At the gate of a small house in a dark tree-lined street, both waited a moment. From her garden leaned an almond tree whose buds, early this year, glistened in the light of the street lamp, with theatrical effect. He broke off a twig.
“I always remember this tree,” he said; “how I used to feel sorry for it when it was full out, and so lively, at midnight in the lamplight. I thought it must be tired.”
“Will you come in?” she asked tenderly.
“I did get a room in town,” he answered, following her.
She opened the door with her latch-key, showing him, as usual, into the drawing-room. Everything was just the same; cold in colouring, warm in appointment; ivory-coloured walls, blond, polished floor, with thick ivory-coloured rugs; three deep arm-chairs in pale amber, with large cushions; a big black piano, a violin-stand beside it; and the room very warm with a clear red fire, the brass shining hot. Coutts, according to his habit, lit the piano-candles and lowered the blinds.
“I say,” he said; “this is a variation from your line!”
He pointed to a bowl of magnificent scarlet anemones that stood on the piano.
“Why?” she asked, pausing in arranging her hair at the small mirror.
“On the piano!” he admonished.
“Only while the table was in use,” she smiled, glancing at the litter of papers that covered her table.
“And then — red flowers!” he said.
“Oh, I thought they were such a fine piece of colour,” she replied.
“I would have wagered you would buy freesias,” he said.
“Why?” she smiled. He pleased her thus.
“Well — for their cream and gold and restrained, bruised purple, and their scent. I can’t believe you bought scentless flowers!”
“What!” She went forward, bent over the flowers.
“I had not noticed,” she said, smiling curiously, “that they were scentless.”
She touched the velvet black centres.
“Would you have bought them had you noticed?” he asked.
She thought for a moment, curiously.
“I don’t know . . . probably I should not.”
“You would never buy scentless flowers,” he averred. “Any more than you’d love a man because he was handsome.”
“I did not know,” she smiled. She was pleased.
The housekeeper entered with a lamp, which she set on a stand.
“You will illuminate me?” he said to Winifred. It was her habit to talk to him by candle-light.
“I have thought about you — now I will look at you,” she said quietly, smiling.
“I see — To confirm your conclusions?” he asked.
Her eyes lifted quickly in acknowledgment of his guess.
“That is so,” she replied.
“Then,” he said, “I’ll wash my hands.”
He ran upstairs. The sense of freedom, of intimacy, was very fascinating. As he washed, the little everyday action of twining his hands in the lather set him suddenly considering his other love. At her house he was always polite and formal; gentlemanly, in short. With Connie he felt the old, manly superiority; he was the knight, strong and tender, she was the beautiful maiden with a touch of God on her brow. He kissed her, he softened and selected his speech for her, he forbore from being the greater part of himself. She was his betrothed, his wife, his queen, whom he loved to idealise, and for whom he carefully modified himself. She should rule him later on — that part of him which was hers. But he loved her, too, with a pitying, tender love. He thought of her tears upon her pillow in the northern Rectory, and he bit his lip, held his breath under the strain of the situation. Vaguely he knew she would bore him. And Winifred fascinated him. He and she really played with fire. In her house, he was roused and keen. But she was not, and never could be, frank. So he was not frank, even to himself. Saying nothing, betraying nothing, immediately they were together they began the same game. Each shuddered, each defenceless and exposed, hated the other by turns. Yet they came together again. Coutts felt a vague fear of Winifred. She was intense and unnatural — and he became unnatural and intense, beside her.
When he came downstairs she was fingering the piano from the score of “Walküre”.
“First wash in England,” he announced, looking at his hands. She laughed swiftly. Impatient herself of the slightest soil, his indifference to temporary grubbiness amused her.
He was a tall, bony man, with small hands and feet. His features were rough and rather ugly, but his smile was taking. She was always fascinated by the changes in him. His eyes, particularly, seemed quite different at times; sometimes hard, insolent, blue; sometimes dark, full of warmth and tenderness; sometimes flaring like an animal’s.
He sank wearily into a chair.
“My chair,” he said, as if to himself.
She bowed her head. Of compact physique, uncorseted, her figure bowed richly to the piano. He watched the shallow concave between her shoulders, marvelling at its rich solidity. She let one arm fall loose, he looked at the shadows in the dimples of her elbow. Slowly smiling a look of brooding affection, of acknowledgment upon him for a forgetful moment, she said:
“And what have you done lately?”
“Simply nothing,” he replied quietly. “For all that these months have been so full of variety, I think they will sink out of my life; they will evaporate and leave no result; I shall forget them.”
Her blue eyes were dark and heavy upon him, watching. She did not answer. He smiled faintly at her.
“And you?” he said, at length.
“With me it is different,” she said quietly.
“You sit with your crystal,” he laughed.
“While you tilt . . .” She hung on her ending.
He laughed, sighed, and they were quiet awhile.
“I’ve got such a skinful of heavy visions, they come sweating through my dreams,” he said.
“Whom have you read?” She smiled.
“Meredith. Very healthy,” he laughed.
She laughed quickly at being caught.
“Now, have you found out all you want?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she cried with full throat.
“Well, finish, at any rate. I’m not diseased. How are you?”
