the paramount ridiculousness of his own position? For willy-nilly he took
his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war...dead. Too much death and
horror. A man needed support arid comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in
the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously
isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connexions. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the
weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or
because of, the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial
Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their
own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their
father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely
mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that
it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt
his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of
the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon
with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two
people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he
married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he
and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which
was beyond sex, and beyond a man's `satisfaction`. Clifford anyhow was not
just keen on his `satisfaction', as so many men seemed to be. No, the
intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an
accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes
which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law
Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.
Chapter 2
Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss
Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was
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