A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON CLASSIC LITERATURE
Editors Note: The connection to classic literature here is too obvious to comment upon. The writer is clearly attempting to reinterpret the literary novel from an altered perspective, striving ineptly to capture something of its original ethos, language and philosophy, hampered only by his inadequacies and authorial inabilities. We offer this text to devotees of 'Literotica' for the purposes of amused entertainment, and nothing more.
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From the start it had been a marriage of inconvenience. Clifford loved the sprawling ancestral grounds of Wragby Hall. His family had owned the estate for generations. But this age of the 'Common Man' holds little sympathy with aristocratic tradition. And the great house had gradually slumped through decades of slumbering neglect into insolvency. While Constance came from a nouveau-riche textile family who owned factories in the industrial squalor of nearby Tevershall. They – boorish and uncouth, had wealth, but no social status. He had all the social connections that a family tree branching back to 1066 could bestow, but no cash. The resulting union made perfect sense. Perfect cold, calculating, inevitable sense. So the two families were united in matrimony. Wragby Hall was saved. But at such a price.
Clifford was a private man. He enjoyed a postprandial brandy with his briar pipe in the musty hush of his library. He liked meandering rambles through the estate with nothing but his hound for company. Constance – 'Connie', loved the social whirl of parties, shopping expeditions in the city, gossip and the good-life. The latest Hollywood Talkie, or new American dance-fad. Things Clifford knew nothing about, and cared less. The honeymoon was a disaster. His attempts to fulfil his matrimonial duties failed catastrophically. She was obviously physically unimpressed by him. He suspected, correctly, that she had been intimate with more than one man previously. That she was a 'New Woman', more well-versed in matters sexual than he. And his failure to respond to her allure, his inability to achieve erection, provoked only scorn and derision. With a little sympathy, with some warmth and compassion, it might have been different. But she treated his impotence as though it were a crippling disability. Something to be pitied at best, or, he suspected, mocked in sniggery secret conversation with delightedly outraged friends behind his back.
They had separate bedrooms. Met over breakfast in frosty formality. And did little else in common.
He watched Connie preparing for an automobile trip into town. Wasn't the chauffeur being just a little over-familiar? When he helped her up into the car wasn't his touch a little more familiar than the demands of his role made strictly necessary? Clifford turned away. It was one thing to be humiliated in the privacy of their bedroom. It was another to have his failing the object of public knowledge, and his wife's infidelities so shamelessly flaunted.
Don't speak. Don't say a word. Clifford Chatterley turned away, unable to watch more. He strolled through the outbuildings without any particular destination in mind. Walking was enough. It was a warm autumn, the trees overhanging the pungent stables already golden, but there was little breeze, and the sun slanting over the house was pleasant. He was deeply troubled, yet the world held its compensations. Over the style the rutted neglected footpath took him down towards the lake edge. The only ripples to disturb its clear surface were those that followed the wake of startled ducks, scudding away from him. He strolled along the shingle around the perimeter of still water. The trees climbing the slope above him to open fields where sheep grazed. It was the kind of day meant to be enjoyed in all its natural purity, but for the weight of doubts and remorse he carried.
So preoccupied was he that he almost failed to notice Mellors. The gamekeeper was occupied with repairing a dry-stone wall that rode its way down a particularly steep incline, overgrown with briar, dense ivy and thistles, marking the division between fields. Stooping to lift rough-edged stone and fitting them into the spaces where the structure had tumbled as the result of weather or perhaps just the inevitable pressures of aging.
'Here, Oliver, allow me to assist you' insisted Clifford, slipping off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
Mellors turned slowly, as was his wont. A man of few words. A ruddy healthy-looking face, used to the outdoors. They were similar in age, but a social gulf of class and background separated their lives. He was stripped to the waist. 'If you be so minded, Sir.'
'Yes, I be so minded.' Clifford kicked out at the nearest stone. 'This brute next, what?' Mellors merely nodded once. He hefted it up. Heavier than he'd anticipated, and it grimed his hands with lichen and dust. Mellors took it without effort, and Clifford watched with a kind of mute admiration. The way he was able to slot seemingly incompatible shapes into a tight unified structure. They worked in silence, pausing only to wipe perspiration from their foreheads. At length Mellors stood back, rubbing his hands together. Appraising the task, completed to his satisfaction. Clifford could smell the sweat-odour of the man.
'What now?'
'Now we rid ourselves of this dirt' smiled the gamekeeper, unbuckling the heavy belt on his loose trousers. He wore long off-white combinations beneath. Clifford hoped he would go no further. But no, he simply rolled them down and off too, then strode naked into the shallow water. Chatterley hesitated. He was uncomfortable with nudity. He'd always been of that nature. But he was soiled and sweat-moist. The water so cleanly inviting. He glanced nervously about. There was no-one. Nothing to see but sheep. Quickly, before his resolve failed him, he undressed, folding his clothes into a neat pile on the grass. Mellors was now swimming with strong strokes some way from the shore. The shingle of tiny stones beneath his bare toes bit sharply, first contact with the rippling water was shockingly cold, but also extremely pleasant. He waded out to knee-depth and paused, looking around him. He could see the expanse of glistening water. The slopes of green fields and trees rising above. The dance of dragonflies skimming the still surface. Everything as it should be.
