But no! He had left her, and wandered away to the soft little kiss-curls in the nape of her neck: the soft, warm, sweet little nape of her neck. His warm breath was among the most delicate fibrils of her hair. She contracted with a sharp convulsion, like tickling. Delicious thrills ran down her spine, before he gave her the full assurance, and kissed her soft, deep, full among the fine curls central in the nape of her neck. She seemed to be lifted into the air as a bit of paper lifts itself up to a piece of warm amber. Her hands fluttered, fluttered on his shoulders, she was rising up on the air like Simon Magus. Let us hope Mr Noon will not let her down too sharp.
No! No! Even as she rose in the air she felt his breath running warm at the gates of her ears. Her lips came apart, she panted with acute anticipation. Ah! — Ah! — and softly came his full, fathomless kiss, softly her ear was quenched in darkness. He took the small, fine contours subtly between his lips, he closed deeper, and with a second reeling swoon she reeled down again and fell, fell through a deeper, darker sea. Depth doubled on depth, darkness on darkness. She had sunk back to the root-stream, beyond sight and hearing.
Now surely it was finished. Occultists tell us that hearing is the most radical of all the senses: that, at a crisis, all sensation can be summed up in the perfected sensation of sound. Surely then it was accomplished. At each new phase she felt she had melted, had sunk to the very bottom. And every time, oh bliss of it, came a new crisis, and she swooned downwards, down a deeper depth, to a new, fathomless, oscillating rest. Oscillating at the deeps of intoxication, as now.
Yet still there was a tiny core of unquenched desire. She seemed to melt and become tinier: and yet she swung in an immeasurable, hungry rhythm, like a meteorite that has fallen through worlds of space, yet still swings, not yet burnt out, caught in some unstable equilibrium between the forces of the planets. So she hung and quivered in immeasurable space.
For sometimes it seemed to her drunken consciousness that she was high, high in space, yet not beyond all worlds, the net of the stars. And sometimes it seemed she was sunk, sunk to immeasurable depths, yet not quite to extinction.
His mouth was coming slowly nearer to her mouth; and yet not approaching. Approaching without disclosing its direction. Loitering, circumventing, and then suddenly taking the breath from her nostrils. For a second she died in the strange sweetness and anguish of suffocation. He had closed her nostrils for ever with a kiss, and she was sleeping, dying in sweet fathomless insentience. Death, and the before-birth sleep.
Yet, not quite. Even now, not quite. One spark persisted and waited in her. Frail little breaths came through her parted lips. It was the brink of ecstacy and extinction. She cleaved to him beyond measure, as if she would reach beyond herself. With a sudden lacerating motion she tore her face from his, aside. She held it back, her mouth unclosed. And obedient down came his mouth on her unclosed mouth, darkness closed on darkness, so she melted completely, fused, and was gone.
She sank, sank with him, right away. Or rising, he lifted her into the oneness with him, up, up, and beyond, into the infinite. It seemed to him she was the heavier, rounded breath which he enwreathed in the perfected bubble flame of himself. So they floated as a perfect bubble, beyond the reach even of space. Beyond height and depth, beyond gravitation. Out in the beyond, suspended in the perfection.
Who knows if they breathed, if they lived!
But all the time, of course, each of them had a secondary mundane consciousness. Each of them was aware of the entry, the other spooners, and the passers-by outside. Each of them attended minutely when one pair of spooners crept through the gap in the big doors, to go home. They were all there, mark you. None of your bestial loss of faculties.
— We have risen to great heights, dear reader, and sunk to great depths. Yet we have hardly fathomed the heights and depths of the spoon in the Co-op. entry. Don’t you wish you were as good at it as Noon and Emmie? Practise then: and you too may swing suspended in the heights, or depths, of infinity, like the popular picture we used to see over the railway bookstalls, winged spooners mid-heaven in the blue ether. Ah, we are all so clean, nowadays: fine clean young men, infinitely spoony, and clean young spoony maidens to match. Nothing earthy, not we. All in mid-air, our goings on.
