Gilbert, watching, saw the flame of anticipation over the man. Johanna was in a Bavarian peasant-dress, tight at the breasts, full-skirted, with a rose silk apron. And the peasant desired her, with his powerful mountain loins and broad shoulders. And Gilbert sympathised with him. But also he was unhappy. He saw that legitimately Johanna was the bride of the mountaineer that night. He saw also that she would never submit. She would not have love without some sort of spiritual recognition. Given the spiritual recognition, she was a queen, more a queen the more men loved her. But the peasant’s was the other kind of desire: the male desire for possession of the female, not the spiritual man offering himself up sexually. She would get no worship from the mountaineer: only lusty mating and possession. And she would never capitulate her female castle of pre-eminence. She would go down before no male. The male must go down before her. “On your knees, oh man!” was her command in love. Useless to command this all-muscular peasant. So she withdrew. She said Danke-schon, and withdrew. And Gilbert saw the animal chagrin in the other man. The lady had let him down. The lady would let him down as long as time lasted. He would have to forfeit his male lustihood, she would yield only to worship, not to the male overweening possession. And he did not yet understand how to forfeit his hardy male lustihood.
Gilbert was in a bad mood. He knew that at the bottom Johanna hated the peasant. How she would hate him if she were given into his possession! And yet how excited she was. And he, Gilbert, must be the instrument to satisfy her roused excitement. It by no means flattered or pleased him. He sympathised with the peasant. Johanna was a fraud.
Sentimentally his mind reverted to Emmie. He had written her an occasional letter, in answer to little letters from her. So now in the farm-house by the rushing stream he remembered her again: and remembered his sister Violet: and wrote picture-postcards to both of them. And out of the few words breathed a touch of yearning we’re-so-fond-of-one-another sentiment.
Johanna, a lynx without scruples, read everything he wrote. He rather liked this trespass upon his privacy. For, not being at all sure about his own emotions, it rather pleased him to see Johanna play skittles with them.
Johanna read the two postcards, and her colour rose. She knew all about Emmie. Gilbert, a real son of his times, had told Johanna everything: particularly everything he should not have told her.
“You’re writing again to that impossible little Emmie!” she cried.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“But I thought you’d finished with her.”
“I can send her a postcard,” he declared.
“I call it filthy, messing on with her.”
“Not at all.”
“Messing. Just messing. — Talking to her about mountains! — Pah! — Oh well — ” and she flung the cards aside. “Write your messy postcards if you want to. But it’s an unclean carrying-on for a man in your position.”
“Not at all. I do remember her.”
“Remember!You and your remembering! Slopping to your sister, and that impossible little Emmie! How manly you are!”
“And will be,” said he.
“But you’re not going to send her this card — you’re not.” And Johanna snatched it up and tore it in four pieces. “There!” And she threw the pieces down. She was a bit scared now.
He looked at her, and his face was dark. He looked at the torn card. And he said nothing. Amid his anger, he admired Johanna. Mistrusting his own emotions, and fearing his own sentiment, he was glad of a decided action on her part. Yet he was angry with her for her insolence.
However, he said nothing. But he gathered up the torn pieces, and put on his hat to go and post the card to his sister Violet. His thoughts and emotions were bubbling. And the bottommost thought and emotion was Damn Emmiel He stood on the bridge and pulled off the Austrian stamp. Then he threw the torn bits into the stream. And he never wrote to the damsel again. But he posted his card to Violet.
The valley began to depress him. The great slopes shelving upwards, far overhead: the sudden dark, hairy ravines in which he was trapped: all made him feel he was caught, shut in down below there. He felt tiny, like a dwarf among the great thighs and ravines of the mountains. There is a Baudelaire poem which tells of Nature, like a vast woman lying spread, and man, a tiny insect, creeping between her knees and under her thighs, fascinated. Gilbert felt a powerful revulsion against the great slopes and particularly against the tree-dark, hairy ravines in which he was caught.
