“What’s tomorrow?” said Jim.
“Thursday,” said Lilly.
“Thursday,” repeated Jim. And he looked up and got Lilly’s eye. He wanted to say “Friday then?”
“Yes, I’d rather you went Thursday,” repeated Lilly.
“But Rawdon — !” broke in Tanny, who was suffering. She stopped, however.
“We can walk across country with you some way if you like,” said Lilly to Jim. It was a sort of compromise.
“Fine!” said Jim. “We’ll do that, then.”
It was lovely sunshine, and they wandered through the woods. Between Jim and Tanny was a sort of growing rapprochement, which got on Lilly’s nerves.
“What the hell do you take that beastly personal tone for?” cried Lilly at Tanny, as the three sat under a leafless great beech-tree.
“But I’m not personal at all, am I, Mr. Bricknell?” said Tanny.
Jim watched Lilly, and grinned pleasedly.
“Why shouldn’t you be, anyhow?” he said.
“Yes!” she retorted. “Why not!”
“Not while I’m here. I loathe the slimy creepy personal intimacy. — ’Don’t you think, Mr. Bricknell, that it’s lovely to be able to talk quite simply to somebody? Oh, it’s such a relief, after most people — -’“ Lilly mimicked his wife’s last speech savagely.
“But I MEAN it,” cried Tanny. “It is lovely.”
“Dirty messing,” said Lilly angrily.
Jim watched the dark, irascible little man with amusement. They rose, and went to look for an inn, and beer. Tanny still clung rather stickily to Jim’s side.
But it was a lovely day, the first of all the days of spring, with crocuses and wall-flowers in the cottage gardens, and white cocks crowing in the quiet hamlet.
When they got back in the afternoon to the cottage, they found a telegram for Jim. He let the Lillys see it — ”Meet you for a walk on your return journey Lois.” At once Tanny wanted to know all about Lois. Lois was a nice girl, well-to-do middle-class, but also an actress, and she would do anything Jim wanted.
“I must get a wire to her to meet me tomorrow,” he said. “Where shall I say?”
Lilly produced the map, and they decided on time and station at which Lois coming out of London, should meet Jim. Then the happy pair could walk along the Thames valley, spending a night perhaps at Marlowe, or some such place.
Off went Jim and Lilly once more to the postoffice. They were quite good friends. Having so inhospitably fixed the hour of departure, Lilly wanted to be nice. Arrived at the postoffice, they found it shut: half-day closing for the little shop.
“Well,” said Lilly. “We’ll go to the station.”
They proceeded to the station — found the station-master — were conducted down to the signal-box. Lilly naturally hung back from people, but Jim was hob-nob with the station-master and the signal man, quite officer-and-my-men kind of thing. Lilly sat out on the steps of the signal-box, rather ashamed, while the long telegram was shouted over the telephone to the junction town — first the young lady and her address, then the message “Meet me X. station 3:40 tomorrow walk back great pleasure Jim.”
Anyhow that was done. They went home to tea. After tea, as the evening fell, Lilly suggested a little stroll in the woods, while Tanny prepared the dinner. Jim agreed, and they set out. The two men wandered through the trees in the dusk, till they came to a bank on the farther edge of the wood. There they sat down.
And there Lilly said what he had to say. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s nothing but love and self-sacrifice which makes you feel yourself losing life.”
“You’re wrong. Only love brings it back — and wine. If I drink a bottle of Burgundy I feel myself restored at the middle — right here! I feel the energy back again. And if I can fall in love — But it’s becoming so damned hard — ”
“What, to fall in love?” asked Lilly.
“Yes.”
“Then why not leave off trying! What do you want to poke yourself and prod yourself into love, for?”
“Because I’m DEAD without it. I’m dead. I’m dying.”
“Only because you force yourself. If you drop working yourself up — ”
“I shall die. I only live when I can fall in love. Otherwise I’m dying by inches. Why, man, you don’t know what it was like. I used to get the most grand feelings — like a great rush of force, or light — a great rush — right here, as I’ve said, at the solar plexus. And it would come any time — anywhere — no matter where I was. And then I was all right.
