Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  She began to tremble. He wanted to impose himself on her. And he began to shudder. She wanted to desert him, to leave him a prey to the open, with the unclean dogs of the darkness setting on to devour him. He must beat her, and make her stay with him. Whereas she fought to keep herself free of him.

  They went their ways now shadowed and stained with blood, feeling the world far off, unable to give help. Till she began to get tired. After a certain point, she became impassive, detached utterly from him. He was always ready to burst out murderously against her. Her soul got up and left him, she went her way. Nevertheless in her apparent blitheness, that made his soul black with opposition, she trembled as if she bled.

  And ever and again, the pure love came in sunbeams between them, when she was like a flower in the sun to him, so beautiful, so shining, so intensely dear that he could scarcely bear it. Then as if his soul had six wings of bliss he stood absorbed in praise, feeling the radiance from the Almighty beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation.

  And ever and again he appeared to her as the dread flame of power. Sometimes, when he stood in the doorway, his face lit up, he seemed like an Annunciation to her, her heart beat fast. And she watched him, suspended. He had a dark, burning being that she dreaded and resisted. She was subject to him as to the Angel of the Presence. She waited upon him and heard his will, and she trembled in his service.

  Then all this passed away. Then he loved her for her childishness and for her strangeness to him, for the wonder of her soul which was different from his soul, and which made him genuine when he would be false. And she loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, or for the way he came through a door with his face open and eager. She loved his ringing, eager voice, and the touch of the unknown about him, his absolute simplicity.

  Yet neither of them was quite satisfied. He felt, somewhere, that she did not respect him. She only respected him as far as he was related to herself. For what he was, beyond her, she had no care. She did not care for what he represented in himself. It is true, he did not know himself what he represented. But whatever it was she did not really honour it. She did no service to his work as a lace-designer, nor to himself as bread-winner. Because he went down to the office and worked every day-that entitled him to no respect or regard from her, he knew. Rather she despised him for it. And he almost loved her for this, though at first it maddened him like an insult.

  What was much deeper, she soon came to combat his deepest feelings. What he thought about life and about society and mankind did not matter very much to her: he was right enough to be insignificant. This was again galling to him. She would judge beyond him on these things. But at length he came to accept her judgments, discovering them as if they were his own. It was not here the deep trouble lay. The deep root of his enmity lay in the fact that she jeered at his soul. He was inarticulate and stupid in thought. But to some things he clung passionately. He loved the Church. If she tried to get out of him, what he believed, then they were both soon in a white rage.

  Did he believe the water turned to wine at Cana? She would drive him to the thing as a historical fact: so much rain-water-look at it-can it become grape-juice, wine? For an instant, he saw with the clear eyes of the mind and said no, his clear mind, answering her for a moment, rejected the idea. And immediately his whole soul was crying in a mad, inchoate hatred against this violation of himself. It was true for him. His mind was extinguished again at once, his blood was up. In his blood and bones, he wanted the scene, the wedding, the water brought forward from the firkins as red wine: and Christ saying to His mother: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?-mine hour is not yet come.”

  And then:

  “His mother saith unto the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.’“

  Brangwen loved it, with his bones and blood he loved it, he could not let it go. Yet she forced him to let it go. She hated his blind attachments.

  Water, natural water, could it suddenly and unnaturally turn into wine, depart from its being and at haphazard take on another being? Ah no, he knew it was wrong.

  She became again the palpitating, hostile child, hateful, putting things to destruction. He became mute and dead. His own being gave him the lie. He knew it was so: wine was wine, water was water, for ever: the water had not become wine. The miracle was not a real fact. She seemed to be destroying him. He went out, dark and destroyed, his soul running its blood. And he tasted of death. Because his life was formed in these unquestioned concepts.

  She, desolate again as she had been when she was a child, went away and sobbed. She did not care, she did not care whether the water had turned to wine or not. Let him believe it if he wanted to. But she knew she had won. And an ashy desolation came over her.

  They were ashenly miserable for some time. Then the life began to come back. He was nothing if not dogged. He thought again of the chapter of St. John. There was a great biting pang. “But thou hast kept the good wine until now.” “The best wine!” The young man’s heart responded in a craving, in a triumph, although the knowledge that it was not true in fact bit at him like a weasel in his heart. Which was stronger, the pain of the denial, or the desire for affirmation? He was stubborn in spirit, and abode by his desire. But he would not any more affirm the miracles as true.

  Very well, it was not true, the water had not turned into wine. The water had not turned into wine. But for all that he would live in his soul as if the water had turned into wine. For truth of fact, it had not. But for his soul, it had.

