Read Lady Chatterley's Lover for Free Online

a fury, ‘they don’t grow in Palestine!’ Pausing for breath he went on: ‘No, we are rooted in spite and envy. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.’
    ‘What’s the fruit of the bo-tree?’ persisted May.
    ‘It has no fruit,’ said Hammond.
    ‘No bos?’ chuckled May.
    ‘I don’t agree with you, Hammond,’ said Clifford running his wheelchair forward.
    ‘Ow, Christ!’ yelled Dukes.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ said Clifford.
    ‘You’ve run over my bloody foot,’ howled Dukes.
    Clifford told Hammond, ‘I don’t think we are as spiteful as you say.’
    ‘Oh, my bloody foot,’ said Dukes, hopping round the room, out the door, along the passage, out into the garden, through a gate and across a ploughed field and back. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing like a ploughed field to cure a crushed foot. By the by when I was away was there any mail for me?’
    Hammond was in full flow. ‘I infinitely prefer spite to the concocted sugaries.’
    ‘I’m not allowed concocted sugaries,’ said Dukes, ‘I’m a diabetic.’
    ‘Real knowledge’, said Hammond, ‘comes out of the whole corpus, out of your belly and your penis.’
    ‘Well,’ said May, ‘I can’t speak for others but I never had any real knowledge come out of my prick, though I’ve listened very closely.’
    ‘Perhaps you’ve got a stupid prick,’ said Hammond, laughing fit to burst. ‘Oh dear, I could do with a drink,’ he said. Constance took him to a tap.
    ‘Hammond thinks we should lead a mental life,’ said Clifford, who thought Hammond was mental.
    Hammond continued. ‘Life is like an apple tree.’
    ‘Why is life like an apple tree?’ said May.
    ‘How should I know?’ said Hammond, blowing his nose in a paper handkerchief and going through it. ‘If’, said Hammond cleaning up the mess, ‘if you’ve got nothing in life but the mental life, you are a plucked apple.’
    ‘Well then,’ said Dukes, ‘we’re all plucked apples.’
    ‘Yes,’ said May. ‘I’m a Granny Smith.’
    ‘Get plucked,’ said Dukes.
    A new guest had joined the party, a Mr Berry. ‘What do you all think of Bolshevism?’ he said as everything led up to it.
    Clifford asked among them all, then said, ‘I’ve just asked and none of us ever think of Bolshevism, why?’
    ‘Bolshevism’, said May, ‘is a hatred of things called bourgeois.’
    ‘What things do you call bourgeois?’ said Clifford, oiling his wheelchair. ‘Would you call a wooden leg bourgeois?’
    ‘If it was on a sailor, no, but if the Queen had one, yes,’ said Dukes, who sprang to attention when he mentioned the Queen. ‘Here’, he said, ‘is a photograph of her.’
    Clifford took the photograph. ‘This isn’t the Queen,’ he said. ‘This is a photograph of a horse.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Dukes. ‘I haven’t got one of the Queen.’
    ‘I don’t think the Queen with a wooden leg is bourgeois,’ said Hammond. ‘I’d say she was aristocracy.’
    ‘Ah yes,’ said May. ‘She is aristocracy but her wooden leg is bourgeois.’
    ‘To be a Communist’, said Hammond, ‘you must submerge yourself in the greater thing.’
    At the mention of the ‘greater thing’ Constance thought of Paddy and his.
    ‘The only time I submerged myself was at Lewisham‘ municipal baths, does that make me a Communist?’ said May laughing.
    ‘Russian Communism is nothing to be laughed at,’ said Clifford.
    ‘Oh, I’m sure they can’t hear me from here,’ said May.
    ‘I can think of nothing worse than being a Bolshevik,’ said Hammond.
    ‘Yes, you could be Tom Loon, Dick Squats, Len Lighthower, Lord Mountbatten or Eric Grins, any of those,’ said Clifford.
    Mr Berry changed the direction of the argument to NorNorEast, roughly parallel with the London and North Eastern line to King’s Cross where, in fact, at this moment the eleven-fifty train was arriving. By coincidence the engine-driver’s name was Dick Squats.
    ‘Do you believe in love?’ Berry said.
    ‘Oh,’ said