Till her mouth fell away, and her head fell aside. He turned his face aside from her, and they breathed their slow, inert breaths apart. They kept their faces apart from each other. And gradually conscious sight returned into the open mirrors of her eyes, gradually wakeful discrimination busied itself in the re-echoing cavities of her ears. Noises which she had heard all the time, she now admitted into her audience. Gradually. It could not be done, or should not be done, all in a smack.
— Ah, the spoon, the perfect spoon! In its mystic bowl all men are one, and so are all women. Champagne and shoulders, poetry and long scarves, loftiness, altruism, souls, hard work, conscience, sacrifice, all fuse into perfect oneness in the spoon. All Whitman’s Songs of Himself and Other People lie in the hollow of a spoon. If you seek the Infinite and the Nirvana, look not to death nor the after-life, nor yet to pure abstraction: but into the hollow spoon.
Gilbert was staring down the opposite direction under lifted, Mephistophelian brows. And seeing, of course, the ghostly chaos of packing cases in the rain, and the strong beams from the bakery windows.
The small sound of church chimes in the night! Emmie broke away from him abruptly.
“I s’ll have to be going. I s’ll cop it from my Dad.”
He lost his balance and stepped down from the step of the doorway embrasure with a jerk, cramped. He felt rather vague and uncomfortable.
She was pushing at her hair, and pulling her cap on. There was a flutter and rustle of her mackintosh. She stepped down from the step, and shook herself. He would move towards the door.
“My gamp!” she said quickly, snatching the article out of a corner in the recess. Then briskly she went forward to the dark wall of the doors. The little round hole showed. In an instant he saw a framed picture of wet pavements and passers- by, and a scarlet cart, which he knew carried the mail, splashing phantom through the mud.
Ah, dear reader, I hope you are not feeling horribly superior. You would never call an umbrella a brolly, much less a gamp. And you have never so much as seen a Co-op. entry. But don’t on this small account sniff at Emmie. No, in that notorious hour when a woman is alone with her own heart, really enjoying herself, ask yourself if your spoon is brighter than Emmie’s, if your spooner is better than Gilbert. Nay, if you prefer love and lover, say love and lover to yourself. It all amounts to the same. But in communion with your naked heart, say whether you have reached Gilbertian heights and Emmelian profundities of the human kiss — or whether you have something to learn even from our poor pair.
Chapter III.
Gilbert Licks the Spoon.
Let none complain that I pry indecently into the privacies of the spoon. A spoon is an open mirror, necessarily a public concern. I do but walk down the public road, past the Co-op. entry, and see Emmie and Mr Noon stepping guildessly forth through the aperture in the big doors, as integral a part of the Sunday night as is the darkness itself, or me in my after- service expansion of soul; and since all is told to me, in the innocent act of slipping through the Co-op. aperture, I tell all again including the innocence.
Neither let the experts and raffinés of the spoon object that my account is but the bare outline of what actually is. I insist that this is the summary and essence of all that is above-board in spooning. There are variations on the spoon. There are tricks, dear reader. In the old days wicked black silk bed- sheets, for example. Ah, but mere interlarded tricks. Different seasoning, the soup is the same. I have heard too of Frenchy, and even of Neapolitan spooning, which I should not like to speak of from hearsay. There are all kinds of kissings. Every nation, every city, every individual introduces a special and individual touch. There are dodges and peculiarities which I leave to experience and to other novelists. I concern
myself with the essential English kiss, within the spoon. Yes, and with the basis of the essential: in short, the radical Co-op. entry spoon of the common people, that has neither champagne and shoulders, nor yet cocktails and fard to embellish it and to obscure its pure simplicity. I am no dealer in abnormalities. Far from it. I take the thing at its best, as one should. I speak of the spoon pure and simple, the spoon of our clean-minded age, from which we sip love’s limpidest sweets. Ah infinite spoon-moments! dear spoon-memories!
Mr Noon, however, was in no such complacent mood as ours.
“It’s not raining so much, I shan’t bother with the brolly,” said Emmie, turning her Noon-kissed face to the dim moist heavens. “That was half-past I heard strike. I s’ll be in a row with our Dad if I don’t hop it.”
She spoke rather breathlessly as she tripped along.
“Why what’s the matter with him?” asked Gilbert irritably, turning traitor to the spoon-grail in the very moment when he had quaffed his dose.
