“I think it depresses him partly that his bowels won’t work. It frightens him. He’s never been ill in his life before,” said Lilly.
“His bowels won’t work if he lets all his spirit go, like an animal dying of the sulks,” said the doctor impatiently. “He might go off quite suddenly — dead before you can turn round — ”
Lilly was properly troubled. Yet he did not quite know what to do. It was early afternoon, and the sun was shining into the room. There were daffodils and anemones in a jar, and freezias and violets. Down below in the market were two stalls of golden and blue flowers, gay.
“The flowers are lovely in the spring sunshine,” said Lilly. “I wish I were in the country, don’t you? As soon as you are better we’ll go. It’s been a terrible cold, wet spring. But now it’s going to be nice. Do you like being in the country?”
“Yes,” said Aaron.
He was thinking of his garden. He loved it. Never in his life had he been away from a garden before.
“Make haste and get better, and we’ll go.”
“Where?” said Aaron.
“Hampshire. Or Berkshire. Or perhaps you’d like to go home? Would you?”
Aaron lay still, and did not answer.
“Perhaps you want to, and you don’t want to,” said Lilly. “You can please yourself, anyhow.”
There was no getting anything definite out of the sick man — his soul seemed stuck, as if it would not move.
Suddenly Lilly rose and went to the dressing-table.
“I’m going to rub you with oil,” he said. “I’m going to rub you as mothers do their babies whose bowels don’t work.”
Aaron frowned slightly as he glanced at the dark, self-possessed face of the little man.
“What’s the good of that?” he said irritably. “I’d rather be left alone.”
“Then you won’t be.”
Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body — the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then Aaron was covered up again, and Lilly sat down in fatigue to look at his patient.
He saw a change. The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face. Aaron was regaining himself. But Lilly said nothing. He watched his patient fall into a proper sleep.
And he sat and watched him sleep. And he thought to himself: “I wonder why I do it. I wonder why I bother with him.... Jim ought to have taught me my lesson. As soon as this man’s really better he’ll punch me in the wind, metaphorically if not actually, for having interfered with him. And Tanny would say, he was quite right to do it. She says I want power over them. What if I do? They don’t care how much power the mob has over them, the nation, Lloyd George and Northcliffe and the police and money. They’ll yield themselves up to that sort of power quickly enough, and immolate themselves pro bono publico by the million. And what’s the bonum publicum but a mob power? Why can’t they submit to a bit of healthy individual authority? The fool would die, without me: just as that fool Jim will die in hysterics one day. Why does he last so long!
“Tanny’s the same. She does nothing really but resist me: my authority, or my influence, or just ME. At the bottom of her heart she just blindly and persistently opposes me. God knows what it is she opposes: just me myself. She thinks I want her to submit to me. So I do, in a measure natural to our two selves. Somewhere, she ought to submit to me. But they all prefer to kick against the pricks. Not that THEY get many pricks. I get them. Damn them all, why don’t I leave them alone? They only grin and feel triumphant when they’ve insulted one and punched one in the wind.
“This Aaron will do just the same. I like him, and he ought to like me. And he’ll be another Jim: he WILL like me, if he can knock the wind out of me. A lot of little Stavrogins coming up to whisper affectionately, and biting one’s ear.
“But anyhow I can soon see the last of this chap: and him the last of all the rest. I’ll be damned for ever if I see their Jims and Roberts and Julias and Scotts any more. Let them dance round their insipid hell-broth. Thin tack it is.
“There’s a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they’ve exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for — they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics — even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers — the American races — and the South Sea Islanders — the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven — Europeans, Asiatics, Africans — everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases.
“Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself on his own pride.
“I suppose really I ought to have packed this Aaron off to the hospital. Instead of which here am I rubbing him with oil to rub the life into him. And I KNOW he’ll bite me, like a warmed snake, the moment he recovers. And Tanny will say ‘Quite right, too,’ I shouldn’t have been so intimate. No, I should have left it to mechanical doctors and nurses.
“So I should. Everything to its own. And Aaron belongs to this little system, and Jim is waiting to be psychoanalysed, and Tanny is waiting for her own glorification.
“All right, Aaron. Last time I break my bread for anybody, this is. So get better, my flautist, so that I can go away.
“It was easy for the Red Indians and the Others to take their hook into death. They might have stayed a bit longer to help one to defy the white masses.
“I’ll make some tea — ”
Lilly rose softly and went across to the fire. He had to cross a landing to a sort of little lavatory, with a sink and a tap, for water. The clerks peeped out at him from an adjoining office and nodded. He nodded, and disappeared from their sight as quickly as possible, with his kettle. His dark eyes were quick, his dark hair was untidy, there was something silent and withheld about him. People could never approach him quite ordinarily.