Bilberries were ripe, and cranberries. Sometimes he and Johanna would lunch in a dark wood, and blacken their mouths with bilberries. Sometimes they would eat in a sunny place, where cranberries like tiny apples, like coral, in clusters shone rosy. There were many butterflies in these open sunny places.
Came letters again from Everard — and a tiny note from one of the boys, the elder. Johanna cried and looked queer. The little scrap of a note from her son upset her far more than all the ravings of her husband. But she backed away — she fought off her realisation.
To Gilbert, Everard was much more real than the children. He read the other man’s letters: “I have been mad, but for my children’s sake I try to keep my sanity. But when I look at the future before me, it is all I can do to prevent myself from beating out my brains against the wall — I cannot stay here in Boston, where everything is leaking out. The looks of sympathy are too much for me, and the knowledge that they all condemn you and look on you as a fallen woman, a pariah in society, makes me lose my reason. Think, woman, think what you have done. Think of the lives you have wrecked. Think of the simple pride and happiness of my aged parents, who loved you, who are loving you even now, in their ignorance — you will send my old father to the grave, killed by his son’s dishonor, and you will poison the innocent belief of my faithful mother. You have darkened forever the lives of your children, and branded their foreheads with their mother’s shame. As for me, I do not live any longer, except as a broken, meaningless automaton, which works for the sake of my children, whom I must save out of the inferno of their mother’s infamy, though every act I make is a new death to me
“Ah me — !” sighed Johanna as she read. It was very upsetting. But after all, there are so many other things than the things people choose to write or think. Johanna knew well enough that at the bottom Everard was infinitely relieved — that he raved the harder in order not to know his own relief. The almost diabolical connubial tension that had existed between him and Johanna was breaking him far more inevitably than this shock of her departure would break him. This shock was like an operation which removes the fatal malady: critical, but a salvation in the end.
Gilbert however had not been through the marriage school, so he took Everard almost at face value. He imagined a dark- eyed, aristocratic-looking, handsome man with grey temples and greying moustache tortured under the stars, away there in Boston, tortured with tortures more than man can bear. And the crucifixes hanging over the Alpine paths, over the little, wistful summer flowers: the strange, deathly, veined pallor of the Grass of Parnassus flowers, in dark, marshy places; the intense gloom of the ravines, with rushing water; and the strange dark eyes of some of the lean peasant men who came over the slopes with their oxen filled our young hero with an almost preternatural apprehension.
Once at twilight he was watching again a dead Christ on a Cross: a dead, naked man dropping forward realistically on the nails, above the darkening highway. And at that moment a bullock-wagon was heard slowly descending from above. Gilbert turned and watched in silence. Slowly, strangely the foreheads of the cattle swayed nearer, with the soft, static step of oxen placing their feet. And when they were abreast the driver, crouched between the shafts, looked up at Gilbert. And from the dark eyes, from the aloof, handsome face seemed to come such a strange look, that Gilbert winced and turned instinctively away, to the dead, dropping burden of the Christ.
It was a dark look, torture, and hate: so it seemed to our friend. A dark look from a passionate face — from the face of
a man dying on the cross of passion — tortured to death — having chosen the death — yet at the last moment black with hate and accusation. It is no joke being crucified on the cross of sex- passion and love. And at the last moment — at the last moment breaks out the black hate against the death-dealers, against the death itself.
The bullock-wagon clattered on. Johanna had drifted down the road. At Gilbert’s feet the mountain pansies still pricked their little ears, in the underlight. Above, the Christ dropped slack on his nails. And Gilbert remembered Everard’s letter: “I gave you everything. I would have been cut to pieces for you.” And he shivered.
For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to be hated. He had seen clearly Everard’s black, helpless eyes of hate, bottomless hate. The dark mountains seemed to reverberate with it.
“So he hates me,” thought Gilbert to himself.
And he shrank from the knowledge — it was a piece of pure knowledge, and it seemed to project his soul naked out of his body, among the darkening hills.