  “Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn’t,” he said, “it doesn’t bother me. I take it for what it is.”

  “And what is it?” she asked, quickly, hopefully.

  “It’s the Bible,” he said.

  That answer enraged her, and she despised him. She did not actively question the Bible herself. But he drove her to contempt.

  And yet he did not care about the Bible, the written letter. Although he could not satisfy her, yet she knew of herself that he had something real. He was not a dogmatist. He did not believe in fact that the water turned into wine. He did not want to make a fact out of it. Indeed, his attitude was without criticism. It was purely individual. He took that which was of value to him from the Written Word, he added to his spirit. His mind he let sleep.

  And she was bitter against him, that he let his mind sleep. That which was human, belonged to mankind, he would not exert. He cared only for himself. He was no Christian. Above all, Christ had asserted the brotherhood of man.

  She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was immortal. Such, somewhere, was her belief, quite obscure and unformulated. She believed in the omnipotence of the human mind.

  He, on the other hand, blind as a subterranean thing, just ignored the human mind and ran after his own dark-souled desires, following his own tunnelling nose. She felt often she must suffocate. And she fought him off.

  Then he, knowing he was blind, fought madly back again, frantic in sensual fear. He did foolish things. He asserted himself on his rights, he arrogated the old position of master of the house.

  “You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried.

  “Fool!” she answered. “Fool!”

  “I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried.

  “Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don’t I know what a fool you are!”

  He knew himself what a fool he was, and was flayed by the knowledge. Yet he went on trying to steer the ship of their dual life. He asserted his position as the captain of the ship. And captain and ship bored her. He wanted to loom important as master of one of the innumerable domestic craft that make up the great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of tubs jostling in futility. She felt no belief in it. She jeered at him as master of the house,
master of their dual life. And he was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame, how her father had been a man without arrogating any authority.

  He had gone on the wrong tack, and he felt it hard to give up the expedition. There was great surging and shame. Then he yielded. He had given up the master-of-the-house idea.

  There was something he wanted, nevertheless, some from of mastery. Ever and anon, after his collapses into the petty and the shameful, he rose up again, and, stubborn in spirit, strong in his power to start afresh, set out once more in his male pride of being to fulfil the hidden passion of his spirit.

  It began well, but it ended always in war between them, till they were both driven almost to madness. He said, she did not respect him. She laughed in hollow scorn of this. For her it was enough that she loved him.

  “Respect what?” she asked.

  But he always answered the wrong thing. And though she cudgelled her brains, she could not come at it.

  “Why don’t you go on with your wood-carving?” she said. “Why don’t you finish your Adam and Eve?”

  But she did not care for the Adam and Eve, and he never put another stroke to it. She jeered at the Eve, saying, “She is like a little marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and Eve like a doll.”

  “It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she continued, “when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have, what arrogance!”

  In a rage one day, after trying to work on the board, and failing, so that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up the whole panel and put it on the fire. She did not know. He went about for some days very quiet and subdued after it.

  “Where is the Adam and Eve board?” she asked him.

  “Burnt.”

  She looked at him.

  “But your carving?”

  “I burned it.”

  “When?”

  She did not believe him.

  “On Friday night.”

  “When I was at the Marsh?”

  “Yes.”

  She said no more.

  Then, when he had gone to work, she wept for a whole day, and was much chastened in spirit. So that a new, fragile flame of love came out of the ashes of this last pain.

  Directly, it occurred to her that she was with child. There was a great trembling of wonder and anticipation through her soul. She wanted a child. Not that she loved babies so much, though she was touched by all young things. But she wanted to bear children. And a certain hunger in her heart wanted to unite her husband with herself, in a child.

  She wanted a son. She felt, a son would be everything. She wanted to tell her husband. But it was such a trembling, intimate thing to tell him, and he was at this time hard and unresponsive. So that she went away and wept. It was such a waste of a beautiful opportunity, such a frost that nipped in the bud one of the beautiful moments of her life. She went about heavy and tremulous with her secret, wanting to touch him, oh, most delicately, and see his face, dark and sensitive, attend to her news. She waited and waited for him to become gentle and still towards her. But he was always harsh and he bullied her.

  So that the buds shrivelled from her confidence, she was chilled. She went down to the Marsh.

  “Well,” said her father, looking at her and seeing her at the first glance, “what’s amiss wi’ you now?”

  The tears came at the touch of his careful love.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Can’t you hit it off, you two?” he said.

  “He’s so obstinate,” she quivered; but her soul was obdurate itself.

  “Ay, an’ I know another who’s all that,” said her father.

  She was silent.

