‘andlin’ of yer!’

  ‘What right have you to speak like that to me?’ said Hilda.

  ‘Right! What right ha’ yo’ ter start harnessin’ other folks i’ your continuity? Leave folks to their own continuities.’

  ‘My dear man, do you think I am concerned with you?’ said Hilda softly.

  ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘Yo’ are. For it’s a force-put. Yo’ more or less my sister-in-law.’

  ‘Still far from it, I assure you.

  ‘Not a’ that far, I assure you. I’ve got my own sort o’ continuity, back your life! Good as yours, any day. An’ if your sister there comes ter me for a bit o’ cunt an’ tenderness, she knows what she’s after. She’s been in my bed afore: which you ‘aven’t, thank the Lord, with your continuity.’ There was a dead pause, before he added: ‘ — Eh, I don’t wear me breeches arse-forrards. An’ if I get a windfall, I thank my stars. A man gets a lot of enjoyment out o’ that lass theer, which is more than anybody gets out o’ th’ likes o’ you. Which is a pity, for you might appen a’ bin a good apple, ‘stead of a handsome crab. Women like you needs proper graftin’.’

  He was looking at her with an odd, flickering smile, faintly sensual and appreciative.

  ‘And men like you,’ she said, ‘ought to be segregated: justifying their own vulgarity and selfish lust.’

  ‘Ay, ma’am! It’s a mercy there’s a few men left like me. But you deserve what you get: to be left severely alone.’

  Hilda had risen and gone to the door. He rose and took his coat from the peg.

  ‘I can find my way quite well alone,’ she said.

  ‘I doubt you can’t,’ he replied easily.

  They tramped in ridiculous file down the lane again, in silence. An owl still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it.

  The car stood untouched, a little dewy. Hilda got in and started the engine. The other two waited.

  ‘All I mean,’ she said from her entrenchment, ‘is that I doubt if you’ll find it’s been worth it, either of you!’

  ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ he said, out of the darkness. ‘But it’s meat an’ drink to me.

  The lights flared out.

  ‘Don’t make me wait in the morning,’

  ‘No, I won’t. Goodnight!’

  The car rose slowly on to the highroad, then slid swiftly away, leaving the night silent.

  Connie timidly took his arm, and they went down the lane. He did not speak. At length she drew him to a standstill.

  ‘Kiss me!’ she murmured.

  ‘Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down,’ he said.

  That amused her. She still kept hold of his arm, and they went quickly down the lane, in silence. She was so glad to be with him, just now. She shivered, knowing that Hilda might have snatched her away. He was inscrutably silent.

  When they were in the cottage again, she almost jumped with pleasure, that she should be free of her sister.

  ‘But you were horrid to Hilda,’ she said to him.

  ‘She should ha’ been slapped in time.’

  ‘But why? and she’s so nice.’

  He didn’t answer, went round doing the evening chores, with a quiet, inevitable sort of motion. He was outwardly angry, but not with her. So Connie felt. And his anger gave him a peculiar handsomeness, an inwardness and glisten that thrilled her and made her limbs go molten.

  Still he took no notice of her.

  Till he sat down and began to unlace his boots. Then he looked up at her from under his brows, on which the anger still sat firm.

  ‘Shan’t you go up?’ he said. ‘There’s a candle!’

  He jerked his head swiftly to indicate the candle burning on the table. She took it obediently, and he watched the full curve of her hips as she went up the first stairs.

  It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.

  Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.

  She had often wondered what Abelard meant, when he said that in their year of love he and Heloise had passed through all the stages and refinements of passion. The same thing, a thousand years ago: ten thousand years ago! The same on the Greek vases, everywhere! The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.

  In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

  And what a reckless devil the man was! really like a devil! One had to be strong to bear him. But it took some getting at, the core of the physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her!

  And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it! She knew now. At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this phallic hunting out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that she would never get it. Now suddenly there it was, and a man was sharing her last and final nakedness, she was shameless.

  What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy, a bit shameful, like Clifford! Like Michaelis even! Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating. The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it, really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer fiery sensuality, not messiness.

  Ah, God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.

  Till his rousing waked her completely. He was sitting up in bed, looking down at her. She saw her own nakedness in his eyes, immediate knowledge of her. And the fluid, male knowledge of herself seemed to flow to her from his eyes and wrap her voluptuously. Oh, how voluptuous and lovely it was to have limbs and body half-asleep, heavy and suffused with passion.

  ‘Is it time to wake up?’ she said.

  ‘Half past six.’