“All right for what? — for making love?”
“Yes, man, I was.”
“And now you aren’t? — Oh, well, leave love alone, as any twopenny doctor would tell you.”
“No, you’re off it there. It’s nothing technical. Technically I can make love as much as you like. It’s nothing a doctor has any say in. It’s what I feel inside me. I feel the life going. I know it’s going. I never get those inrushes now, unless I drink a jolly lot, or if I possibly could fall in love. Technically, I’m potent all right — oh, yes!”
“You should leave yourself and your inrushes alone.”
“But you can’t. It’s a sort of ache.”
“Then you should stiffen your backbone. It’s your backbone that matters. You shouldn’t want to abandon yourself. You shouldn’t want to fling yourself all loose into a woman’s lap. You should stand by yourself and learn to be by yourself. Why don’t you be more like the Japanese you talk about? Quiet, aloof little devils. They don’t bother about being loved. They keep themselves taut in their own selves — there, at the bottom of the spine — the devil’s own power they’ve got there.”
Jim mused a bit.
“Think they have?” he laughed. It seemed comic to him.
“Sure! Look at them. Why can’t you gather yourself there?”
“At the tail?”
“Yes. Hold yourself firm there.”
Jim broke into a cackle of a laugh, and rose. The two went through the dark woods back to the cottage. Jim staggered and stumbled like a drunken man: or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia: as if he had no power in his lower limbs.
“Walk there — !” said Lilly, finding him the smoothest bit of the dark path. But Jim stumbled and shambled, in a state of nauseous weak relaxation. However, they reached the cottage: and food and beer — and Tanny, piqued with curiosity to know what the men had been saying privately to each other.
After dinner they sat once more talking round the fire.
Lilly sat in a small chair facing the fire, the other two in the armchairs on either side the hearth.
“How nice it will be for you, walking with Lois towards London tomorrow,” gushed Tanny sentimentally.
“Good God!” said Lilly. “Why the dickens doesn’t he walk by himself, without wanting a woman always there, to hold his hand.”
“Don’t be so spiteful,” said Tanny. “YOU see that you have a woman always there, to hold YOUR hand.”
“My hand doesn’t need holding,” snapped Lilly.
“Doesn’t it! More than most men’s! But you’re so beastly ungrateful and mannish. Because I hold you safe enough all the time you like to pretend you’re doing it all yourself.”
“All right. Don’t drag yourself in,” said Lilly, detesting his wife at that moment. “Anyhow,” and he turned to Jim, “it’s time you’d done slobbering yourself over a lot of little women, one after the other.”
“Why shouldn’t I, if I like it?” said Jim.
“Yes, why not?” said Tanny.
“Because it makes a fool of you. Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your legs. I’d be ashamed if I were you.”
“Would you?” said Jim.
“I would. And it’s nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees all go rickety.”
“Think that’s it?” said Jim.
“What else is it. You haven�
��t been here a day, but you must telegraph for some female to be ready to hold your hand the moment you go away. And before she lets go, you’ll be wiring for another. YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, you want to be loved — a man of your years. It’s disgusting — ”
“I don’t see it. I believe in love — ” said Jim, watching and grinning oddly.
“Bah, love! Messing, that’s what it is. It wouldn’t matter if it did you no harm. But when you stagger and stumble down a road, out of sheer sloppy relaxation of your will — -”
At this point Jim suddenly sprang from his chair at Lilly, and gave him two or three hard blows with his fists, upon the front of the body. Then he sat down in his own chair again, saying sheepishly:
“I knew I should have to do it, if he said any more.”
Lilly sat motionless as a statue, his face like paper. One of the blows had caught him rather low, so that he was almost winded and could not breathe. He sat rigid, paralysed as a winded man is. But he wouldn’t let it be seen. With all his will he prevented himself from gasping. Only through his parted lips he drew tiny gasps, controlled, nothing revealed to the other two. He hated them both far too much.