“Because he’s a wire-whiskered nuisance, and I’ve got to be in by quarter to ten, because he’s on night duty.”
“What would he do if you weren’t in by quarter to ten?”
“Ay, you ask me! Make my life a blooming hell. — Oh — !” and she stopped for a second in the road — ”now I haven’t got a book, and I told our Sis I was calling for one. Little fool! Little fool I am! Drat!” And she stamped her foot. “You haven’t got a book on you? He’s sure to twig. Oh what a bally nuisance!”
Gilbert fortunately had in his pocket a volume on Conic Sections, and this Emmie at once appropriated, hugging it under her arm.
She ran tripping forward, Gilbert strode beside her. She lived down in the valley, about a mile out of Woodhouse. She was uneasy now because of her father, and had almost forgotten Mr Noon, at her side.
He, however, had not forgotten her. A black vindictiveness had come over him.
“What time does your father go to work?” he asked. He knew that Mr Bostock had a job on the railway.
“Ten. He’s on duty at ten: and it takes him quarter of an hour to get there, or he says so. It would take me about five minutes. Like him to make a mountain of it.”
“Come out a bit after he’s gone,” suggested Gilbert.
“Go on!” said Emmie, with suggestive sharpness.
Now this was not the first of Emmie’s spoons — even with Gilbert. And she was quite prepared for after-spoon developments — even naughty ones. So that when she said “Go on,” she was merely non-committal.
She knew that young men would frequendy follow up a nice innocent lovely spoon with a certain half-tiresome persistence in going further. Half-tiresome, because it is the last step which may cost. And yet rather wickedly nice, you know. Remember that Emmie is a sport, and that in defiance of fathers and stone tablets there is also bliss. And moreover the man who is a true and faithful spoon makes this ultimate so dear, such a last clean sweep in sympathy! Ah, talk not of grossness in this soft and sympathising conjunction! Don’t you agree, dear reader?
“You’ll come, won’t you?” said Gilbert.
“Let’s see how the land lies, first,” she replied. “You needn’t wait if I don’t come out and cooey.”
By Cooey she meant call a soft, lurking Coo-ee! to him.
Gilbert was behaving in the accepted way — or one of the ways — of after-spoon, and she took no alarm. He was quiet, and seemed persuasive. His silence came suggestive and rather pleading to her, as they hurried down the hill. She was a sport — and she liked a man who could come on: one who pressed fearless forward, a Galahad of sentiment, to the bitter end. Bitter! Well, bitter-sweet. Oh gentle joust of ultimate sentiment, oh last sweet throw of love, wherein we fall, spoon- overthrown! Shall I be Minnesinger of the spoon?
But alas, there is a fly in the ointment. There is a snake in the grass. It is in Gilbert’s mood. Alas, poor Emmie. She is mistaken about his soft, sweet, sinful coming-on. Instead of being in the melting stage, just ready to melt right down with her, the final fuse within the spoon, he is horrid. Ah, in the last coming on, how gentle is the Galahad of kisses, how subtle his encroachment to the goal! But Gilbert was a snake in the grass. He was irritable, in a temper, and would not let her go though he did not really want her. Why he was in a temper, and why he hated her he did not know. Doubtful if he ever knew his own state of feeling. Beware, gende reader! For if in the course of soft and kissy love you once get out of the melting spoon-mood, there is hell to pay, both for you and for her.
Emmie’s garden gate opened from a little path between two hedges that led from the high-road between cottage gardens to the field stile. The two arrived at the bottom of the hill and crossed the road to where the path, called a twitchel, opened between thick hedges.
“Don’t come down the twitchel,” she said to him in a low tone. “I’ll bet he’s watching. — If I can slip out when he’s gone I shall cooey. Au revoy.”
She disappeared between the dark hedges of the twitchel, and shordy he heard her gate clash. He loitered about again, and was in a temper because he was kept waiting. He was in a rage with himself, so turned his wrath against circumstances.
