family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie
felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was
nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.
Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big
and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a
wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in
which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost
thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all.
Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very
personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and
yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary
and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the
whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely
an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to
modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.
Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted
everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in
the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to
Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as if the
whole of his being were in his stories.
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He
talked everything over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and
she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body
and sex had to rouse up and pass into theme stories of his. This thrilled
her and absorbed her.
Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the
house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, arid the
dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female you could hardly call her a
parlour-maid, or even a woman...who waited at table, had been in the house
for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was
awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these
endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical
cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook,
an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest
the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty
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