By the Isar the roses were out, wild roses, but red, almost scarlet red. And columbines and the last lilies still lurked on the steep, moist, hidden banks. The river made many twists — there were many shoals of pink sand and gravel — the stream broke up into various arms. And sometimes the rafts coming sailing down would get caught, and in spite of all efforts the raftsmen would be fast.
In one deep little corner, in an arm of the stream, Gilbert and Johanna would sometimes bathe. The water was cold, but wonderful once one was in. Johanna was a better swimmer than Gilbert — he was no water fowl. But she rocked on the water like a full water lily, her white and gold breasts of a deep-bosomed woman of thirty-two swaying slightly to the stream, her white knees coming up like buds, her face flushed and laughing.
“How lovely! How lovely!” she cried, in the water-ecstasy.
But he was lean and dry-souled, he never could know the water-ecstasy. And as she rolled over in the pallid, pure, bluey-effervescent stream, and he saw her magnificent broad white shoulders and her knot of hair, envy, and an almost hostile desire filled him. She came from the water full-blown like a water-flower, naked and delighted with her element. And she lay spread in the sun on the clean shingle. And he sat in his lean, unyielding nudity upon a great pinkish boulder, and he looked at her, still with the dark eyes of a half-hostile desire and envy. Strange enemies they were, as a white seagull and a gold land-hawk are enemies. And he brooded, looking at her as her strong bosom rose and fell, and the full breasts lay sideways. And with a sort of inward rage he wished he could see her without any darkness of desire disturbing his soul.
Fool that he was. As if there were not sufficient dead eyes of insentience in the world, without his wishing to escape from the sacred magnetism of desire. But it was a chain that held this land-hawk by the leg: as it held that white seagull by the wing. And in their hour they both struggled against the bond.
Ah the history of man and woman: it is a long history of their struggles to be free of one another. Egyptian king-gods, and christian crucifixion, they are only dodges to escape the fatal bond that binds man to woman and woman to man, and makes each the limit of the other. Oh what a limitation is this woman to me! And oh what a limitation am I to her almighty womanliness.
And so it is, the two raging at one another. And sometimes one wins, and the other goes under. And then the battle is reversed. And sometimes the two fly asunder, and men are all soldiers and women all weavers. And sometimes all women become as men, as in England, so that the men need no longer be manly. And sometimes all men become as women, so the women need no longer be womanly. And sometimes — but oh so rarely — man remains man, and woman woman, and in their difference they meet and are very happy.
But man must remain man, and woman woman. There is something manly in the soul of a man which is beyond woman, and in which she has no part. And there is something in woman, particularly in motherhood, in which man has no part, and can have no part. For a woman to trespass into man’s extremity is poison, and for a man to trespass into woman’s final remoteness is misery.
So there we are — the old, the eternal game of man and woman: the time-balancing oscillation of eternity. In this we live, and from this our lives are made. There is a duality in opposition, between man and woman. There is a dual life- polarity. And the one half can never usurp the other half — the one pole can never replace the other. It is the basis of the life- mystery.
The universe swings in a same dual polarity. Let scientists say what they will, the sun is but one pole of our gravitation. There is another: perhaps the moon: perhaps the invisible. But between a dual polarity our round earth swings on her course. If there were but one pole, and that the sun, then she would fall into the sun. Which she does not.
Many times, perhaps most times, Gilbert and Johanna were completely happy. But again, each tugged the leash. He wanted life to be all his life, male; she wanted life to be all her life, female. And sometimes he fell under her tugging, and sometimes she fell under his. And then there was war.
For a woman doesn’t want a man she can conquer: no, though she fight like hell for conquest. And the same with a man. Oh horrible submission, especially in marriage are you the foulest of treacheries! Never submit, never abandon yourself completely. This is the last word to every man and woman.
Ultimately, a woman wants a man who, by entering into complete relationship with her, will keep her in her own polarity and equipoise, true to herself. The man wants the same of a woman. It is the eternal oscillating balance of the universe. It is the timeless inter-related duality of fire and water. Let life overbalance in either direction, and there is a fight, a terrific struggle to get back the balance. And let the mechanistic intervention of some fixed ideal neutralise the incalculable ebb-and-flow of the two principles, and a raging madness will supervene in the world. A madness which is pleasantly accumulating in mankind today.