“But . . . but . . .” she stumbled on doggedly. “What do you intend to do?”
He hardened the line of his mouth and eyes, only to retort with immediate lightness:
“Just go on.”
This was their battlefield: she could not understand how he could marry: it seemed almost monstrous to her; she fought against his marriage. She looked up at him, witch-like, from under bent brows. Her eyes were dark blue and heavy. He shivered, shrank with pain. She was so cruel to that other, common, everyday part of him.
“I wonder you dare go on like it,” she said.
“Why dare?” he replied. “What’s the odds?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, in deep, bitter displeasure.
“And I don’t care,” he said.
“But . . .” she continued, slowly, gravely pressing the point: “You know what you intend to do.”
“Marry — settle — be a good husband, good father, partner in the business; get fat, be an amiable gentleman — Q.E.F.”
“Very good,” she said, deep and final.
“Thank you.”
“I did not congratulate you,” she said.
“Ah!” His voice tailed off into sadness and self-mistrust. Meanwhile she watched him heavily. He did not mind being scrutinised: it flattered him.
“Yes, it is, or may be, very good,” she began; “but why all this? — why?”
“And why not? And why? — Because I want to.”
He could not leave it thus flippantly.
“You know, Winifred, we should only drive each other into insanity, you and I: become abnormal.”
“Well,” she said, “and even so, why the other?”
“My marriage? — I don’t
know. Instinct.”
“One has so many instincts,” she laughed bitterly.
That was a new idea to him.
She raised her arms, stretched them above her head, in a weary gesture. They were fine, strong arms. They reminded Coutts of Euripides’ “Bacchae”: white, round arms, long arms. The lifting of her arms lifted her breasts. She dropped suddenly as if inert, lolling her arms against the cushions.
“I really don’t see why you should be,” she said drearily, though always with a touch of a sneer, “why we should always — be fighting.”
“Oh, yes, you do,” he replied. It was a deadlock which he could not sustain.
“Besides,” he laughed, “it’s your fault.”
“Am I so bad?” she sneered.
“Worse,” he said.
“But” — she moved irritably — ”is this to the point?”
“What point?” he answered; then, smiling: “You know you only like a wild-goose chase.”
“I do,” she answered plaintively. “I miss you very much. You snatch things from the Kobolds for me.”
“Exactly,” he said in a biting tone. “Exactly! That’s what you want me for. I am to be your crystal, your ‘genius’. My length of blood and bone you don’t care a rap for. Ah, yes, you like me for a crystal-glass, to see things in: to hold up to the light. I’m a blessed Lady-of-Shalott looking-glass for you.”
“You talk to me,” she said, dashing his fervour, “of my fog of symbols!”
“Ah, well, if so, ‘tis your own asking.”
“I did not know it.” She looked at him coldly. She was angry.
“No,” he said.
Again, they hated each other.
“The old ancients,” he laughed, “gave the gods the suet and intestines: at least, I believe so. They ate the rest. You shouldn’t be a goddess.”
“I wonder, among your rectory acquaintances, you haven’t learned better manners,” she answered in cold contempt. He closed his eyes, lying back in his chair, his legs sprawled towards her.
“I suppose we’re civilised savages,” he said sadly. All was silent. At last, opening his eyes again, he said: “I shall have to be going directly, Winifred; it is past eleven . . .” Then the appeal in his voice changed to laughter. “Though I know I shall be winding through all the Addios in ‘Traviata’ before you can set me travelling.” He smiled gently at her, then closed his eyes once more, conscious of deep, but vague, suffering. She lay in her chair, her face averted, rosily, towards the fire. Without glancing at her he was aware of the white approach of her throat towards her breast. He seemed to perceive her with another, unknown sense that acted all over his body. She lay perfectly still and warm in the fire-glow. He was dimly aware that he suffered.
“Yes,” she said at length; “if we were linked together we should only destroy each other.”
He started, hearing her admit, for the first time, this point of which he was so sure.
“You should never marry anyone,” he said.
“And you,” she asked in irony, “must offer your head to harness and be bridled and driven?”
“There’s the makings of quite a good, respectable trotter in me,” he laughed. “Don’t you see it’s what I want to be?”
“I’m not sure,” she laughed in return.
“I think so.”
They were silent for a time. The white lamp burned steadily as moonlight, the red fire like sunset; there was no stir or flicker.
“And what of you?” he asked.
She crooned a faint, tired laugh.
“If you are jetsam, as you say you are,” she answered, “I am flotsam. I shall lie stranded.”
“Nay,” he pleaded. “When were you wrecked?”
She laughed quickly, with a sound like a tinkle of tears.
“Oh, dear Winifred!” he cried despairingly.
She lifted her arms towards him, hiding her face between them, looking up through the white closure with dark, uncanny eyes, like an invocation. His breast lifted towards her uptilted arms. He shuddered, shut his eyes, held himself rigid. He heard her drop her arms heavily.
“I must go,” he said in a dull voice.
The rapidly-chasing quivers that ran in tremors down the front of his body and limbs made him stretch himself, stretch hard.
“Yes,” she assented gravely; “you must go.”
