Cataclysm

The cataclysm has happened, but we've got to live. This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. Her husband Clifford had returned home from the war a cripple, unable to have children. He was not downcast for he could propel himself in a bath chair, yet he was a blank of insentience.

Constance was a ruddy-faced woman who had known the sex thing as an 18-year-old girl in 1913 when she had roamed the woods near Dresden with guitar-playing German youths, Twang-Twang! and her father, a man of experience, was now concerned she was unsuited to life as a demi-vierge.

Clifford and Connie had returned to Wragby Hall in 1920, yet despite its proximity to the earthy Nottinghamshire mining village of Tevershall, there was no connection between the two. They lived in the world of ideas, where Clifford's insubstantial writing had brought him a certain celebrity among the well-to-do London literati.

"The penis is much overvalued," he declared to Connie. "But if you are desperate for a child, I would overlook an act of congress on your part and raise whatever may result as my own."

Connie was fading, her womb deprived of the life seed, and she found a connection in the contours of Michaelis. He was an outsider with the nobility of a Negro! A man despised for being arriviste! And yet he had the tiny, disconnected penis of the London Modernist. She felt nothing and he had his crisis all too quickly, leaving her to achieve her own by rubbing herself abstractedly against him.

"This is my England," Clifford said, vibrating with the bitch-goddess Success, as the gamekeeper tended his chicks. Connie's eyes took in the man's red moustache and Nottinghamshire loins. Oh for the integrated life! How dare she be defrauded of her womanhood!

Later that day she walked alone to the gamekeeper's hut. "What's your name?" she asked. "And what are you doing?"

"Mellors, mi' Lady," he replied. "Ah've bin killin' a bad pussy."

Oh Persephone! Oh anemones! Connie hated him... [continues]

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