  She had to be at the lane-end at eight. Always, always, always this compulsion on one!

  ‘I might make the breakfast and bring it up here; should I?’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes!’

  Flossie whimpered gently below. He got up and threw off his pyjamas, and rubbed himself with a towel. When the human being is full of courage and full of life, how beautiful it is! So she thought, as she watched him in silence.

  ‘Draw the curtain, will you?’

  The sun was shining already on the tender green leaves of morning, and the wood stood bluey-fresh, in the nearness. She sat up in bed, looking dreamily out through the dormer window, her naked arms pushing her naked breasts together. He was dressing himself. She was half-dreaming of life, a life together with him: just a life.

  He was going, fleeing from her dangerous, crouching nakedness.

  ‘Have I lost my nightie altogether?’ she said.

  He pushed his hand down in the bed, and pulled out the bit of flimsy silk.

  ‘I knowed I felt silk at my ankles,’ he said.

  But the night-dress was slit almost in two.

  ‘Never mind!’ she said. ‘It belongs here, really. I’ll leave it.’

  ‘Ay, leave it, I can put it between my legs at night, for company. There’s no name nor mark on it, is there?’

  She slipped on the torn thing, and sat dreamily looking out of the window. The window was open, the air of morning drifted in, and the sound of birds. Birds flew continuously past. Then she saw Flossie roaming out. It was morning.

  Downstairs she heard him making the fire, pumping water, going out at the back door. By and by came the smell of bacon, and at length he came upstairs with a huge black tray that would only just go through the door. He set the tray on the bed, and poured out the tea. Connie squatted in her torn nightdress, and fell on her food hungrily. He sat on the one chair, with his plate on his knees.

  ‘How good it is!’ she said. ‘How nice to have breakfast together.’

  He ate in silence, his mind on the time that was quickly passing. That made her remember.

  ‘Oh, how I wish I could stay here with you, and Wragby were a million miles away! It’s Wragby I’m going away from really. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Ay!’

  ‘And you promise we will live together and have a life together, you and me! You promise me, don’t you?’

  ‘Ay! When we can.’

  ‘Yes! And we will! we will, won’t we?’ she leaned over, making the tea spill, catching his wrist.

  ‘Ay!’ he said, tidying up the tea.

  ‘We can’t possibly not live together now, can we?’ she said appealingly.

  He looked up at her with his flickering grin.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘Only you’ve got to start in twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘Have I?’ she cried. Suddenly he held up a warning finger, and rose to his feet.

  Flossie had given a short bark, then three loud sharp yaps of warning.

  Silent, he put his plate on the tray and went downstairs. Constance heard him go down the garden path. A bicycle bell tinkled outside there.

  ‘Morning, Mr Mellors! Registered letter!’

  ‘Oh ay! Got a pencil?’

  ‘Here y’are!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Canada!’ said the stranger’s voice.

  ‘Ay! That’s a mate o’ mine out there in British Columbia. Dunno what he’s got to register.’

  ‘‘Appen sent y’a fortune, like.’

  ‘More like wants summat.’

  Pause.

  ‘Well! Lovely day again!’

  ‘Ay!’

  ‘Morning!’

  ‘Morning!’

  After a time he came upstairs again, looking a little angry.

  ‘Postman,’ he said.

  ‘Very early!’ she replied.

  ‘Rural round; he’s mostly here by seven, when he does come.

  ‘Did your mate send you a fortune?’

  ‘No! Only some photographs and papers about a place out there in British Columbia.’

  ‘Would you go there?’

  ‘I thought perhaps we might.’

  ‘Oh yes! I believe it’s lovely!’

  But he was put out by the postman’s coming.

  ‘Them damn bikes, they’re on you afore you know where you are. I hope he twigged nothing.’

  ‘After all, what could he twig!’

  ‘You must get up now, and get ready. I’m just goin’ ter look round outside.’

  She saw him go reconnoitring into the lane, with dog and gun. She went downstairs and washed, and was ready by the time he came back, with the few things in the little silk bag.

  He locked up, and they set off, but through the wood, not down the lane. He was being wary.

  ‘Don’t you think one lives for times like last night?’ she said to him.

  ‘Ay! But there’s the rest o’times to think on,’ he replied, rather short.

  They plodded on down the overgrown path, he in front, in silence.

  ‘And we will live together and make a life together, won’t we?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Ay!’ he replied, striding on without looking round. ‘When t’ time comes! Just now you’re off to Venice or somewhere.’

  She followed him dumbly, with sinking heart. Oh, now she was wae to go!

  At last he stopped.