`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?' asked Connie.
`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public, if it comes to that.
There's nothing really in my plays to make them popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will have to be...for the time being.'
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little.
He seemed so old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said Clifford contemplatively.
`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly, with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
`And are you alone?' asked Connie.
`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek, so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry. Oh, yes, I must marry.'
`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will it be an effort?'
He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman...'
`Try an American,' said Clifford.
`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand dollars from America alone.
Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory Ne*gro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth;
that momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha aims at, and which Ne*groes express sometimes without ever aiming at it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance.
And then a swimming through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion, amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider!