John Thomas & Lady Jane

She was nearly at the wide riding when he came up and flung his naked arm round her soft, naked-wet middle. She gave a shriek and straightened herself and the heap of her soft, chill flesh came up against his body. He pressed it all up against him, madly, the heap of soft, chilled female flesh that became quickly warm as flame, in contact. The rain streamed on them till they smoked. He gathered her lovely, heavy posteriors one in each hand and pressed them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in the rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her on the path, in the roaring silence of the rain, and short and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal.

He got up in an instant, wiping the rain from his eyes.

‘Come in,’ he said, and they started running back to the hut. He ran straight and swift: he didn’t like the rain. But she came slower, gathering forget-me-nots and campion and bluebells, running a few steps and watching him fleeing away from her.

When she came with her flowers, panting to the hut, he had already started a fire, and the twigs were crackling. Her sharp breasts rose and fell, her hair was plastered down with rain, her face was flushed ruddy and her body glistened and trickled. Wide-eyed and breathless, with a small wet head and full, trickling, na‹ve haunches, she looked another creature.

He took the old sheet and rubbed her down, she standing like a child. Then he rubbed himself having shut the door of the hut. The fire was blazing up. She ducked her head in the other end of the sheet, and rubbed her wet hair.

‘We’re drying ourselves together on the same towel, we shall quarrel!’ he said.

She looked up for a moment, her hair all odds and ends.

[...]


She turned round and climbed into his lap, clinging to him. ‘Kiss me!’ she whispered.

And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their minds, and at last she was sad.

She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fire-glow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.

‘Flowers stops out of doors all weathers,’ he said. ‘They have no houses.’

‘Not even a hut!’ she murmured.

With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mound of Venus.

‘There!’ he said. ‘There’s forget-me-nots in the right place!’

She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.

‘Doesn’t it look pretty!’ she said.

‘Pretty as life,’ he replied.

And he stuck a pink campion-bud among the hair.

‘There! That’s me where you won’t forget me! That’s Moses in the bull-rushes.’

‘You don’t mind, do you, that I’m going away?’ she asked wistfully, looking up into his face.

But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite blank.

‘You do as you wish,’ he said.

And he spoke in good English.

‘But I won’t go if you don’t wish it,’ she said, clinging to him.

There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire. The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said nothing.


[...]


‘Ay! And you? Are you the Lady of the Red-Hot Mortar?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes! You’re Sir Pestle and I’m Lady Mortar.’

‘All right, then I’m knighted. John Thomas is Sir John, to your Lady Jane.’

‘Yes! John Thomas is knighted! I’m my-lady-maiden-hair, and you must have flowers too. Yes!’

She threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-gold hair above his penis.

‘There!’ she said. ‘Charming! Charming! Sir John!’

And she pushed a bit of forget-me-not in the dark hair of his breast.

‘And you won’t forget me there, will you?’ She kissed him on the breast, and made two bits of forget-me-not lodge one over each nipple, kissing him again.

‘Make a calendar of me!’ he said. He laughed, and the flowers shook from his breast.

[...]


But he was coming back, trotting strangely, and carrying flowers. She was a little afraid of him, as if he were not quite human. And when he came near, his eyes looked into hers, but she could not understand the meaning.

He had brought columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle in small bud. He fastened fluffy young oak-sprays round her breasts, sticking in tufts of bluebells and campion: and in her navel he poised a pink campion flower, and in her maiden-hair were forget-me-nots and woodruff.

‘That’s you in all your glory!’ he said. ‘Lady Jane, at her wedding with John Thomas.’

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his navel. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his moustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

‘This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,’ he said. ‘An’ we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their ways. Maybe — ’





DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley's Lover


Me entran escalofrios cuando leo esto.
Ilustración de la gran gran Raquel Aparicio Torinos.