He must have slept. He was in great misery, his mouth like an open sepulchre, his consciousness dull. He was hardly aware that it was late afternoon, hot and motionless. The outside things were all so far away. And the blackness of death and misery was thick, but transparent, over his eyes.
He went on, still obstinately insisting that ahead there was something, perhaps even water, though hope was dead in him. It was not hope, it was heavy volition that insisted on water.
The sling dragged on his neck, he threw it away, and walked with his hand against his breast. And his braces dragged on him. He didn’t want any burden at all, none at all. He stopped, took off his braces and threw them away, then his sweat-soaked undervest. He didn’t want these things. He didn’t want them. He walked on a bit.
He hesitated, then came for a moment to his senses. He was going to throw away his trousers too. But it came to him: “Don’t be a fool, and throw away your clothes, man. You know men do it who are lost in the bush, and then they are found naked, dead.”
He looked vaguely round for the vest and braces he had just thrown away. But it was half an hour since he had flung them down. His consciousness tricked him, obliterating the interval. He could not believe his eye. They had ghostlily disappeared.
So he rolled his trousers on his naked hips, and pressed his hurt hand on his naked breast, and set off again in a sort of fear. His hat had gone long ago. And all the time he had this strange desire to throw all his clothes away, even his boots, and be absolutely naked, as when he was born. And all the time something obstinate in him combated the desire. He wanted to throw everything away, and go absolutely naked over the border. And at the same time, something in him deeper than himself obstinately withstood the desire. He wanted to go over the border. And something deeper even than his consciousness, refused.
So he went on, scarcely conscious at all. He himself was in the middle of a vacuum, and pressing round were visions and agonies. The vacuum was perhaps the greatest agony, like a death-tension. But the other agonies were pressing on its border: his dry, cardboard mouth, his aching body. And the visions pressed on the border too. A great lake of ghostly white water, such as lies in the valleys where the dead are. But he walked to it, and it wasn’t there. The moon was shining whitely.
And on the edge of the aching void of him, a wheel was spinning in his brain like a prayer-wheel.
“Petition me no petitions, Sir, to-day;
Let other hours be set apart for business.
Today it is our pleasure to be drunk
And this our queen . . .”
Water! Water! Water! Was water only a visionary thing of memory, something only achingly, wearyingly, thought and thought and thought, and never substantiated?
“A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave . . .”
The wheel of words went round, the wheel of his brain, on the edge of the vacuum. What did that mean? What was a Briton?
“A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave.”
The words went round and round and were absolutely meaningless to him.
And then out of the dark another wheel was pressing and turning.
“How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land.”
Away on the hard dark periphery of his consciousness, the wheel of these words was turning and grinding.
His mind was turning helplessly, but his feet walked on. He realised in a weird, mournful way that he was shut groping in a dark unfathomable cave, and that the walls of the cave were his own aching body. And he was going on and on in the cave, looking for the fountain, the water. But his body was the aching, ghastly, jutting walls of the cave. And it made this weary grind of words on the outside. And he had need to struggle on and on.
In little flickers he tried to associate his dark cave-consciousness with his grinding body. Was it night, was it day?
But before he had decided that it was night, the two things had gone apart again, and he was groping and listening to the grind.
“But hushed be every thought that springs
From out the bitterness of things.
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things
Falling from us, vanishing.”
He was so weary of the outward grind of words. He was stumbling as he walked. And waiting for the walls of the cave to crash in and bury him altogether. And the spring of water did not exist.
“Blank misgivings of a creator moving about in a world not realised.”
This phrase almost united his two consciousnesses. He was going to crash into this creator who moved about unrealised. Other people had gone, and other things. Monica, Easu, Tom, Mary, Mother, Father, Lennie. They were all like papery, fallen leaves blowing about outside in some street. Inside here there were no people at all, none at all. Only the Creator moving around unrealised. His Lord.
He stumbled and fell, and in the white flash of falling knew he hurt himself again, and that he was falling forever.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FIND
I
The subconscious self woke first, roaring in distant wave-beats, unintelligible, unmeaning, persistent, and growing in volume. It had something to do with birth. And not having died. “I have not let my soul run like water out of my mouth.”
And as the roaring and beating of the waves increased in volume, tiny little words emerged like flying-fish out of the black ocean of consciousness. “Ye must be born again,” in little silvery, twinkling spurts like flying-fish which twinkle silver and spark into the utterly dark sea again. They were gone and forgotten before they were realised. They had merged deep in the sea again. And the roar of dark consciousness was the roar of death. The kingdom of death. And the lords of death.
“Ye must be born again.” But the twinkling words had disappeared into the lordly powerful darkness of death. And the baptism is the blackness of death between the eyes, that never lifts, forever, neither in life nor death. You may be born again. But when you emerge, this time you emerge with the darkness of death between your eyes, as a lord of death.