For some minutes there was dead silence, whilst Lilly silently and viciously fought for his breath. Tanny opened her eyes wide in a sort of pleased bewilderment, and Jim turned his face aside, and hung his clasped hands between his knees.
“There’s a great silence, suddenly!” said Tanny.
“What is there to say?” ejaculated Lilly rapidly, with a spoonful of breath which he managed to compress and control into speech. Then he sat motionless again, concerned with the business of getting back his wind, and not letting the other two see.
Jim jerked in his chair, and looked round.
“It isn’t that I don’t like the man,” he said, in a rather small voice. “But I knew if he went on I should have to do it.”
To Lilly, rigid and physically preoccupied, there sounded a sort of self-consciousness in Jim’s voice, as if the whole thing had been semi-deliberate. He detected the sort of maudlin deliberateness which goes with hysterics, and he was colder, more icy than ever.
Tanny looked at Lilly, puzzled, bewildered, but still rather pleased, as if she demanded an answer. None being forthcoming, she said:
“Of course, you mustn’t expect to say all those things without rousing a man.”
Still Lilly did not answer. Jim glanced at him, then looked at Tanny.
“It isn’t that I don’t like him,” he said, slowly. “I like him better than any man I’ve ever known, I believe.” He clasped his hands and turned aside his face.
“Judas!” flashed through Lilly’s mind.
Again Tanny looked for her husband’s answer.
“Yes, Rawdon,” she said. “You can’t say the things you do without their having an effect. You really ask for it, you know.”
“It’s no matter.” Lilly squeezed the words out coldly. “He wanted to do it, and he did it.”
A dead silence ensued now. Tanny looked from man to man.
“I could feel it coming on me,” said Jim.
“Of course!” said Tanny. “Rawdon doesn’t know the things he says.” She was pleased that he had had to pay for them, for once.
It takes a man a long time to get his breath back, after a sharp blow in the wind. Lilly was managing by degrees. The others no doubt attributed his silence to deep or fierce thoughts. It was nothing of the kind, merely a cold struggle to get his wind back, without letting them know he was struggling: and a sheer, stock-stiff hatred of the pair of them.
“I like the man,” said Jim. “Never liked a man more than I like him.” He spoke as if with difficulty.
“The man” stuck safely in Lilly’s ears.
“Oh, well,” he managed to say. “It’s nothing. I’ve done my talking and had an answer, for once.”
“Yes, Rawdy, you’ve had an answer, for once. Usually you don’t get an answer, you know — and that’s why you go so far — in the things you say. Now you’ll know how you make people feel.”
“Quite!” said Lilly.
“I don’t feel anything. I don’t mind what he says,” said Jim.
“Yes, but he ought to know the things he DOES say,” said Tanny. “He goes on, without considering the person he’s talking to. This time it’s come back on him. He mustn’t say such personal things, if he’s not going to risk an answer.”
“I don’t mind what he says. I don’t mind a bit,” said Jim.
“Nor do I mind,” said Lilly indifferently. “I say what I feel — You do as you feel — There’s an end of it.”
A sheepish sort of silence followed this speech. It was broken by a sudden laugh from Tanny.
“The things that happen to us!” she said, laughing rather shrilly. “Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, we’re all struck into silence!”
“Rum game, eh!” said Jim, grinning.
“Isn’t it funny! Isn’t life too funny!” She looked again at her husband. “But, Rawdy, you must admit it was your own fault.”
Lilly’s stiff face did not change.
“Why FAULT!” he said, looking at her coldly. “What is there to talk about?”
“Usually there’s so much,” she said sarcastically.
A few phrases dribbled out of the silence. In vain Jim, tried to get Lilly to thaw, and in vain Tanny gave her digs at her husband. Lilly’s stiff, inscrutable face did not change, he was polite and aloof. So they all went to bed.
In the morning, the walk was to take place, as arranged, Lilly and Tanny accompanying Jim to the third station across country. The morning was lovely, the country beautiful. Lilly liked the countryside and enjoyed the walk. But a hardness inside himself never relaxed. Jim talked a little again about the future of the world, and a higher state of Christlikeness in man. But Lilly only laughed. Then Tanny managed to get ahead with Jim, sticking to his side and talking sympathetic personalities. But Lilly, feeling it from afar, ran after them and caught them up. They were silent.
