And he knew himself deficient in brute power. So he must make up in quickness and skill and concentration. When he did strike it must be a fine keen blow that went deep. He had confidence in his power to do it. Only — and this was the disturbing element — he knew there was not much time. And he would rather be knocked out himself than have the fight spoiled in the middle.
He moved lightly and led Easu on, ducked, bobbed up again, and began to be consummately happy. Easu could not get at him.
“Come on!” said Easu thickly.
So suddenly he came on, and bang! Bang! went his knuckles against that insulting chin. And he felt joy spring in his bowels.
But he did not escape without punishment. Pat!-butt! Pat!-butt! went Easu’s swinging blows down over his back. But Jack got in two more: Bang! Bang! He knew by the exquisite pain of his knuckles that he had struck deep, pierced the marrow of the other with pain of defeat.
Pat-butt! Pat-butt! came the punishment.
But Jack was out again, dancing softly, electric joy in his bowels. Then suddenly he sprang back at Easu, his arms swinging in strange, vindictive sideways swoops. Ping! Pong! Ping! Pong! rapid as lightning. Easu fell back a little dazed before this sudden rain of white blows, but Jack followed, followed, followed, nimbly, warily, but with deadly, flickering intent.
Crash! Easu went down, but caught Jack a heavy smash in the face with his right as he fell. Jack reeled away.
And then, posed, waiting, watching, with blood running from bruised cuts on his swelling face, one eye rapidly closing, he stood well forward, fists in true boxing trim, and a deep gratification of joy in his dark belly.
Easu rose slowly, foaming at the mouth; then getting to his feet rushed head down, in a convulsion, at his adversary. Jack stepped aside, but not quite quick enough. He caught Easu a blow with his left under the ear, but not in time to stop the impact. Easu’s head butted right where he wanted it to — into his enemy’s stomach; though not full in the pit. Jack fell back winded, and Red also fell again, giving Jack time to throw back his head and whoop for a few mouthfuls of air. So that when Red rushed in again, he was able feebly to fence and stall him off, stepping aside and hitting again, but wofully clipping, smacking only . . .
“Foul! He’s winded! Foul!” yelled someone from the bushes. “Time!”
“Not for mine,” roared Easu.
He sprang and dashed at his gasping, gulping adversary, whirling his arms like iron piston-rods. Jack dodged the propelled whirl, but stumbled over one of the big feet stuck out to trip him. Easu hit as he fell, and swung a crashing left-right about the sinking, unprotected head. And when Jack was down, kicked the prostrate body in an orgasm of fury.
“Foul, you swine!” screamed Rackett, springing in like a tiger. Easu, absolutely blind with rage and hate, stared hellish and unseeing. Jack lay crumpled on the floor. Dr. Rackett stooped down to him, as Tom and Lennie and Alec Rice ran in. Easu went and dropped on a fallen log, sitting blowing to get his wind and his consciousness back. He was unconscious with fury, like some awful Thing, not like a man.
“My God, Easu!” screamed Rackett, who had lifted the dead head of Jack on to his knees. “If you’ve done for him I’ll have you indicted.”
And Easu, slowly, heavily coming back to consciousness, lifted his head, and the blue pupils of his red eyes went ugly with evil fear, his bruised face seemed to have dropped with fear. He waited, vacant, empty with fear.
At length Jack stirred. There was life in him. And at once the bully Easu began to talk wide.
“Bloody little sod came at me bashing me jaw, when I’d never touched him. Had to fight to defend myself. Bloody little sod!”
Jack opened his eyes and struggled to rise.
“Anybody counting?” he said stupidly. But he could not get up.
“It was a foul,” said Rackett.
“Foul be blithered!” shouted Easu. “It was a free fight and no blasted umpires asked for. If that bloody bastard wants some more, let him get up. I’m goin’ to teach him to come crowin’ from England, crowin’ over an Australian.”
But Jack was on his unsteady feet. He would fight now if he died for it.
“Teach me!” he said vaguely, and sprang like a cat out of a bag on the astonished and rather frightened Easu.