He turned to her. Again looking up darkly, from under her lowered brows, she lifted her hands like small white orchids towards him. Without knowing, he gripped her wrists with a grasp that circled his blood-red nails with white rims.
“Good-bye,” he said, looking down at her. She made a small, moaning noise in her throat, lifting her face so that it came open and near to him like a suddenly-risen flower, borne on a strong white stalk. She seemed to extend, to fill the world, to become atmosphere and all. He did not know what he was doing. He was bending forward, his mouth on hers, her arms round his neck, and his own hands, still fastened on to her wrists, almost bursting the blood under his nails with the intensity of their grip. They remained for a few moments thus, rigid. Then, weary of the strain, she relaxed. She turned her face, offered him her throat, white, hard, and rich, below the ear. Stooping still lower, so that he quivered in every fibre at the strain, he laid his mouth to the kiss. In the intense silence, he heard the deep, dull pulsing of her blood, and a minute click of a spark within the lamp.
Then he drew her from the chair up to him. She came, arms always round his neck, till at last she lay along his breast as he stood, feet planted wide, clasping her tight, his mouth on her neck. She turned suddenly to meet his full, red mouth in a kiss. He felt his moustache prick back into his lips. It was the first kiss she had genuinely given. Dazed, he was conscious of the throb of one great pulse, as if his whole body were a heart that contracted in throbs. He felt, with an intolerable ache, as if he, the heart, were setting the pulse in her, in the very night, so that everything beat from the throb of his overstrained, bursting body.
The hurt became so great it brought him out of the reeling stage to distinct consciousness. She clipped her lips, drew them away, leaving him her throat. Already she had had enough. He opened his eyes as he bent with his mouth on her neck, and was startled; there stood the objects of the room, stark; there, close below his eyes, were the half-sunk lashes of the woman, swooning on her unnatural ebb of passion. He saw her thus, knew that she wanted no more of him than that kiss. And the heavy form of this woman hung upon him. His whole body ached like a swollen vein, with heavy intensity, while his heart grew dead with misery and despair. This woman gave him anguish and a cutting-short like death; to the other woman he was false. As he shivered with suffering, he opened his eyes again, and caught sight of the pure ivory of the lamp. His heart flashed with rage.
A sudden involuntary blow of his foot, and he sent the lamp-stand spinning. The lamp leaped off, fell with a smash on the fair, polished floor. Instantly a bluish hedge of flame quivered, leaped up before them. She had lightened her hold round his neck, and buried her face against his throat. The flame veered at her, blue, with a yellow tongue that licked her dress and her arm. Convulsive, she clutched him, almost strangled him, though she made no sound.
He gathered her up and bore her heavily out of the room. Slipping from her clasp, he brought his arms down her form, crushing the starting blaze of her dress. His face was singed. Staring at her, he could scarcely see her.
“I am not hurt,” she cried. “But you?”
The housekeeper was coming; the flames were sinking and waving up in the drawing-room. He broke away from Winifred, threw one of the great woollen rugs on to the flame, then stood a moment looking at the darkness.
Winifred caught at him as he passed her.
“No, no,” he answered, as he fumbled for the latch. “I’m not hurt. Clumsy fool I am — clumsy fool!”
In another instant he was gone, running with burning-red hands held out blindly, down the street.
WINTRY PEACOCK
There was thin, crisp snow on the ground, the sky was blue, the wind very cold, the air clear. Farmers were just turning out the cows for an hour or so in the midday, and the smell of cow-sheds was unendurable as I entered Tible. I noticed the ash-twigs up in the sky were pale and luminous, passing into the blue. And then I saw the peacocks. There they were in the road before me, three of them, and tailless, brown, speckled birds, with dark-blue necks and ragged crests. They stepped archly over the filigree snow, and their bodies moved with slow motion, like small, light, flat-bottomed boats. I admired them, they were curious. Then a gust of wind caught them, heeled them over as if they were three frail boats opening their feathers like ragged sails. They hopped and skipped with discomfort, to get out of the draught of the wind. And then, in the lee of the walls, they resumed their arch, wintry motion, light and unballasted now their tails were gone, indifferent. They were indifferent to my presence. I might have touched them. They turned off to the shelter of an open shed.
As I passed the end of the upper house, I saw a young woman just coming out of the back door. I had spoken to her in the summer. She recognized me at once, and waved to me. She was carrying a pail, wearing a white apron that was longer than her preposterously short skirt, and she had on the cotton bonnet. I took off my hat to her and was going on. But she put down her pail and darted with a swift, furtive movement after me.
‘Do you mind waiting a minute?’ she said. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’
She gave me a slight, odd smile, and ran back. Her face was long and sallow and her nose rather red. But her gloomy black eyes softened caressively to me for a moment, with that momentary humility which makes a man lord of the earth.
I stood in the road, looking at the fluffy, dark-red young cattle that mooed and seemed to bark at me. They seemed happy, frisky cattle, a little impudent, and either determined to go back into the warm shed, or determined not to go back, I could not decide which.
Presently the woman came forward again, her head rather ducked. But she looked up at me and smiled, with that odd, immediate intimacy, something witch-like and impossible.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 634