He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid.
His face was dark and hollow, he seemed frail, sitting there in the London afternoon darning the black woollen socks. His full brow was knitted slightly, there was a tension. At the same time, there was an indomitable stillness about him, as it were in the atmosphere about him. His hands, though small, were not very thin. He bit off the wool as he finished his darn.
As he was making the tea he saw Aaron rouse up in bed.
“I’ve been to sleep. I feel better,” said the patient, turning round to look what the other man was doing. And the sight of the water steaming in a jet from the teapot seemed attractive.
“Yes,” said Lilly. “You’ve slept for a good two hours.”
“I believe I have,” said Aaron.
“Would you like a little tea?”
“Ay — and
a bit of toast.”
“You’re not supposed to have solid food. Let me take your temperature.”
The temperature was down to a hundred, and Lilly, in spite of the doctor, gave Aaron a piece of toast with his tea, enjoining him not to mention it to the nurse.
In the evening the two men talked.
“You do everything for yourself, then?” said Aaron.
“Yes, I prefer it.”
“You like living all alone?”
“I don’t know about that. I never have lived alone. Tanny and I have been very much alone in various countries: but that’s two, not one.”
“You miss her then?”
“Yes, of course. I missed her horribly in the cottage, when she’d first gone. I felt my heart was broken. But here, where we’ve never been together, I don’t notice it so much.”
“She’ll come back,” said Aaron.
“Yes, she’ll come back. But I’d rather meet her abroad than here — and get on a different footing.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s something with marriage altogether, I think. Egoisme a deux — ”
“What’s that mean?”
“Egoisme a deux? Two people, one egoism. Marriage is a self-conscious egoistic state, it seems to me.”
“You’ve got no children?” said Aaron.
“No. Tanny wants children badly. I don’t. I’m thankful we have none.”
“Why?”
“I can’t quite say. I think of them as a burden. Besides, there ARE such millions and billions of children in the world. And we know well enough what sort of millions and billions of people they’ll grow up into. I don’t want to add my quota to the mass — it’s against my instinct — ”
“Ay!” laughed Aaron, with a curt acquiescence.
“Tanny’s furious. But then, when a woman has got children, she thinks the world wags only for them and her. Nothing else. The whole world wags for the sake of the children — and their sacred mother.”
“Ay, that’s DAMNED true,” said Aaron.
“And myself, I’m sick of the children stunt. Children are all right, so long as you just take them for what they are: young immature things like kittens and half-grown dogs, nuisances, sometimes very charming. But I’ll be hanged if I can see anything high and holy about children. I should be sorry, too, it would be so bad for the children. Young brats, tiresome and amusing in turns.”
“When they don’t give themselves airs,” said Aaron.
“Yes, indeed. Which they do half the time. Sacred children, and sacred motherhood, I’m absolutely fed stiff by it. That’s why I’m thankful I have no children. Tanny can’t come it over me there.”
“It’s a fact. When a woman’s got her children, by God, she’s a bitch in the manger. You can starve while she sits on the hay. It’s useful to keep her pups warm.”
“Yes.”
“Why, you know,” Aaron turned excitedly in the bed, “they look on a man as if he was nothing but an instrument to get and rear children. If you have anything to do with a woman, she thinks it’s because you want to get children by her. And I’m damned if it is. I want my own pleasure, or nothing: and children be damned.”
“Ah, women — THEY must be loved, at any price!” said Lilly. “And if you just don’t want to love them — and tell them so — what a crime.”
“A crime!” said Aaron. “They make a criminal of you. Them and their children be cursed. Is my life given me for nothing but to get children, and work to bring them up? See them all in hell first. They’d better die while they’re children, if childhood’s all that important.”
“I quite agree,” said Lilly. “If childhood is more important than manhood, then why live to be a man at all? Why not remain an infant?”
“Be damned and blasted to women and all their importances,” cried Aaron. “They want to get you under, and children is their chief weapon.”
“Men have got to stand up to the fact that manhood is more than childhood — and then force women to admit it,” said Lilly. “But the rotten whiners, they’re all grovelling before a baby’s napkin and a woman’s petticoat.”
“It’s a fact,” said Aaron. But he glanced at Lilly oddly, as if suspiciously. And Lilly caught the look. But he continued:
“And if they think you try to stand on your legs and walk with the feet of manhood, why, there isn’t a blooming father and lover among them but will do his best to get you down and suffocate you — either with a baby’s napkin or a woman’s petticoat.”
Lilly’s lips were curling; he was dark and bitter.
