“Yes,” said Rachel Witt dryly. “Why?”
“All the time the trees grow and listen. And if you cut a tree down without asking pardon, trees will hurt you sometime in your life, in the night-time.”
“I suppose,” said Rachel Witt, “that’s an old superstition.”
“They say that ash trees don’t like people. When the other people were most in the country — I mean like what they call fairies, that have all gone now — they liked ash trees best. And you know the little green things with little small nuts in them, that come flying from ash trees — pigeons, we call them — they’re the seeds — the other people used to catch them and eat them before they fell to the ground. And that made the people so they could hear trees living and feeling things. — But when all these people that there are now came to England, they liked the oak trees best, because their pigs ate the acorns. So now you can tell the ash trees are mad, they want to kill all these people. But the oak trees are many more than the ash trees.”
“And do you eat the ash tree seeds?” she asked.
“I always ate them when I was little. Then I wasn’t frightened of ash trees, like most of the others. And I wasn’t frightened of the moon. If you didn’t go near the fire all day, and if you didn’t eat any cooked food nor anything that had been in the sun, but only things like turnips or radishes or pignuts, and then went without any clothes on, in the full moon, then you could see the people in the moon, and go with them. They never have fire, and they never speak, and their bodies are clear almost like jelly. They die in a minute if there’s a bit of fire near them. But they know more than we. Because unless fire touches them, they never die. They see people live and they see people perish, and they say, people are only like twigs on a tree, you break them off the tree, and kindle fire with them. You made a fire of them, and they are gone, the fire is gone, everything is gone. But the people of the moon don’t die, and fire is nothing to them. They look at it from the distance of the sky, and see it burning things up, people all appearing and disappearing like twigs that come in spring and you cut them in autumn and make a fire of them and they are gone. And they say: What do people matter? If you want to matter, you must become a moon-boy. Then all your life, fire can’t blind you and people can’t hurt you. Because at full moon you can join the moon people, and go through the air and pass any cool places, pass through rocks and through the trunks of trees, and when you come to people lying warm in bed, you punish them.”
“How?”
“You sit on’ the pillow where they breathe, and you put a web across their mouth, so they can’t breathe the fresh air that comes from the moon. So they go on breathing the same air again and again, and that makes them more and more stupefied. The sun gives out heat, but the moon gives out fresh air. That’s what the moon people do: they wash the air clean with moonlight.”
He was talking with a strange, eager naïveté that amused Rachel Witt, and made her a little uncomfortable in her skin. Was he after all no more than a sort of imbecile?
“Who told you all this stuff?” she asked abruptly.
And, as abruptly, he pulled himself up.
“We used to say it when we were children.”
“But you don’t believe it? It is only childishness, after all.” He paused a moment or two.
“No,” he said, in his ironical little day voice. “I know I shan’t make anything but a fool of myself, with that talk. But all sorts of things go through our heads, and some seem to linger, and some don’t. But you asking me about God put it into my mind, I suppose. I don’t know what sort of things I believe in: only I know it’s not what the chapel folks believe in. We none of us believe in them when it comes to earning a living, or, with you people, when it comes to spending your fortune. Then we know that bread costs money, and even your sleep you have to pay for. — That’s work. Or, with you people, it’s just owning property and seeing you get your value for your money. — But a man’s mind is always full of things. And some people’s minds, like my aunt and uncle, are full of religion and hell for everybody except themselves. And some people’s minds are all money, money, money, and how to get hold of something they haven’t got hold of yet. And some people, like you, are always curious about what everybody else in the world is after. And some people are all for enjoying themselves and being thought much of, and some, like Lady Carrington, don’t know what to do with themselves. Myself, I don’t want to have in my mind the things other people have in their minds. I’m one that likes my own things best. And if, when I see a bright star fall, like to-night, I think to myself: ‘There’s movement in the sky. The world is going to change again. They’re throwing something to us from the distance, and we’ve got to have it, whether we want it or not. To-morrow there will be a difference for everybody, thrown out of the sky upon us, whether we want it or not: then that’s how I want to think, so let me please myself.’“
“You know what a shooting star actually is, I suppose? — and that there are always many in August, because we pass through a region of them?”