Gilbert and Johanna were mostly very happy. She was wild with pleasure at release from conventional life. She would dance in her glowing, full bodied nudity round and round the flat, and she made him dance also, in his more intense, white and ruddy-haired nudity. He was stiff and constrained. There was an intense fierce reserve and stiffness in him. His whiteness was very white and hard, his hair was black, but his body hair ruddy-brown. She was full and soft and gold-white, with delicate soft hair.
“Dance,” she said to him. “Dance!”
And with her arms spread on the air, she floated round in triumph. And he, ashamed to be ashamed, danced in correspondence, with a jerky, male stiffness that seemed to her odd and strange. Woosh she went, veering as on a current of water down the passage, looping her soft nudity and her soft, soft-stemmed hands in a loop round the little kitchen, and floating back into the sitting-room, where he was dancing with odd, jerky, nigger-like motions which seemed to her so comical and curious. Why on earth dance like that, when one could swim deliciously on the air! And him, he wondered how one could abandon oneself to swim on the air, when one was sharp and intensely local. So she swam around him, and drooped her soft-stemmed hand over his hard, naked shoulder. And he came with his comical quick motions, and put his thin, hard naked arm round her full soft waist. And she shouted with pleasure and triumph, and his eyes twinkled sardonically.
To be free! To be free, Great God! Not furtive and orgiastic at night, and stiff in a linen collar of correctitude during the day. Whether Gilbert liked it or not, she insisted on floating round in her soft, ambient nudity in the morning or the afternoon, if she felt like it. And she made him float, or paddle likewise. And he, as we said before, was ashamed to be ashamed.
Likewise she insisted on going barefoot, though the roads were stony and painful. So off they trudged, both barefoot, on the roads through the forest, and they got sole-sore and he became cross. And at evening a doe ran across the sky-line, so fleet. And as they came home, the fire-flies were threading in and out of the tall, tall dark rye, carrying their little explosive lanterns in their tails.
“I love you! I love you, you dears, you dears!” she cried to the fire-flies. “I wish I was a fire-fly.”
“Don’t gush,” said he.
“You — who are you?” she cried at him.
“And what are you, for a fire-fly?” he said.
“Go away, you spoil everything. — You dear, you dear fireflies, I love you. I wish I was one of you, to swim through the tops of the rye. Oh, I do! I should love it. I should love to be a fire-fly, and not bother with tiresome men and their pettiness any more.”
“You might be less of a fool, if you were a fire-fly,” he said to her. “You’re too big a fool to be a human being.”
“Oh God! Oh God!” she cried, lifting her hands to the deity. “Why am I persecuted by this person at my side.”
“Because you ask for it,” said he.
“Go away! Go away! I want to be happy. I want to be happy with the lovely fire-flies.”
“Yes, you might ask them first, before
you go butting in.”
“They’ll be glad of me,” she said.
“By God, then they’re welcome.”
“Go away! Go home, you hateful thing.”
“Come away, you ass. Don’t slobber any more.”
“Slobber! If you weren’t a dried English stick, you’d know it wasn’t slobber.”
“And being a dried English stick, I just know it is.”
“You would. There isn’t a drop of sap in you.”
“And you’re going squashy and over-ripe.”
“Oh, but isn’t he a devill Now he’s spoiled my fire-flies.”
And she went home in a dudgeon, and spent the rest of the evening making a marvellous painting on brown paper, of fire-flies in the corn. And he stood on the balcony, and looked at the fire-flies drifting in and out of the darkness, weaving and waving in the dark air beneath him. And the night was a great concave of darkness. And the river sounded as in a sea- shell. And an owl flew hooting with a little sob. And the great concave of darkness in front seemed vast, and bristling with fir-trees and mysterious northern, eastern lands.
Again they walked the miles across to the Lake of Starnberg. Ah, how Gilbert loved to emerge from the forests into the wide, half-marshy corn-lands. There lay the broad-roofed farms: there rose a tall white church, black-capped. A hare rushed along the road-side: a deer flashed across out of the tall rye, and ran again into the deep corn. Then she turned, and spread her wide ears, up to the chin in corn, and watched our pair of finches. And her fawn, lost in the high corn of the opposite side of the way, made a great rustling, and whimpered and cried like a child for its mother. The doe flashed back at a tangent, and called to her fawn from the hill crest. Then off they trotted, into the forest edge.
Gilbert and Johanna walked through the shallow lands. A peasant, and his wife in the great blue-cotton trousers of the marsh-women were earning their hay off the hay-sticks in their arms, and loading it on the cart, where their little boy trod it down.
Coming to the village with the trees and the tall black and white church, on the opposite crest, Johanna and Gilbert arrived at an inn, and went into the inn-garden for dinner. They were eating their soup when in chattered a class of school-boys, two by two, with their teacher in attendance. He had the self-important self-conscious look of a teacher. The boys seemed happy, carrying their jackets. After a delay and a flutter and a few reprimands, they were arranged at a long table for dinner, a chattering pleased little crowd.
Gilbert watched them ominously. A sort of horror overcame him. He could not think of his own teaching days now, without horror. To be a school-teacher: he looked at the quite pleasant German specimen. — But the ignominy of it! The horror of the hideous tangled captivity.
Ah liberty, liberty, the sweetest of all things: freedom to possess one’s body and soul, to be master of one’s own days. Not many souls are fit for freedom. Most get bored, or nervous, or foolish. Let them have jobs, let such have their time allotted to them. But for the free soul liberty is essential, and a job is a thing to be contemplated with horror and hatred.
It was full summer-time, and wild strawberries were ripe along the forest hedges. Gilbert and Johanna gathered them in big leaves, and tasted all the fragrance of the wild native world in them, the fierceness of the lost winter.
And again the post arrived from America, and more torrents of abuse, rage, grief, despair and self-pity. Everard wrote also to the Baron, and the family clock began to whirr again. The Baron wrote to Johanna, and added his praise to that of the injured husband. His daughter was ruining the family honor. Marriage was a social institution, and whoever attacked the social fabric deserved to be treated as a criminal and coerced into submission. A private excursion in the fields of adultery- was perhaps to be condoned.
The Baron knew he was on thin ice, on the marriage question. Had he not his own illegitimate menage, under the rose? But he kept his position. The institution was to be supported, the individual might do as he liked — under the rose. “Ach yea!” said Lotte. “If the bed isn’t roses the bedcover is.” So she went in and out among the rose-bushes, and hid, not behind the fig-leaf, but behind this same immortal rose.
Johanna was not hiding: and here came the difficulty. The Baron stormed against the paltry and mischievous Alfred, the intriguing Louise, and the gullible fool of a Johanna. “Do you think any man will marry you again after you have made such an exposure of yourself?” he wrote. And getting hotter, he continued: “But if ever you bring this ill-bred, common, penniless lout to my house, I shall kick him down the stairs.”
“Ach Papa,” wrote Johanna. “Don’t you talk of kicking, with so much gout in your feet.”
Long, sombre, semi-mystical poems arrived from Rudolf. The raven of woe had made off with the pearl of the north, and hidden it in some unclean cranny. But was no falcon on the wing?
No, dear Rudolf, no falcon was on the wing. He sat with his posterior on his chair in his study and wrote inky poems.
And then the Baroness, Johanna’s mother, fluttered near. She arrived in Munich, and descended for the moment on Alfred. Alfred and Louise meanwhile sardonically pulled both ways.
Arrived the Baroness’ letter from Munich, to Gilbert in German. “Think what you do. Think what position you can give my daughter. She has been used to a comfortable and honorable life, and she must not be brought down to degradation. Her father was a cultured nobleman of high family, and how could he bear to think of his daughter going about the country homeless, living on charity, with a strange man, like a tramp. Yes, like a tramp trailing across the country.”