To be hated — fathomlessly hated. He knew it among the terrible, black-gulfed mountains.
And he tried to shrink away: to shrink far away. “I would have been cut to pieces for you.” The words made him sick. Fancy wanting to be cut to pieces for somebody — nay, by somebody one loves! How fearful — how foul! “I gave you everything, body and soul.” Perhaps it was not true. But in so far as it was true, why this horrible sexual self-sacrifice in marriage? Surely it was obscene.
Supposing Pontius Pilate had come at the last hour to Calvary, and said “No more of this unclean business!” Suppose he had ordered Jesus to be taken down, restored, healed, and sent home to live. Would the world have been worse? Would it?
The position was, in a degree, Everard’s. His marriage was an awful torture to him. Yet he wanted to die of it. And now Johanna had left him, so that he must live. The terrible sexual-passional crucifixion was interrupted — and the crucified husband taken down, told to live.
And on Master Gilbert devolved the responsibility for the interruption. He knew it. And at the bottom of his soul he believed that Everard should be grateful. Should be. Perhaps even was — or would be in the end. Grateful that another man had taken this wife away from him — this Gethsemane cup. Gilbert would have to swallow the same cup: but with a different stomach, surely.
At the bottom of his soul he firmly believed that Everard should be grateful to him. But the bottom of one’s soul is rather a remote region. And for the present he had to realise the blind, black hate that was surging against him. To be hated — to be blackly, blindly, fathomlessly hated!
He shrank, and there came on his face the wistful, wondering look of an animal shot in mid-flight — a look which Johanna detested. She had been sufficiently cursed by the wounded-animal look. She preferred the light of battle. But as yet Gilbert was down and wincing.
Chapter XXI.
Over the Gemserjoch.
Arrived a friend — a botanising youth of twenty-one, a Londoner whom Gilbert had known in England and again in Munich. He was called Terry — an ardent youth of Fabian parents, who had been given a rare good time all his life, and who expected the jolly game to continue. He was of that ephemeral school of young people who were to be quite quite natural, impulsive and charming, in touch with the most advanced literature. He wore a homespun jacket and flannel trousers and an old hat and a rag of a tie, and was a nice, quaint youth, ten times more sophisticated than our pair of finches, but quite amiable, sophisticated. He swam in a fierce river, he clambered over mountains, he collected flowers and pressed them in a blotting-paper book, and he talked mysteriously and sententiously, in a hushed, cultured voice, and was never offensive.
He was a great camper-out. If they had been in the wilds of Australia it could not have been more thorough. Down they clambered to black depths between the cliffs — they got on to a bushy island in mid-stream — they roasted pieces of veal on sticks before a fire, far away down there in the gloom. Then Terry flung himself into a water-fall pool.
At night — he had a room in the same farm-house — they improvised ballets. The Russian Ballet with Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky had just come to London. Neither Gilbert nor Johanna knew it. But Terry drilled them. He was a brawny fellow. He stripped himself naked save for a pair of drawers and a great scarlet turban and sat in a corner intensely playing knuckle-stones. Gilbert, feeling rather a fool, sat on the bed in Johanna’s dressing-gown, turned the scarlet side outwards, and with a great orange and lemon scarf round his head, and being Holofernes. Johanna, handsomely rigged in shawls, was to be Judith charming the captain.
So Terry, as a slave, squatted in his corner and buried himself in his knuckle-stone business. Gilbert ana Johanna were deeply impressed. Johanna began to swim forward like a houri or a Wagner heroine, to Gilbert, who was perched cross-legged, in the scarlet-silk wadded dressing-gown, upon the large bed. But Gilbert looked so uneasy and Johanna herself felt such a fool she fell to laughing, and laughed till her shawl arrangements fell away. Then the slave in the corner grew really angry, and it was all a fiasco. But both of them wondered at Terry: he was really angry.