“Yes, Mam, I’ve been told. But stones don’t come at us from the sky for nothing. Either it’s like when a man tosses an apple to you out of his orchard, as you go by. Or it’s like when somebody shies a stone at you to cut your head open. You’ll never make me believe the sky is like an empty house with a slate falling from the roof. The world has its own life, the sky has a life of its own, and never is it like stones rolling down a rubbish-heap and falling into a pond. Many things twitch and twitter within the sky, and many things happen beyond us. My own way of thinking is my own way.”
“I never knew you talk so much.”
“No, Mam. It’s your asking me that about God. Or else it’s the night-time. I don’t believe in God and being good and going to heaven. Neither do I worship idols, so I’m not a heathen as my aunt called me. Never from a boy did I want to believe the things they kept grinding in their guts at home, and at Sunday school, and at school. A man’s mind has to be full of something, so I keep to what we used to think as lads. It’s childish nonsense, I know it. But it suits me. Better than other people’s stuff. Your man Phoenix is about the same, when he lets on. — Anyhow, it’s my own stuff that we believed as lads, and I like it better than other people’s stuff. — You asking about God made me let on. But I would never belong to any club, or trades union, and God’s the same to my mind.”
With this he gave a little kick to his horse, and St. Mawr went dancing excitedly along the highway they now entered, leaving Mrs. Witt to trot after as rapidly as she could.
When she came to the hotel, to which she had telegraphed for rooms, Lewis disappeared, and she was left thinking hard.
It was not till they were twenty miles from Merriton, riding through a slow morning mist, and she had a rather far-away, wistful look on her face, unusual for her, that she turned to him in the saddle and said:
“Now don’t be surprised, Lewis, at what I am going to say. I am going to ask you, now, supposing I wanted to marry you, what should you say?”
He looked at her quickly, and was at once on his guard. “That you didn’t mean it,” he replied hastily.
“Yes” — she hesitated, and her face looked wistful and tired. — ”Supposing I did mean it. Supposing I did really, from my heart, want to marry you and be a wife to you” — she looked away across the fields — ”then what should you say?”
Her voice sounded sad, a little broken.
“Why, Mam!” he replied, knitting his brow and shaking his head a little. “I should say you didn’t mean it, you know. Something would have come over you.”
“But supposing I wanted something to come over me?” He shook his head.
“It would never do, Mam Some people’s flesh and blood is kneaded like bread: and that’s me. And some are rolled like fine pastry, like Lady Carrington. And some are mixed with gunpowder. They’re like a cartridge you put in a gun, Mam.”
She listened impatiently.
“Don�
�t talk,” she said, “about bread and cakes and pastry, it all means nothing. You used to answer short enough ‘Yes, Mam! No, Mam!’ That will do now. Do you mean ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!?’“
His eyes met hers. She was again hectoring.
“No, Mam!” he said, quite neutral. “Why?”
As she waited for his answer, she saw the foundations of his loquacity dry up, his face go distant and mute again, as it always used to be, till these last two days, when it had had a funny touch of inconsequential merriness.
He looked steadily into her eyes, and his look was neutral, sombre, and hurt. He looked at her as if infinite seas, infinite spaces divided him and her. And his eyes seemed to put her away beyond some sort of fence. An anger congealed cold like lava, set impassive against her and all her sort.
“No, Mam. I couldn’t give my body to any woman who didn’t respect it.”
“But I do respect it, I do!” — she flushed hot like a girl.
“No, Mam. Not as I mean it,” he replied.
There was a touch of anger against her in his voice, and a distance of distaste.
“And how do you mean it?” she replied, the full sarcasm coming back into her tones. She could see that, as a woman to touch and fondle he saw her as repellent: only repellent.
“I have to be a servant to women now,” he said, “even to earn my wage. I could never touch with my body a woman whose servant I was.”
“You’re not my servant: my daughter pays your wages. — And all that is beside the point, between a man and a woman.”
“No woman who I touched with my body should ever speak to me as you speak to me, or think of me as you think of me,” he said.
“But! — ” she stammered. “I think of you — with love. And can you be so unkind as to notice the way I speak? You know it’s only my way.”
“You, as a woman,” he said, “you have no respect for a man.”
“Respect! Respect!” she cried. “I’m likely to lose what respect I have left. I know I can love a man. But whether a man can love a woman — ”
“No,” said Lewis. “I never could, and I think I never shall. Because I don’t want to. The thought of it makes me feel shame.”
“What do you mean” she cried.
“Nothing in the world,” he said, “would make me feel such shame as to have a woman shouting at me, or mocking at me, as I see women mocking and despising the men they marry. No woman shall touch my body and mock me or despise me. No woman.”
“But men must be mocked, or despised even, sometimes.”
“No. Not this man. Not by the woman I touch with my body.”
“Are you perfect?”
“I don’t know. But if I touch a woman with my body, it must put a lock on her, to respect what I will never have despised: never!”
“What will you never have despised?”
“My body! And my touch upon the woman.”
“Why insist so on your body?” — And she looked at him with a touch of contemptuous mockery, raillery.
He looked her in the eyes steadily, and coldly, putting her away from him, and himself far away from her.
“Do you expect that any woman still stay your humble slave to-day?” she asked cuttingly.
But he only watched her coldly, distant, refusing any connection.
“Between men and women, it’s a question of give and take. A man can’t expect always to be humbly adored.”
He watched her still, cold, rather pale, putting her far from him. Then he turned his horse and set off rapidly along the road, leaving her to follow.
She walked her horse and let him go, thinking to herself: “There’s a little bantam cock. And a groom! Imagine it! Thinking he can dictate to a woman!”
She was in love with him. And he, in an odd way, was in love with her. She had known it by the odd, uncanny merriment in him, and his unexpected loquacity. But he would not have her come physically near him. Unapproachable there as a cactus, guarding his ‘body’ from her contact. As if contact with her would be mortal insult and fatal injury to his marvellous ‘body’.
What a little cock-sparrow!
Let him ride ahead. He would have to wait for her somewhere.
She found him at the entrance to the next village. His face was pallid and set. She could tell he felt he had been insulted, so he had congealed into stiff insentience.
“At the bottom of all men is the same,” she said to herself: “an empty, male conceit of themselves.”
She, too, rode up with a face like a mask, and straight on to the hotel.
“Can you serve dinner to myself and my servant?” she asked at the inn: which, fortunately for her, accommodated motorists, otherwise they would have said ‘No!’
“I think,” said Lewis as they came in sight of Merriton, “I’d better give Lady Carrington a week’s notice.”
A complete little stranger! And an impudent one. “Exactly as you please,” she said.
She found several letters from her daughter at Marshal Place. “Dear Mother: No sooner had you gone off than Flora appeared, not at all in the bud, but rather in full blow. She demanded her victim; Shylock demanding the pound of flesh: and wanted to hand over the shekels.
“Joyfully I refused them. She said ‘Harry’ was much better, and invited him and me to stay at Corrabach Hall till he was quite well: it would be less strain on your household, while he was still in bed and helpless. So the plan is, that he shall be brought down on Friday, if he is really fit for the journey, and we drive straight to Corrabach. I am packing his bags and mine, clearing up our traces: his trunks to go to Corrabach, mine to stay here and make up their minds. — I am going to Flints Farm again to-morrow, dutifully, though I am no flower for the bedside. — I do so want to know if Rico has already called her Fiorita: or perhaps Florecita. It reminds me of old William’s joke: ‘Now yuh tell me, little Missy: which is the best posey that grow?’ And the hushed whisper in which he said the answer: ‘The Collyposy!’ Oh dear, I am so tired of feeling spiteful, but how else is one to feel?