But something was very wrong. When his left fist rang home, it caused such an agony that a sheer scream of pain tore from him, clearing the mists from his brain in a strange white light. He was now fully conscious again, super-conscious. He knew he must hit with his right, and hit hard. He heard nothing, and saw nothing. But with a kind of trance vision he was super-awake.
Man is like this. He has various levels of consciousness. When he is broken, killed at one level of consciousness, his very death leaves him on a higher level. And this is the soul in its entirety, being conscious, super-conscious, far beyond mentality. It hardly needs eyes or ears. It is clairvoyant and clair-audient. And man’s divinity, and his ultimate power, is in this super-consciousness of the whole soul. Not in brute force, not in skill or intelligence alone. But in the soul’s extreme power of knowing and then willing. On this alone hangs the destiny of all mankind.
Jack, uncertain on his feet, incorporate, wounded to horrible pain in his left hand, was now in the second state of consciousness and power. Meanwhile the doctor was warning Easu to play fair. Jack heard absolutely without hearing. But Easu was bothered by it.
He was flustered by Jack’s unexpected uprising. He was weary and wavering, the paroxysm of his ungovernable fury had left him, and he had a desire to escape. His rage was dull and sullen.
Jack was softly swaying. Easu shaped up and waited. And suddenly Jack sprang, with all the weight of his nine stone behind him, and all the mystery of his soul’s deadly will, and planted a blow on Easu’s astonished chin with his granite right fist. Before there was any recovery he got in a second blow, and it was a knockout. Easu crashed, and Jack crashed after him, and both lay still.
Dr. Rackett, watch in hand, counted. Easu stared at the darkening blue, and sat up. An oath came out of his disfigured mouth. Dr. Rackett put the watch in his pocket as Easu got to his feet. But Jack did not move. He lay in a dead faint.
Lennie, the emotional, began to cry when he saw Jack’s bruised, greenish-looking face. Dr. Rackett was feeling the pulse and the heart.
“Take the horse, and fetch some whiskey and some water, Tom,” he said.
Tom turned to Easu, who stood with his head down and his mouth all cut, watching, waiting to depart, undecided.
“I’ll borrow your horse a minute, Easu,” he said. And Easu did not answer. He was getting into his shirt again, and for the moment none of him was visible save the belt of white skin round the waist. Tom pulled up the girth of the black horse, and jumped into the saddle. Lennie slipped up behind him, his face still wet with tears. Easu’s face emerged, disfigured, out of his white shirt, and watched them go. Rackett attended to Jack, who still gave no signs of life. Alec Rice stood beside the kneeling doctor, silent and impassive.
Easu slowly buttoned his shirt cuffs and shirt-collar, with numb fingers. The pain was just beginning to come out, and he made queer slight grimaces with his distorted face. Slowly he got, his black tie, and holding up his chin, fastened it round his throat, clumsily. He was not the same Easu that had set off so huge and assertive, with Monica.
Lennie came running with a tin of water. He had slipped off the horse at the lower dam, and found the tin which he kept secreted there. Dr. Rackett put a wet handkerchief on Jack’s still, dead face. Under the livid skin the bruises and the blood showed terrifying, one eye already swollen up. The queer mask of a face looked as if the soul, or the life, had retreated from it in weariness or disgust. It looked like somebody else’s altogether.
“He ain’t dead, is he?” whimpered Lennie, terrified most of all because Jack, with his swollen face and puffed eye, looked like somebody else.
“No! But I wish Tom would come with that whiskey.�
��
As he spoke, they heard the crashing sound of the horse through the bushes, and Tom’s red, anxious face appeared. He swung out of the saddle and dropped the reins on the ground.
Dr. Rackett pressed the bruised chin, pressed the mouth open, and poured a little liquor down Jack’s throat. There was no response. He poured a little more whiskey. There came a slight choking sound, and then the one dark-blue eye opened vacant. It stared in vacancy for some moments, while everybody stood with held breath. Then the whiskey began to have effect. Life seemed to give a movement of itself, in the boy’s body, and the wide-open eye took a conscious direction. It stared straight into the eyes of Easu, who stood there looking down, detached, in humiliation, derision, and uneasiness. It stared with a queer, natural recognition, and a faint jeering, uneasy grin was the reflex on Easu’s disfigured mask.