“What was the interesting topic?” he said cuttingly.
“Nothing at all!” said Tanny, nettled. “Why must you interfere?”
“Because I intend to,” said Lilly.
And the two others fell apart, as if severed with a knife. Jim walked rather sheepishly, as if cut out.
So they came at last past the canals to the wayside station: and at last Jim’s train came. They all said goodbye. Jim and Tanny were both waiting for Lilly to show some sign of real reconciliation. But none came. He was cheerful and aloof.
“Goodbye,” he said to Jim. “Hope Lois will be there all right. Third station on. Goodbye! Goodbye!”
“You’ll come to Rackham?” said Jim, leaning out of the train.
“We should love to,” called Tanny, after the receding train.
“All right,” said Lilly, non-committal.
But he and his wife never saw Jim again. Lilly never intended to see him: a devil sat in the little man’s breast.
“You shouldn’t play at little Jesus, coming so near to people, wanting to help them,” was Tanny’s last word.
CHAPTER IX. LOW-WATER MARK
Tanny went away to Norway to visit her people, for the first time for three years. Lilly did not go: he did not want to. He came to London and settled in a room over Covent Garden market. The room was high up, a fair size, and stood at the corner of one of the streets and the market itself, looking down on the stalls and the carts and the arcade. Lilly would climb out of the window and sit for hours watching the behaviour of the great draught-horses which brought the mountains of boxes and vegetables. Funny half-human creatures they seemed, so massive and fleshy, yet so Cockney. There was one which could not bear donkeys, and which used to stretch out its great teeth like some massive serpent after every poor diminutive ass that came with a coster’s barrow. Another great horse could not endure standing. It would shake itself and give little starts, and back into the heaps of carrots and broccoli, whilst the drive
r went into a frenzy of rage.
There was always something to watch. One minute it was two great loads of empty crates, which in passing had got entangled, and reeled, leaning to fall disastrously. Then the drivers cursed and swore and dismounted and stared at their jeopardised loads: till a thin fellow was persuaded to scramble up the airy mountains of cages, like a monkey. And he actually managed to put them to rights. Great sigh of relief when the vans rocked out of the market.
Again there was a particular page-boy in buttons, with a round and perky behind, who nimbly carried a tea-tray from somewhere to somewhere, under the arches beside the market. The great brawny porters would tease him, and he would stop to give them cheek. One afternoon a giant lunged after him: the boy darted gracefully among the heaps of vegetables, still bearing aloft his tea-tray, like some young blue-buttoned acolyte fleeing before a false god. The giant rolled after him — when alas, the acolyte of the tea-tray slipped among the vegetables, and down came the tray. Then tears, and a roar of unfeeling mirth from the giants. Lilly felt they were going to make it up to him.
Another afternoon a young swell sauntered persistently among the vegetables, and Lilly, seated in his high little balcony, wondered why. But at last, a taxi, and a very expensive female, in a sort of silver brocade gown and a great fur shawl and ospreys in her bonnet. Evidently an assignation. Yet what could be more conspicuous than this elegant pair, picking their way through the cabbage-leaves?
And then, one cold grey afternoon in early April, a man in a black overcoat and a bowler hat, walking uncertainly. Lilly had risen and was just retiring out of the chill, damp air. For some reason he lingered to watch the figure. The man was walking east. He stepped rather insecurely off the pavement, and wavered across the setts between the wheels of the standing vans. And suddenly he went down. Lilly could not see him on the ground, but he saw some van-men go forward, and he saw one of them pick up the man’s hat.
“I’d better go down,” said Lilly to himself.
So he began running down the four long flights of stone stairs, past the many doors of the multifarious business premises, and out into the market. A little crowd had gathered, and a large policeman was just rowing into the centre of the interest. Lilly, always a hoverer on the edge of public commotions, hung now hesitating on the outskirts of the crowd.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 312