Next day arrived a second young man, an American, acquaintance of Johanna. He came from Odessa, where he had been vowing eternal love to a Russian girl whom he had known as a political refugee in London. This young man’s name was Stanley. He was handsome and American-aristocratic, with large dark eyes and attractive lean face and American degage elegance. He was twenty-two years old. There was something very American about his slender silk ankles and doe-skin shoes. But he had been educated in England and spoke English without trace.
Of course he was dead with fatigue after the journey. He made those dark, arch, American eyes at Johanna, rather yearning you know, and in a whimsical fashion told all about his love affair: all about it, don’t you know: rather humorously. And he wasn’t sure now whether his heart’s compass hadn’t shifted a few points. No — oh no — he was less bowled of a heap than he thought he would be.
Oh dear, that Russian life — what would his own dear mother say to it! What would his mother say when she knew he was with the errant Mrs Everard. Oh dear oh dear, he was always tipping a little fat in his dear mother’s steady if neurotic American fire. But there you are — men shouldn’t have mothers.
Stanley, however, had a mother. Gentle reader — which reminds me, I’ve not spoken to you for at least twenty pages, gentle reader. I hope you’re not sulking, and on the brink of closing this friendly book for ever. Gentle reader, we’re going from bad to worse. Never say you weren’t warned. Stanley had a nervous, cultured, dear mother away in America.
— The roses round the door Make me love mother more But when they’re in the bud She scarcely stirs my blood —
Even that bit of poetry I stole.
Stanley was always talking about his mother. But though he was quite a well-bred young man, even I daren’t transcribe his language faithfully.
“Oh, my mother!” he moaned. “She is a bitch.”
“But you love her,” said Johanna.
“Me! Love her! Not at any price. I’m her only son. She knows what I think of her.”
“I’m sure she does,” said Johanna. “She knows you can’t do without her.”
“Me do without her? Her and her nerves. Why if it’s a south wind she hates me and if it’s an east wind she prays for me. Oh dear oh Lor! And nobody loves me.”
“Ah, you! Too many people love you,” said Johanna.
“None! None!”
“What about Katinka?”
“She’s a little bitch. What’s the good of her loving me? Besides, she doesn’t really. — Nobody loves me! Nobody loves me!” And he ran out and leapt on to the parapet of the bridge, and ran there riskily and funnily, like a boy, or like a dog. His black hair was brushed straight back, he had a beautiful profile, pale, with an arched nose and a well-shaped brow. His delicate ankles in their purple socks showed as he ran backwards and
forwards there in the air, to the amazement of the villagers. He was looking for the postman. His letters having been forwarded to Terry’s care, he was nervously wanting some communication, something to come and reassure him.
The postman came and brought him one letter. He read it unheeding and rushed again into the house.
“Nobody loves me! Nobody’s ever going to love me,” he wailed.
Terry understood and was amused. Gilbert looked on in wonder. He did not know the spoiled, well-to-do sons of a Fabian sort of middle-class, whose parents had given them such a happy picknicky childhood and youth that manhood was simply in the way. Yet there was a charm, a wilful, spoilt charm about Stanley. He had a shrewd petulant humour, and was no fool. An engineer by training, he went into the little electric works by the stream, and examined the machinery and the dynamos. How quiet his touch was then. And what a still concentration there was in his interest. But the moment he had seen everything, and was through with it, he broke into his wails about being loved.
He liked to walk with Johanna and be half mothered by her, completely admired by her. He could be so charming in his winsome fretfulness. And, like a queer mother’s child, he understood so much of a woman’s feelings, particularly of her nerves. He discussed Everard and the children with much length and earnestness, in private with Johanna. And she unbosomed herself to him as she never could to Gilbert. About Gilbert there was something resistant, just resistant. But Stanley could be a pure sympathetic, nerve-corresponding creature. She thought any woman might love him. And besides, she knew he was rather brilliant as an engineer. Terry said so. And she had seen his quiet, potent touch on the machinery.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 298