“Guess he’s had enough for once,” said Easu, and turning, he picked up his horse’s reins, dropped into the saddle, and rode straight away.
“Feel bad?” Dr. Rackett asked.
“Rotten!” said Jack.
And at last Lennie recognised the voice. He could not recognise the face, especially with that bunged-up eye peering gruesomely through a gradually diminished slit, Hun-like.
Dr. Rackett smiled slightly.
“Where’s your pain?” he asked.
Jack thought about it. Then he looked into Rackett’s eyes without answering.
“Think you can stand?” said Rackett.
“Try me.”
They got him to his feet. Everything began to swim again. Rackett’s arm came round him.
“Did he knock me out?” Jack asked. The question came from his half-consciousness: from a feeling that the battle with Easu was not yet finished.
“No, you knocked him out. Let’s get your coat on.”
But as he shoved his arm into his coat he knew he was fainting again, and he almost wept, feeling his consciousness and his control going. He thought it was just his stiff, swollen, unnatural face that caused it.
“Can y’ walk?” asked Tom anxiously.
“Don’t walk on my face, do I?” came the words. But as they came, so did the reeling, nauseous oblivion. He fainted again, and was carried home like a sack over Tom’s back.
When he came to, he was on his bed, Lennie was feverishly pulling off his shoes, and Dr. Rackett was feeling him all over. Dr. Rackett smelt of drugs. But now Rackett’s face was earnest and attentive, he looked a nice man, only weak.
Jack thought at once of Gran.
“How’s Gran?” he asked.
“She’s picked up again. The relations put her in a wax, so she came to life again.”
“You’re the one now, you look an awful sight,” said Len.
“Did anybody see me?” asked Jack, dim and anxious.
“Only Grace so far.”
Rackett, who was busy bandaging, saw the fever of anxiety coming into the one live eye.
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Len, he mustn’t talk at all. He’s got to go to sleep.”
After they had got his nightshirt on, they gave him something to drink, and he went to sleep.
II
When he awoke, it was dark. His head felt enormous. It was getting bigger and bigger, till soon it would fill the room. Soon his head would be so big, it would fill all the room, and the room would be too small for it. Oh, horror! He was so frightened, he cried out.
“What’s amiss?” a quick voice was asking.
“Make a light! Make alight!” cried Jack.
Lennie quickly lit a candle, and to Jack’s agonized relief, there was the cubby, the bed, the walls, all of natural dimensions, and Tom and Lennie in their nightshirts standing by his bed.
“What’s a-matter, ol’ dear?” Lennie asked caressively.
“My head! I thought it was getting so big the room wouldn’t hold it.”
“Aw! go on now!” said Lennie. “Y’ face is a bit puffy, but y’ head’s same as ever it was.”
Jack couldn’t believe it. He was so sensually convinced that his head had grown enormous, enormous, enormous.
He stared at Lennie and Tom in dismay. Lennie stroked his hair softly.
“There’s y’ ol’ nut!” he said. “Tain’t no bigger ‘n it ever was. Just exactly same life-size.”
Gradually Jack let himself be convinced. And at last he let them blow the candle out. He went to sleep.
He woke again with a frenzy working in him. He had pain, too. But far worse than the pain was the tearing of the raging discomfort, the frenzy of dislocation. And in his stiff swollen head, there was something he remembered but could not drag into light. What was it? What was it? In the frenzy of struggle to know, he went vague.
Then it came to him, words as plain as knives.
“And when I die
In hell I shall lie
With fire and chains
And awful pains.”
The Aunts had repeated this to him, as a child, when he was naughty. And it had always struck a vague terror into his soul. He had forgotten it. Now it came again.
“In hell I shall lie
With fire and chains
And awful pains.”
He had a vivid realisation of this hell. That was where he lay at that very moment.
“You must be a good, loving little boy.”