He was in a rage. He did really like women — so he put it to himself. There was nothing he liked better than to have one in his arms — his own phraseology again. And Emmie was a regular little sport, a regular little sport. He admired her. And he fidgetted about in a temper waiting for her. Black devils frisked in his veins, and pricked him with their barbed tails. He was full of little devils. Alas, he had fallen from the white election of the spoon. He plunged into the twitchel, saw the row of cottages, of which hers was the end one; saw the lighted window, heard voices; heard a man’s voice from the back premises, from the back door, and plunged on. He clambered over the stile and went forward down the black, muddy field-path towards the canals. No good going very far, however.
He heard a step behind him, and listened. Her father, ten to one. He loitered on the dark, open field. The man came nearer. Glancing round, Gilbert saw the dark whiskers on the pallid face, and sent out a wave of hatred. He loitered whilst her father strode past him, on into the night. Then he turned back towards the cottage.
He had been in a similar situation more than once. Nay, for the young fellows of the colliery-places like Whetstone and Woodhouse, for the young bloods who had a bit of dash of warmth about them, the situation was almost traditional. Bostock, Emmie’s father, had done the same, and worse, many a time in his day. So had old Noon, Gilbert’s father. Gilbert was but keeping up a human tradition. And yet he was in a temper about it. He sort of felt himself in a ready- made circumstance, going through a ready-made act, and he was thoroughly annoyed with everything. Yes, he was, in Woodhouse phraseology, a womaniser: and he knew it: and he meant to be a womaniser. So why make any bones about his present situation? But his temper mounted. Yes, he would be a womaniser. He prided himself on it. Wasn’t “Down Among the Dead Men” one of his favourite songs? Fine tune too.
“And may Confusion still pursue The senseless woman-hating crew “
Alas, he would be a womaniser. Yet he kicked with fury against the universal spoon. He fought like a fly in oil.
Meanwhile Emmie indoors was going through her own little act. She enjoyed play-acting. She had lied like a little trooper to her father, having a sulky innocence-suspected look which he exacted, and a pert tongue which he threatened with extraction. For Alf Bostock had been a womaniser both before and after his marriage to his mild, lax Jinny: and him a man with a swarm of little children. She had no rosy time of it. Till he got kicked out of his job; and suddenly became religious, with all the ferocity of an old trotter. So he proceeded to put his children through the paces of narrow- pathdom. His poor Jinny was always wax, but his own offspring tended to bristle. And Emmie, who was perhaps his favourite — a pretty, taking, sharp-answering little thing, with a way of her own — she was his special enemy as she grew up. A roaming bitch, he called her in his wrath.
And it was curiously appropriate, for she had the alert, inquisitive, tail- in-the-air appearance of a bitch who has run away and finds the world an adventure, as she tripped the streets.
Once the tyrant was gone, Emmie was quite equal to any occasion. She had retreated upstairs, as if to bed, before his departure. Now down she came again.
“Hey, our mother, I’ll have my supper now in peace,” she said, taking a knife and going into the pantry for bread and cheese and cake.
“There’s a bit of apple-pie if you’d like it,” said her indulgent, easy mother.
Emmie walked out with the pie-dish, and sat scraping it with a spoon.
“I’ve got my lessons to do yet,” she said cheerfully.
“Be ashamed,” said her mother. “Last minute.”
“Make use of the fag-ends of time,” said Emmie.
“Ay, fag-ends,” said her mother.
Emmie spread her books on the table under the lamp, to write the compulsory notes for the morrow’s lessons. She pulled her hair untidy on her brow as she did so.
“Go to bed, Mother Bostock,” she said to her mother. “Don’t sit dropping off in that chair. How do you think anybody can make notes, when they have to watch for your head dropping on to the floor. Get up. Go on.”
“Ay,” said her mother amiably. “How long shall you be?”
“About twenty minutes I should think. Go on now — go to bed. You know you’ll get a crick in your neck.”
“Ay, you’d like to think so,” said her mother, weakly rising and obeying. “I shall listen for you, now,” she added from the foot of the stairs.
“Go on — I shan’t be a minute if you leave me in peace.”
And Mrs Bostock slowly mounted the creaky stairs. Emmie scribbled away in her flighty fashion for some time, pausing occasionally to listen. At length she shut her books and stretched her arms. Then with startling suddenness she blew out the lamp. After which she stood in the darkness and listened.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 270