Page 70 - lady-chatterlys-lover

him, so when he came back, and went to the pit for a black-
smith’s job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really
very glad to get him...its almost impossible to find a good
man round here for a gamekeeper...and it needs a man who
knows the people.’
’And isn’t he married?’
’He was. But his wife went off with...with various men...
but finally with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she’s
living there still.’
’So this man is alone?’
’More or less! He has a mother in the village...and a child,
I believe.’
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly promi-
nent blue eyes, in which a certain vagueness was coming.
He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was
like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the
haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at
Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise
information, she felt all the background of his mind filling
up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It
made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the hu-
man soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding
shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to re-
cover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is
really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like
a bruise, which Only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it
fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered