“Yes, there is you,” said Louise, with doubtful intonation. Gilbert flushed, and went pale.
“Wire that it is another man,” said he, with his immovable, pale-faced obstinacy.
“But think — think what it means!” cried Johanna.
“I know without thinking. There’s nothing else to do. Say another man.”
“Shall I?” wavered Johanna.
“Ach — but you don’t know what you are doing!” cried Louise. “You are so young — you are so young, Mr Noon. You are younger than Johanna. Think what will happen — ach — I can’t think of it. You have no work — no money. Let there be time. Let Johanna have time. You must not hurry her in such a thing. Let her take time.”
There was silence. Gilbert became paler and paler. He hated the park, and the morning sunshine, and the chestnut- trees in flower. They all looked to him like cardboard.
“Yes, is it not better so?” persisted Louise.
“No,” said Gilbert. “She must wire the truth.”
“Ach must — must. There can be no must,” said Louise, rather cuttingly. “And the truth is nicht wahr. It is so simple.” She laughed cynically.
“Yes,” said Gilbert. “The truth isn’t true.”
“The truth isn’t true,” repeated Louise. “No — the truth is never true, Mr Noon. You are so young, you do not know what it means.” She laughed hollowly.
It is a stagey thing to say. But then Louise had a queer, tired, devilish hollow little laugh of her own.
“Wire another man,” said Gilbert to Johanna.
“Must I?” she said.
“Ach Hannele, du bist so dumm!” cried Louise. “There can be no must.”
She seemed to be brooding a bitter end of meditation, as she sat with her knee crossed, her veil loose on her brow, looking across the park.
“I think you must,” said Gilbert to Johanna.
“And shall I do as you tell me? What shall I say?” asked Johanna.
“Say another man — ” said Gilbert.
Louise had listened in silence to this little dialogue, almost as if she did not hear. Now she put in.
“Another man!” she laughed. “Oh, it sounds so nice. I like it very much. Another man.’“
“Shall I say that?” said Johanna.
“Yes, say that,” said Gilbert.
“Must I?” said Johanna.
“Yes.”
Louise rose to her feet.
“Oh you young people!” she said. “Come, I must go. Mr Noon, I must take Johanna away to our mother.”
“You will telegraph before you go home?” said Gilbert to Johanna.
“Yes — yes — ” said Johanna nervously.
“And you’ll say what I told you?”
He looked into her eyes.
“Yes, I promise,” she said, still waveringly.
“Come! Come!” said Louise. “Ach what are you doing? You do not know.”
They walked across the hateful park, into which wild horses would not have dragged Mr Gilbert again. He loathed everything he was in for. And yet he was in for it, so there was nothing to be done.
Louise got a taxi, and drove off with Johanna. Both had lowered their veils. Both waved to him triumphantly as they drove off between the avenue of trees. And if anything can be more hateful to a man than to have two females driving triumphantly off in a taxi, and waving to him as they leave him stranded in uncertainty, hanging at a loose end, then tell me what it is.
He rambled round the attractive but to him hateful old town of Detsch, and in perfect misery had his hair cut. The barber was French, and talked anti-German.
With a trimmed head Gilbert looked for luncheon — found a little place where working men ate, and where he had Frankfurter sausages and sauerkraut and felt horribly conspicuous. Then he went home and lay down on the bed.
Johanna was coming some time during the afternoon. And he felt wretched, and not in his own skin. He felt thoroughly humiliated, and now knew he was embarking on a new little sea of ignominy. He writhed under all the ignominy.
There was a tap at the door. It was Johanna. She entered in silence, looking worried.
“Did you wire?” he said.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I said Nicht Berry — Schreibe — Not Berry, am writing.”
“You sent that?”
“Yes, I sent it before I got home — from the Friedrichstrasse post office. — Oh, Mama is in such a state. She wants to see you too.”
“And have you written?”
“No — but I’m going to today.”
“What is the address? I’ll write too.”
“Will you? To Everard?” she said doubtfully.
“Yes. What is the address?”
“What will you say?” she asked.
“Exactly what is.”
“And what is? Tell me what you’ll say.”
“That you will stay with me — that you are living with me now — and that you won’t go back.”
He was anything but happy and assured. But a strange, pale fixity was on him. He said what he had to say, without giving it thought. In a process of strange abstraction his mind had decided without thinking. And this seemed to mesmerise Johanna.
“Will you say that?” she said wistfully.
“Yes — what is the address?”
He went to the table and took a piece of paper. He stood there in his shirtsleeves. Johanna, in a lovely dress of dull reddish cashmere, wearing a close toque made all of darkish bird’s breast-feathers, stood in the light of the window, wondering and half wistful like a child. He looked at her, from his pallid, gloomy face.
“What is the address?” he repeated.
“Dr Everard “ and she answered automatically, whilst he wrote what she said.
“I shall write to him tonight,” he said, laying down the pencil.
“Shall you?” she said wonderingly.
He looked at her, then he locked the door.
“Do you want me?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you want me always?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t say it very brightly.”
“No.”
“My love — ”
She could see the sombre fire of passion in his eyes and his clouded brow. He resented so bitterly all the complication and humiliation. No man felt the sting of humiliation more keenly than he, or resented it more deeply and lastingly. He resented the rising tide of black, sewer-like ignominy that was just going to envelop him. He was heavy with deep, sullen resentment. And yet, like fate, his soul was fixed. Johanna was going to stay with him. She was with him now. In the midst of it all he was to enjoy her, she him.
She was quite ready to enjoy him — far more ready than he was to enjoy her. She could soon abandon herself to passion and delicious pleasure. But he came dense and crude.
None the less she admired him.
“What a wonderful shape you are here!” she said, running her fingertips over the front contour of the big hip bone. He was rather bony. He wondered over her appreciation of him:
something very unexpected in it. But he liked it, and his desire spread new wings.
The course of true love is said never to run true. But never did the course of any love run so jagged as that of Johanna and Mr Noon. The wonder is, it ever got there at all.
And yet, perhaps, a jagged, twisty, water-fally, harassed stream is the most fascinating to follow. It has a thousand unexpected thrills and adventures in it. Let those who love peace seek peace and pursue it. We are not so keen on peace. To be a fat cow in a fat pasture is not our ideal. Away with your stodgy and suety peace. Let us have a continual risk and tumble and the unceasing spur of jeopardy on our flank to make us jump and fly down the wind. None of your fat grazing-grounds for us. If we are to have yon tasty tuft of grass, or yon patch of sweet-herb, we’ve got to hop perilously down a
precipice for it. And that is what we prefer. God, I don’t want to sup life with a spoon. I’d rather go lean-bellied till I’d caught my bird.
Which all goes to prove that the critic who says I am on the search for beauty rather than truth may be right. He can read this book and make certain. He says I am Aubrey Beardsley rather than Swift. So that all you have to fear, gentle reader, is some exquisite tail-piece to Salome. I’ll do my best for you. If you have misgivings, leave off now.
“Quick, sharp, on the alert Let every gentleman put on his shirt!
And, oh, quick if you please Let every lady get on her chemise!”
Never was such a pair of unfortunate interrupted lovers. As in Macbeth, there came a knocking at the door. Johanna, in the arms of Gilbert, gave an awful start. He sat up and listened, with visions of husbands, police, incensed official Barons and what-not coursing through his mind.
“Bang-bang-bang-bang!” came the double knock. Whoever it was, they would have heard the voices of the guilty pair. The door-handle gave a little squeak of protest as the unknown horror tried it from outside. Luckily the door was locked.
“Bang-bang-bang!” came the officious knock. And still dead silence in the room, where the guilty pair lay on the bed with beating hearts.
“See who it is,” whispered Johanna, pushing him from her.
And then he saw her, in puris naturalibus, flee swiftly, white and naked, behind a curtain which hung across a corner, huddling there with her feet, and the tip of her shoulder, and then, as she stooped, that exquisite finale of Salome showing round and white behind the curtain, before the dazed eyes of Gilbert.
He was in no better plight than she: not a rag, not a stitch on him, and there he stood in the middle of the room listening to that diabolical knocking and vacantly watching the come and go of the exquisite tail-piece to Johanna, as she stooped to unravel her stockings.
And why, under such circumstances, should she be putting on her grey silk stockings, and routing for her garters with rosebuds on them. Why oh why, in the shipwreck of nudity, cling to the straw of a grey silk stocking.
Rap-rap-rap! This was not to be borne. The vacant Gilbert was man enough upon necessity: necessity it had to be, however: and necessity it now was. Therefore he reached down his double-breasted brown overcoat, and wrapped it round him as far as possible. It went round him well enough, but it left his bare neck sticking out at the top, and half a yard of bare shins sticking out at the bottom. No help for it. He unlocked and opened the door, holding it and barring the entrance of — that damned Swiss manageress. His hair was ruffled and on end, he looked at the precise female with his vacant, unassailable eye.
“Die gnadige Frau ist da? — Is the lady there?”
“Wie? — What?”
“Die Frau Doktor is da? — The Mrs Doctor is there?”
“Wie? — What?”
“Madame, est-elle ici? — Is Madam here?”
Gilbert shook his head solemnly.
“Non, elle n’est pas ici.”
Heaven knows why he chose to answer the French and not the German.
The Swiss woman looked at him: he looked at her.
“Elle n’est pas ici?” she repeated.
“Non. Non!” and Gilbert looked into the room behind him, vacantly. He saw Johanna’s now stockinged ankles behind the linen curtain.
“Non! Elle n’est pas ici,” he said with the innocent “pipe of half awakened bird.” He looked into the hard black eyes of the venomous manageress mildly.
The manageress looked various volumes and daggers back at him, but as she did not proceed to throw them he let her look.
“Merci,” she said reluctantly: very reluctantly. She had lost the battle. And she turned away.
And as he saw her back, Gilbert became aware of his own hairy shins, and agonies of confusion went over him. He locked the door stupefied with confusion.
“Oh God, I must get out of this!” cried Johanna, springing from behind the curtain in her grey silk stockings, rose-bud garters, and cambric chemise. Gilbert, still clasped in his brown overcoat, watched her as she flew into her lacey-white knickers, her pretty, open work French stays, her grey silk petty and her reddish dress. She tied the tapes and snapped the press-studs like lightning. In a moment she was tying her shoe-laces. And then she had only to poke her hair more or less under the dusky-lustrous feather toque, and fling the lace scarf over her shoulders, and she was ready.
“Goodbye!” she said, looking at him with wide scared eyes. “I hope before God she won’t make a row. — I’ll go down.”
She was much more scared than Gilbert would have thought. But in a moment she was gone — her red dress and white scarf and soft-feathered head flashed across the landing and was gone.
He proceeded to dress himself, feeling a new rage at his new mess. But there was nothing for it but just to go on. And when there is nothing for it but just to go on, why, one goes on.
So he went downstairs — without mishap. And at the bottom he heard loud laughing talking voices from the lounge. Johanna for certain. Yes, there was Johanna talking to a handsome, ultra-fashionable woman who had daring dark eyes and looked like a cocotte.
This was Johanna’s sister Lotte, descended from the chic of Vienna.
“Ja Lotte — le voila — le faux Monsieur Berry.”
“Bonjour M’sieur,” said Lotte, holding out an elegant white-kid-gloved hand. “Vous n’etes pas Berry, alors!”
Gilbert bowed, and his eye caught a spark from Lotte’s.
“Safe — safe!” cried Johanna to him in English. “Oh, I had the fright of my life.”
“Ai-da!” said Lotte. “I doan spik English. Je vous ai fait un mauvais tour, hein? Mille pardons! I did you a bad turn. I asked the woman if Johanna was here, and she said she thought she was upstairs. So I said Tell her please. Of course, if I had known — ” Lotte made dark, wicked eyes at Gilbert — ”I should have said Pray don’t disturb her.” She put on an engaged look, and smoothed her gloves like a woman just going out, and arched her eyebrows in a rather becoming pantomime. “But I have made a serious faux pas.”
And she bridled, displeased with herself.
“However,” she continued, “all can be finished in the next chapter. I am going.”
She once more made eyes at Gilbert, and held out her hand.
“I come with you, Lotte,” said Johanna.
And once more Gilbert watched two women sail off in a taxi-cab, whilst he was left stranded in that accursed, blaring, military town. And what was worse, he had lost another of his skins now, and felt more raw than he cared to admit even to himself. He loathed the black-eyed Swiss manageress, with her face like a pair of scissors. And he hated her hotel: family indeed!
The twilight of the same day saw Johanna walking sentimentally with Captain von Daumling, who was sparkling in his blue and pink uniform, but whose heart was veiled in a grey chiffon of tears. They strayed unconsciously to the spiney cathedral.
“Let us go,” said Rudolf, “and light a candle to our love, on the altar of the Virgin.”
“Yes, do let us,” cried Johanna, thrilled to her soul.
Now that the candle of Rudolfs brief passion was drooping and almost spent, its ruddy light dwindling to the smallest pale wick-glow, Johanna was thrilled to her marrow to stick up a good stout candle of wax to burn on the altar of the Virgin. In the dusk of the tall, forested cathedral, with the gorgeous windows glowing but shedding no light, they crept on the low strand of the floor, and the captain’s spurs tinkled melancholy, a tiny sound low on the floor of the vast, branching shadow of the interior. Johanna was not a catholic, but she loved her cathedral. Its slender, shafted upsoaring affected her deliriously. She crept across the forlorn floor to the flickering altar of the Virgin, whilst the Captain of the Fifth trod softly, holding the stout wax candle between his fingers, at her side.