  “You don’t want to make yourselves miserable,” said her father; “all about nowt.”

  “He isn’t miserable,” she said.

  “I’ll back my life, if you can do nowt else, you can make him as miserable as a dog. You’d be a dab hand at that, my lass.”

  “I do nothing to make him miserable,” she retorted.

  “Oh no-oh no! A packet o’ butterscotch, you are.”

  She laughed a little.

  “You mustn’t think I want him to be miserable,” she cried. “I don’t.”

  “We quite readily believe it,” retorted Brangwen. “Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.”

  This made her think. She was rather surprised to find that she did not intend her husband to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.

  Her mother came, and they all sat down to tea, talking casually.

  “Remember, child,” said her mother, “that everything is not waiting for your hand just to take or leave. You mustn’t expect it. Between two people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to be just your way.”

  “Ha-nor do I. If I did I should soon find my mistake out. If I put my hand out to take anything, my hand is very soon bitten, I can tell you.”

  “Then you must mind where you put your hand,” said her father.

  Anna was rather indignant that they took the tragedy of her young married life with such equanimity.

  “You love the man right enough,” said her father, wrinkling his forehead in distress. “That’s all as counts.”

  “I do love him, more shame to him,” she cried. “I want to tell him-I’ve been waiting for four days now to tell him — — ” her face began to quiver, the tears came. Her parents watched her in silence. She did not go on.

  “Tell him what?” said her father.

  “That we’re going to have an infant,” she sobbed, “and he’s never, never let me, not once, every time I’ve come to him, he’s been horrid to me, and I wanted to tell him, I did. And he won’t let me-he’s cruel to me.”

  She sobbed as if her heart would break. Her mother went and comforted her, put her arms round her, and held her close. Her father sat with a queer, wrinkled brow, and was rather paler than usual. His heart went tense with hatred of his son-in-law.

  So that, when the tale was sobbed out, and comfort administered and tea sipped, and something like calm restored to the little circle, the thought of Will Brangwen’s entry was not pleasantly entertained.

  Tilly was set to watch out for him as he passed by on his way home. The little party at table heard the woman’s servant’s shrill call:

  “You’ve got to come in, Will. Anna’s here.”

  After a few moments, the youth entered.

  “Are you stopping?” he asked in his hard, harsh voice.

  He seemed like a blade of destruction standing there. She quivered to tears.

  “Sit you down,” said Tom Brangwen, “an’ take a bit off your length.”

  Will Brangwen sat down. He felt something strange in the atmosphere. He was dark browed, but his eyes had the keen, intent, sharp look, as if he could only see in the distance; which was a beauty in him, and which made Anna so angry.

  “Why does he always deny me?” she said to herself. “Why is it nothing to him, what I am?”

  And Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth.

  “How long are you stopping?” the young husband asked his wife.

  “Not very long,” she said.

  “Get your tea, lad,” said Tom Brangwen. “Are you itchin’ to be off the moment you enter?”

  They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light through her comb and her wattles made an oriflamme tossed here and there, as she went, her grey body was like a ghost.

  Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off things.

  “Where was I born, mother?” she asked.

  “In London.”

  “And was my father”-she spoke of h
im as if he were merely a strange name: she could never connect herself with him-”was he dark?”

  “He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring. He went bald, rather bald, when he was quite young,” replied her mother, also as if telling a tale which was just old imagination.

  “Was he good-looking?”

  “Yes-he was very good-looking-rather small. I have never seen an Englishman who looked like him.”

  “Why?”

  “He was”-the mother made a quick, running movement with her hands-”his figure was alive and changing-it was never fixed. He was not in the least steady-like a running stream.”

  It flashed over the youth-Anna too was like a running stream. Instantly he was in love with her again.

  Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with fear, fear of the unknown, when he heard his women speak of their bygone men as of strangers they had known in passing and had taken leave of again.

  In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all their hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?

  The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow.

  She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight.

  “I think we are going to have an infant, Bill,” she said, from far off.

  He trembled, and his fingers tightened on hers.

  “Why?” he asked, his heart beating. “You don’t know?”

  “I do,” she said.

  They continued without saying any more, walking along opposite horizons, hand in hand across the intervening space, two separate people. And he trembled as if a wind blew on to him in strong gusts, out of the unseen. He was afraid. He was afraid to know he was alone. For she seemed fulfilled and separate and sufficient in her half of the world. He could not bear to know that he was cut off. Why could he not be always one with her? It was he who had given her the child. Why could she not be with him, one with him? Why must he be set in this separateness, why could she not be with him, close, close, as one with him? She must be one with him.