The Baroness had a real style of her own. Gilbert spit on his hands, and tackled the German language. He would answer Dutch with Dutch. “Your daughter wishes to stay with me, I do not detain her against her will. So long as she wishes to stay, I shall never ask her to go away. I am no more master of her actions than is anyone else. I shall stand by her as long as ever she asks for it, or wishes it, or will have it. Her marriage in America is a disaster for her. I want her to stay with me. We are not tramps nor living on charity, since nobody gives us anything. I do what I can do — and it can’t be otherwise.”
And then, lo and behold, Johanna, happening to go into the kitchen one rainy morning just after midday, just after the midday train had gone down the line, saw a figure which surely was familiar coming down the path from the station: a sturdy, even burly figure in a black coat and skirt, and a white chiffon scarf, and an insecure boat-shaped hat, bobbing along under an umbrella.
The Baroness, by all the powers. Johanna rushed into the bedroom, where Gilbert was sitting stark naked, his feet under him, musing on the bed.
“Mama!” said Johanna, flinging off her blue silk wrap and appearing like a Rubens’ Venus.
“What?” said Gilbert.
“Quick! There’s Mama! Coming from the station. Thank the Lord I saw her.”
And Johanna flew into her chemise, whilst Gilbert got into his shirt.
By the time the Baroness had had a word with Frau Breitgau, and had struggled up the stairs, two correct young people were standing on their feet, dressed and ready. But alas, they both, and he in particular, had that soft, vague, warm look in their eyes and in their faces, that tender afterglow of a fierce round of love and passion.
Into this mild, dawn-tender, rosy half-awakenedness came the Baroness, like the black and ponderous blast of Boreas. Gilbert was bewildered at being honored so unexpectedly, but as yet he was unsuspicious. He took the umbrella of the visitor, and gave her a seat on the honorable and comfortable deep sofa. Then he took a chair at the desk, where he had the evening before been working at music.
There was a lull. And then suddenly, like a bomb which has been quietly steaming and then goes off, the Baroness went off. She planted her knees square, she pushed the hat off her forehead, she let her white chiffon scarf hang loose. And then, in a child’s high, strange lament voice, she turned to Gilbert and began.
It would be
useless to repeat what she said. Poor Gilbert, the dawn-rose going more and more bewildered in his eyes, his mouth coming apart, his face growing pale, seemed to shrink in his chair — and shrank and shrank, as if he would get down between the two legs of the pedestal desk, and there, like an abashed dog retreated in its kennel, bark uncertainly at the intruder.
On and on went the Baroness. It was not abuse — not at all. It was like a child in a dream going on and on, in a high, plaintive, half-distracted voice. She said everything she had said before, and everything that she would inevitably say. She said all the things that had come into her mind, all the things she had put into her letter. She reminded him of poor Johanna’s unhappy future — and of the children. — ”Ja, und Sie wissen nicht was eine Mutter von zwei Kindern ist. Das wissen Sie nicht. — Ja, und ich meine, ihr Vater ist ein adlicher, hochgebildeter Mann — Ja, und wenn Sie Geld hatten — Ja, und ihr Mann ist doch so gut, so gelernt, und so beriihmt dort in Amerika — Ja und was fur ein Leben ist es dann fur Sie. Oh jeh, noch so jung und unerfahren sind Sie — ”
“ — Yes, and you don’t know what a Mother of two children is — Yes, and I must say, her father is a cultured nobleman — Yes, and if you had any money even — Yes, and her husband is really so good, so kind, so learned, and so famous there in America. — Yes, and what kind of life is it for you? Oh dear, you are so young and inexperienced — oh dear, what a sad and heavy fate you take on your young shoulders — Oh, what a sad and heavy fate. Oh dear, it is good you have no mother, for what should she say. — But why will you do this thing? Why will you do it. — And yes, even if Johanna says she is happy now, think in six months! In six months! Oh poor Johanna, my poor Hannele. And her two children. Ach, and she a mother with two children. That you don’t understand. You are young, you don’t understand. No, what a sad life you make for yourself — ah, I cannot think of it — such a sad life for you. — And yes, what will you do when the Herr Doktor wants this house? Oh yea, then you have no roof to your heads! Homeless, like a pair of tramps — like a pair of tramps — and her father is really such a cultured nobleman “
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 293