Page 204 - lady-chatterlys-lover

’Goodnight Clifford! DO sleep well! The Racine gets into
one like a dream. Goodnight!’
She had drifted to the door. She was going without kiss-
ing him goodnight. He watched her with sharp, cold eyes.
So! She did not even kiss him goodnight, after he had spent
an evening reading to her. Such depths of callousness in
her! Even if the kiss was but a formality, it was on such for-
malities that life depends. She was a Bolshevik, really. Her
instincts were Bolshevistic! He gazed coldly and angrily at
the door whence she had gone. Anger!
And again the dread of the night came on him. He was a
network of nerves, anden he was not braced up to work, and
so full of energy: or when he was not listening-in, and so
utterly neuter: then he was haunted by anxiety and a sense
of dangerous impending void. He was afraid. And Connie
could keep the fear off him, if she would. But it was obvious
she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t. She was callous, cold and cal-
lous to all that he did for her. He gave up his life for her, and
she was callous to him. She only wanted her own way. ‘The
lady loves her will.’
Now it was a baby she was obsessed by. Just so that it
should be her own, all her own, and not his!
Clifford was so healthy, considering. He looked so well
and ruddy in the face, his shoulders were broad and strong,
his chest deep, he had put on flesh. And yet, at the same
time, he was afraid of death. A terrible hollow seemed to
menace him somewhere, somehow, a void, and into this
void his energy would collapse. Energyless, he felt at times
he was dead, really dead.

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