He submerged and swam. Feeling the grimy tiredness cleansing away from him, dissolving in a cloudy stain that became yet more tenuous, fading to nothing. It was too cold to swim for long. They returned to lie together on a small grassy headland near the repaired wall. Mellors lay on his stomach. Chatterley at first sat with his knees drawn up tightly to his chest. But the pale sun was warming. He relaxed, and lay back. Mellors raised himself on one elbow, reached out to pluck a long grass-stem and nibbled it contemplatively.
'I have no place asking you, Sir. You seem troubled. Is that so?'
'You know how it is. Life is complicated. It taxes the mind excessively with its complexity.'
'You are wrong, beg pardon for saying this. Look around you. There is birth, there is growth, and there is death. That is all. That is enough.'
'You are a philosopher, my friend. Perhaps I am asking the wrong questions?'
Mellors ran the palm of his hand purposefully through the muddy edge of the water. Lifted his hand towards where Clifford reclined, and, extending two muddy fingers, leaving a trail of dirt across the other man's chest. 'The answer you're seeking lies in the soil' he said. Drawing muddy fingers down the ribcage of his chest, down across his stomach. 'The soil, the flesh, and the seed' he said. Massaging dirt into Clifford's testicle-sack. The unexpected intimate contact was startling. Clifford froze, unable to move, his breath stilled in his throat. Yet Mellors was rubbing gritty circles around his moist groin, touching and nudging his flaccid penis as he did so.
Even more disturbing his organ was firming at the touch. Why, when it had stubbornly refused to react to Constance, was it erecting now, in the presence of this horny-handed son of the soil? Yet reacting it certainly was. Quivering into full stiffness. He was minded to push the interfering hand away. But instead he lay still, and allowed it to continue. By now Mellors was shifting his attention more specifically to the firming shaft, sharp particles of grit mixed in with the traces of mud adding a teasing sting to the awakening organ. And it was amazing to Clifford that this hand that could so easily snap the neck of a rabbit, could yet be so tender.
'This is the way that men console each other' said the gamekeeper softly. He voice oddly soothing. 'I saw conscripts doing it during military campaigns, far from home. The John Thomas knows little of good and evil, it has its own urgencies that cannot be denied.' He had now resettled his body, so that as he easily masturbated Clifford, he lay on his side, making his own thighs open for appraisal. His large penis lying across his leg, its heavy presence demanding attention. 'It is best done when the favour is returned.'
Clifford hesitated. Uncertain. Every action must have a reaction. Every debt must be paid in kind. He felt rising panic, but surely that is better than feeling nothing at all? Mellors slowed his caressing grip, loosed his fingers ever so slightly, and ceased his teasing motion. As if offering quid pro quo. Clifford was unwilling to comply, but wanted him to stop even less. If ever there had been a serpent in Eden to seduce and tempt the unwary from the path of virtue, it must resemble the hooded monster in the gamekeeper's groin. After a moment's pause he determinedly reached out, ran his own palm through the moist earth, and smeared the slimy residue along the length of Mellors' larger 'John Thomas'. A flame at his touch. When he circled and enclosed its girth in his dirty fingers, it was alive, flexing and stirring in response. Emboldened and fascinated, he found himself easing the foreskin back, exposing the glistening glans. And began to mimic the attentions the gamekeeper was bestowing on his own excited body. It came surprisingly naturally. Satisfied by the reciprocation, Mellors resumed his masturbatory motion up and down Clifford's lesser length. Chatterley squirmed in pleasure as sensation crawled across his groin, drawing energy from the very core of his being.
When the tingling at the base of his spine exploded into orgasm it was overwhelming, so powerful his hips first rose from the grass, then its intensity forced his spasm-wracked body to double-up, contracting in upon himself. A series of eruptions sprayed up his stomach as high as his chest. While caught within its release, he continued to pump Mellors, reluctant now to relinquish possession of the thick meat-column, until the gamekeeper's ejaculation followed, spraying white fluid up across his stomach and across Clifford's fingers. Afterwards, for a long moment they lay side by side, breathing heavily in unison. With Clifford becalmed in a fine melancholy pause, adrift in an ocean rolling its dark dumb mass. There was mud beneath his nails, and another man's semen on his fingers. He no longer cared. We all come from such primal slime. Then both began to laugh at the shared joy. And once begun it was impossible to stop. As if the penis-evacuation had vomited away all the vexing darkness out of his life. It was too long since Clifford Chatterley had laughed.