It was a hushed moment. He lighted the wick of his new pale candle at one of the candles already burning, and the
n stuck it, like a new pale tree, a new wasting column of life, on one of the expiring sockets. After which he came and kneeled at Johanna’s side, and they knew a perfect unison.
Oh white, oh waxen candle of purified love, how still, how golden the flame of the spirit hovers upon you, while the wax lasts. Oh beautiful tall erect candle of chastened aspiration, how soothing is the sight of you to a soul perplexed and suffering. Nay, quench the dusky, crimson-burning torch of unhallowed passion, scatter its lurid blood-flame, crush it down to next to nothingness, put it in your pocket and forget it. And light a six-franc waxen candle upon the altar of uplifted aspiration, and pray a little prayer to the Virgin and the Unbegotten.
And prepare to consume this six-francs-worth of material wax, this mundane flesh: prepare, oh prepare to struggle as a guttering flame struggles with the wick, for release. For release into the infinite. Rudolf watched the sunken, flapping flame of somebody else’s candle beating its wings to escape into the boundless eternity, and he pressed his hands to his breast. To escape — ah, to escape from the limitations of this five-franc mould of a corpus!
Johanna meanwhile watched the same sunk flame flapping and fighting for life, fighting, sipping, sipping avidly at the spent wax, and yet, in spite of all its struggles forced to go, forced to leave the lovely warm place of presence, to be driven over the threshold of existence into the howling wilderness of infinite chaos, where the world is void and dark. So there she knelt with luxurious tears in her eyes. I say luxurious. For after all it wasn’t her candle, it was only the cavalry captain’s. And he was no longer indispensable.
They were both sad, but for different reasons. They both saw the candle-flame shuddering in its frail mortality, and felt the vast shadow of eternity branching overhead. And they both had pangs: widely differing pangs.
So, gentle reader, before you light your next candle to the Virgin, make up your mind which emotion you’re going to get out of it: whether you’re going to see the immortal soul escaping at last into freedom and bliss, on a strong draught of uplift; or whether you’re going to lament “Alas, gone out, gone out!”
Let us invoke the great spirit of Uplift. Oh Uplift, Uplift, that which carries us beyond ourselves, how much bigger we are than ever we were intended to be when we whirl with thy wind in our skirts, heavenwards. Oh mighty rushing wind, oh universal Uplift, carry us above our own high-water-mark and make us boundless. Blow us into the mid-heaven’s zenith till this poor earth is no more than a speck of dust in our eye, and we are so god-almighty elevated that there’s nothing either here nor in kingdom come but we can look down on it. Dear draughty uplift, bellow out our skirts and trouser-legs like zeppelin balloons, till we whirl straddling up into the sky, whence we can look down on our fellow-men. Oh holy uplift, let us look down on our fellow-men: in love of course! Let us look down on our fellow-men, as pathetic, tearful Gods look down on mankind, pitiful, all pitiful and all benign. Oh, as we straddle in mid-heaven with the sanctified wind of Uplift bellowing up our trouser-legs and ballooning our trouser-seat so that we float butt-end uppermost, oh then, then oh then we spread our arms to mankind away below there, we gather humanity like a tray of silk-worm cocoons to our beneficent bosom, and we fairly reel in mid-air with charitable feeling. Of course our trousers are sound, so we are safe. We are none of your arse-patched mundane sitters. We are the uplift- wooshers, who dribble the Pluto-drizzle of charity over the world. It’s a risky thing to do, of course, if your trouser-seat is worn a little thin. The balloon of the spiritual inflatus might then burst and let you down flop on that same pathetic mankind, which will not welcome you at all if you come cropping down like a brick-bat. In fact, in these days of risky tailors, it isn’t half such a safe thing as it used to be, to go wooshing up in the air on the draught of sanctified Uplift. In fact I should warn people to beware of entertaining charitable and benevolent feelings just now, till they are quite sure their material gas-envelope is quite sound. Let them rub and feel their trouser-seat and their backside carefully, to make sure it is a sound vacuum, and that it will act as a trustworthy float when it is filled with the spirit of uplift, most vacuous of all vacuosities. I say the trouser-seat, because of course that is the obvious pouch or inflatus-bladder of Uplift. Ah humanity, humanity, let your posterior forever not exist, save as a vacuum. Queens of Spain have no legs, but all lofty mankind has no backside: not a bit of it. Nothing there. Nothing twin- protuberant and kickable. Only the float-void.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 285