“Ay, it is like that,” said Aaron, rather subduedly.
“The man’s spirit has gone out of the world. Men can’t move an inch unless they can grovel humbly at the end of the journey.”
“No,” said Aaron, watching with keen, half-amused eyes.
“That’s why marriage wants readjusting — or extending — to get men on to their own legs once more, and to give them the adventure again. But men won’t stick together and fight for it. Because once a woman has climbed up with her children, she’ll find plenty of grovellers ready to support her and suffocate any defiant spirit. And women will sacrifice eleven men, fathers, husbands, brothers and lovers, for one baby — or for her own female self-conceit — ”
“She will that,” said Aaron.
“And can you find two men to stick together, without feeling criminal, and without cringing, and without betraying one another? You can’t. One is sure to go fawning round some female, then they both enjoy giving each other away, and doing a new grovel before a woman again.”
“Ay,” said Aaron.
After which Lilly was silent.
CHAPTER X. THE WAR AGAIN
“One is a fool,” said Lilly, “to be lachrymose. The thing to do is to get a move on.”
Aaron looked up with a glimpse of a smile. The two men were sitting before the fire at the end of a cold, wet April day: Aaron convalescent, somewhat chastened in appearance.
“Ay,” he said rather sourly. “A move back to Guilford Street.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” said Lilly. “I was reading an old Baden history. They made a law in 1528 — not a law, but a regulation — that: if a man forsakes his wife and children, as now so often happens, the said wife and children are at once to be dispatched after him. I thought that would please you. Does it?”
“Yes,” said Aaron briefly.
“They would have arrived the next day, like a forwarded letter.”
“I should have had to get a considerable move on, at that rate,” grinned Aaron.
“Oh, no. You might quite like them here.” But Lilly saw the white frown of determined revulsion on the convalescent’s face.
“Wouldn’t you?” he asked.
Aaron shook his head.
“No,” he said. And it was obvious he objected to the topic. “What are you going to do about your move on?”
“Me!” said Lilly. “I’m going to sail away next week — or steam dirtily away on a tramp called the Maud Allen Wing.”
“Where to?”
“Malta.”
“Where from?”
“London Dock. I fixed up my passage this morning for ten pounds. I am cook’s assistant, signed on.”
Aaron looked at him with a little admiration.
“You can take a sudden jump, can’t you?” he said.
“The difficulty is to refrain from jumping: overboard or anywhere.”
Aaron smoked his pipe slowly.
“And what good will Malta do you?” he asked, envious.
“Heaven knows. I shall cross to Syracuse, and move up Italy.”
“Sounds as if you were a millionaire.”
“I’ve got thirty-five pounds in all the world. But something will come along.”
“I’ve got more than that,” said Aaron.
“Good for you,” replied Lilly.
He rose and went to the cupboard, taking out a bowl and a basket
of potatoes. He sat down again, paring the potatoes. His busy activity annoyed Aaron.
“But what’s the good of going to Malta? Shall YOU be any different in yourself, in another place? You’ll be the same there as you are here.”
“How am I here?”
“Why, you’re all the time grinding yourself against something inside you. You’re never free. You’re never content. You never stop chafing.”
Lilly dipped his potato into the water, and cut out the eyes carefully. Then he cut it in two, and dropped it in the clean water of the second bowl. He had not expected this criticism.
“Perhaps I don’t,” said he.
“Then what’s the use of going somewhere else? You won’t change yourself.”
“I may in the end,” said Lilly.
“You’ll be yourself, whether it’s Malta or London,” said Aaron.
“There’s a doom for me,” laughed Lilly. The water on the fire was boiling. He rose and threw in salt, then dropped in the potatoes with little plops. “There there are lots of mes. I’m not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man. Otherwise you’d have stayed in your old place with your family.”
“The man in the middle of you doesn’t change,” said Aaron.
“Do you find it so?” said Lilly.
“Ay. Every time.”
“Then what’s to be done?”
“Nothing, as far as I can see. You get as much amusement out of life as possible, and there’s the end of it.”
“All right then, I’ll get the amusement.”
“Ay, all right then,” said Aaron. “But there isn’t anything wonderful about it. You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren’t. You’re no more than a man who drops into a pub for a drink, to liven himself up a bit. Only you give it a lot of names, and make out as if you were looking for the philosopher’s stone, or something like that. When you’re only killing time like the rest of folks, before time kills you.”
Lilly did not answer. It was not yet seven o’clock, but the sky was dark. Aaron sat in the firelight. Even the saucepan on the fire was silent. Darkness, silence, the firelight in the upper room, and the two men together.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 314