Page 207 - lady-chatterlys-lover

the colonel who had loved him and whom he had loved: the
several years that he had been an officer, a lieutenant with
a very fair chance of being a captain. Then the death of the
colonel from pneumonia, and his own narrow escape from
death: his damaged health: his deep restlessness: his leav-
ing the army and coming back to England to be a working
man again.
He was temporizing with life. He had thought he would
be safe, at least for a time, in this wood. There was no shoot-
ing as yet: he had to rear the pheasants. He would have
no guns to serve. He would be alone, and apart from life,
which was all he wanted. He had to have some sort of a
background. And this was his native place. There was even
his mother, though she had never meant very much to him.
And he could go on in life, existing from day to day, without
connexion and without hope. For he did not know what to
do with himself.
He did not know what to do with himself. Since he had
been an officer for some years, and had mixed among the
other officers and civil servants, with their wives and fami-
lies, he had lost all ambition to ‘get on’. There was a toughness,
a curious rubbernecked toughness and unlivingness about
the middle and upper classes, as he had known them, which
just left him feeling cold and different from them.
So, he had come back to his own class. To find there,
what he had forgotten during his absence of years, a pet-
tiness and a vulgarity of manner extremely distasteful. He
admitted now at last, how important manner was. He ad-
mitted, also, how important it was even TO PRETEND not

0 Lady Chatterly’s Lover