He had never wanted to be a good, loving little boy. Something in his bowels revolted from being a good, loving little boy, revolted in nausea. “But if you’re not a good, loving little boy.
‘Then when you die
In hell you will lie’ — etc.
“Let me lie in hell, then,” the bad and unloving little boy had answered, to the shocked horror of the Aunts. And the answer had scared even himself.
And now the hell was on him. And still he was not a good, loving little boy.
He remembered his lessons: Love your enemies.
“Do I love Easu?” he asked himself. And he writhed over in bed in disgust. He loathed Easu. If he could crush him absolutely to powder, he would crush him to powder. Make him extinct.
“Lord, Lord!” he groaned. “I loathe Easu. I loathe him.”
What was amiss with him? Did he want to leave off loathing Easu? Was that the root of his sickness and fever?
But when he thought of Easu’s figure and face, he knew he didn’t want to leave off loathing him. He did loathe him, whether he wanted to or not, and the fact to him was sacred. It went right through the core of him.
“Lord! Lord!” he groaned, writhing in fever. “Lord, help me to loathe him properly. Lord, I’ll kill him if you want me to; and if you don’t want me to, I won’t. I’ll kill him if you want me to. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t care any more.”
The pledge seemed to soothe him. At the back of Jack’s consciousness was always this mysterious Lord, to whom he cried in the night. And this Lord put commands upon him, but so darkly, Jack couldn’t easily find out what the commands were. The Aunts had always said, the command was to be a good, loving little boy. But when he tried being a good, loving little boy, his soul seemed to lose his Lord, and turn wicked. That was what made him fear hell. When he seemed to lose connection with his great, mysterious Lord, with whom he communed absolutely alone, he became aware of hell. And he couldn’t share with his Aunts that Jesus whom they always commended. At the Sacrament, something in his soul stood cold, and he knew this was no Sacrament to him.
He had his own Lord. And when he could get into communication or communion, with his own Lord, he always felt well and right again. Now, in his pain and battered fever, he was fighting for his Lord again.
“Lord, I don’t love Easu, and I’ll kill him if you want me to. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t bother any more.”
This pledge and this submission soothed him strangely. He felt he was coming back to his own Lord. It was a pledge, and he would keep it. He gave no pledge to love Easu. Only not to kill him, if the Lord didn’t want
it; and to kill him, if the Lord did.
“Lord, I don’t love Monica. I don’t love her. But if she’d give up to me, I’d love her if you wanted me to.”
He thought about this. Somewhere, his soul burned against Monica. And somewhere, his soul burned for her.
But she must give up to him. She must give herself up. He demanded this submission, as if it were a submission to his mysterious Lord. She would never submit to the mysterious Lord direct. Like that old demon of a Gran, who knew the Lord, and played with Him, spited Him even. Monica would have first to submit to himself, Jack, in person, before she would really yield before the immense Lord. And yield before the immense Lord she must. Through him.
“Lord!” he said, invoking the supreme power, “I love Lennie and Tom, and I want always to love them, and I want you to back them.”
The prickles of pain entered his soul again.
“Lord, I don’t love my father, but I don’t want to hurt him. Only, I don’t love him, Lord. And it’s not my fault, though he’s a good man, because I wasn’t born with love for him in me.”
This had been a thorn in his consciousness since he was a child. Best get it out now. Because the fear of not loving his father had almost made him hate him. If he ought to love him, and he couldn’t love him, then there was nothing to do but hate him, because of the hopeless obligation. But if he needn’t love him, then he needn’t hate him, and they could both be in peace. He would leave it to his Lord.
“Perhaps I ought to love Mary,” he continued. “But I don’t really love her, because she doesn’t realise about the Lord. She doesn’t realise there is any Lord. She thinks there’s only me, and herself. But there is the Lord. And Monica knows. But Monica, is spiteful against the Lord. Lord! Lord!”
He ended on the old human cry of invocation: a cry which is answered, when it comes from the extreme, passionate soul. The strange, dark comfort and power came back to him again, and he could go to sleep once more, with his Lord.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 402