“You looked most prosaically romantic, setting off in a rubber cape, followed by Lewis. Hope the roads were not very slippery, and that you had a good time, à la Mademoiselle de Maupin. Do remember, dear, not to devour little Lewis before you have got half-way — ”
“Dear Mother: I half expected word from you before I left, but nothing came. Forrester drove me up here just before lunch. Rico seems much better, almost himself, and a little more than that. He broached our staying at Corrabach very tactfully. I told him Flora had asked me, and it seemed a good plan. Then I told him about St. Mawr. He was a little piqued, and there was a pause of very disapproving silence. Then he said: ‘Very well, darling. If you wish to keep the animal, do so by all means. I make a present of him again.’ Me: ‘That’s so good of you, Rico. Because I know revenge is sweet.’ Rico: ‘Revenge, Loulina! I don’t think I was selling him for vengeance! Merely to get rid of him to Flora, who can keep better hold over him.’ Me: ‘But you know, dear, she was going to geld him!’ Rico: ‘I don’t think anybody knew it. We only wondered if it were possible, to make him more amenable. Did she tell you?’ Me: ‘No — Phoenix did. He had it from a groom.’ Rico: ‘Dear me! A concatenation of grooms! So your mother rode off with Lewis, and carried St. Mawr out of danger! I understand! Let us hope worse won’t befall.’ Me: ‘Whom?’ Rico: ‘Never mind, dear! It’s so lovely to see you. You are looking rested. I thought those Countess of Wilton roses the most marvellous things in the world, till you came, now they’re quite in the background.’ He had some very lovely roses in a crystal bowl: the room smelled of roses. Me: ‘Where did they come from?’ Rico: ‘Oh, Flora brought them!’ Me: ‘Bowl and all?’ Rico: ‘Bowl and all! Wasn’t it dear of her?’ Me: ‘Why, yes! But then she’s the goddess of flowers, isn’t she?’ Poor darling, he was offended that I should twit him while he is ill, so I relented. He has had a couple of marvellous invalid’s bed-jackets sent from London: one a pinkish yellow, with ros
e-arabesque facings: this one in fine cloth. But unfortunately he has already dropped soup on it. The other is a lovely silvery and blue and green, soft brocade. He had that one on to receive me, and I at once complimented him on it. He has got a new ring too: sent by Aspasia Weingartner, a rather lovely intaglio of Priapus under an apple bough, at least, so he says it is. He made a naughty face, and said: ‘The Priapus stage is rather advanced for poor me.’ I asked what the Priapus stage was, but he said: ‘Oh, nothing!’ Then nurse said: ‘There’s a big classical dictionary that Miss Manby brought up, if you wish to see it.’ So I have been studying the Classical Gods. The world always was a queer place. It’s a very queer one when Rico is the god Priapus. He would go round the orchard painting life-like apples on the trees, and inviting nymphs to come and eat them. And the nymphs would pretend they were real: ‘Why, Sir Prippy, what stunningly naughty apples!’ There’s nothing so artificial as sinning nowadays. I suppose it once was real.
“I’m bored here: wish I had my horse.”
“Dear Mother: I’m so glad you are enjoying your ride. I’m sure it is like riding into history, like the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, in those old by-lanes and Roman roads. They still fascinate me: at least, more before I get there than when I am actually there. I begin to feel real American and to resent the past. Why doesn’t the past decently bury itself instead of waiting to be admired by the present?
“Phoenix brought Poppy. I am so fond of her: rode for five hours yesterday. I was glad to get away from this farm. The doctor came, and said Rico would be able to go down to Corrabach to-morrow. Flora came to hear the bulletin, and sailed back full of zest. Apparently Rico is going to do a portrait of her, sitting up in bed. What a mercy the bedclothes won’t be mine when Priapus wields his palette from the pillow.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 549