The waves of dark consciousness surged in a huge billow, and broke. The boy’s eyes were wide open, and his voice was saying:
“Is that you, Tom!”
The sound of his voice paperily rustling these words was so surprising to him that he instantly went dark again. He heard no answer.
But those surging dark waves pressed him again and again, and again his eyes were open. They recognised nothing. Something was being done to him on the outside of him. His own throat was moving. And life started again with a sharp pain.
“What was it?”
The question sparked suddenly out of him. Someone was putting a metal rim to his lips, there was liquid in his mouth. He put it out. He didn’t want to come back. His soul sank again like a dark stone.
And at the very bottom it took a command from the Lord of Death, and rose slowly again.
Someone was tilting his head, and pouring a little water again. He swallowed with a crackling noise and a crackling pain. One had to come back. He recognised the command from his own Lord. His Lord was the Lord of Death. And he, Jack, was dark-anointed and sent back. Returned with the dark unction between his brows. So be it.
He saw green leaves hanging from a blue sky. It was still far off. And the dark was still better. But the dark green leaves were also like a triumphal banner. He tries to smile, but his face is stiff. The faintest irony of a smile sets in its stiffness. He is forced to swallow again, and know the pain and tearing. Ah! He suddenly realised the water was good. He had not realised it the other times. He gulped suddenly, everything forgotten. And his mind gave a sudden lurch towards consciousness.
“Is that you, Tom?”
“Yes. Feel better?”
He saw the red mistiness of Tom’s face near. Tom was faithful. And this time his soul swayed, as if it too had drunk of the water
of faithfulness.
He drank the water from the metal cup, because he knew it came from Tom’s faithfulness.
Gradually Jack revived. But his burning bloodshot eyes were dilated with fever, and he could not keep hold of his consciousness. He realised that Tom was there, and Mary, and somebody he didn’t for a long time recognise as Lennie; and that there was a fire, and a smell of meat, and night was again falling. Yes, he was sure night was falling. Or was it his own consciousness going dark? He didn’t know. Perhaps it was the everlasting dark.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Sundown,” said Tom. “Why?”
But he was gone again. It was no good trying to keep a hold on one’s consciousness. The ache, the nausea, the throbbing pain, the swollen mouth, the strange feeling of cracks in his flesh, made him let go.
Tom was there and Mary. He would leave himself to Tom’s faithfulness and Mary’s tenderness, and Lennie’s watchful intuition. The mystery of death was in that bit of deathless faithfulness which was in Tom. And Mary’s tenderness, and Lennie’s intuitive care, both had a touch of the mystery and stillness of the death that surrounds us darkly all the time.
II
They got Jack home, but he was very ill. His life would seem to come back. Then it would sink away again like a stone, and they would think he was going. The strange oscillation. Several times, Mary watched him almost die. Then from the very brink of death, he would come back again, with a strange, haunted look in his blood-shot eyes.
“What is it, Jack?” she would ask him. But the eyes only looked at her.
And Lennie, standing there silently watching, said:
“He’s had about enough of life, that’s what it is.”
Mary, blanched with fear, went to find Tom.
“Tom,” she said, “he’s sinking again. Lennie says it’s because he doesn’t want to live.”
Tom silently threw down his tool, and walked with her into the house. It was obvious he was sinking again.
“Jack!” said Tom in a queer voice, bending over him. “Mate! Mate!” He seemed to be calling him into camp.
Jack’s expressionless, fever-dilated, blood-shot eyes opened again. The whites were almost scarlet.
“Y’ aren’t desertin’ us, are y’?” said Tom, in a gloomy, reproachful tone. “Are y’ desertin’ us, mate?”
It was the Australian, lost but unbroken on the edge of the wilderness, looking with grim mouth into the void, and calling to his mate not to leave him. Man for man, they were up against the great dilemma of white men, on the edge of the white man’s world, looking into the vaster, alien world of the undawned era, and unable to enter, unable to leave their own.
Jack looked at Tom and smiled faintly. In some subtle way, both men knew the mysterious responsibilities of living. Tom was almost fatalistic-reckless. Yet it was a recklessness which knew that the only thing to do was to go ahead, meet death that way. He could see nothing but meeting death ahead. But since he was a man, he would go ahead to meet it, he would not sit and wait.
Jack smiled faintly, and the courage came back to him. He began to rally.
The next morning, he turned to Mary and said:
“I still want Monica.”
Mary dropped her head and did not answer. She recognised it as one of the signs that he was going to live. And she recognised the unbending obstinacy in his voice.
“I shall come for you too in time,” he said to her, looking at her with his terrible scarlet eyes.
She did not answer, but her hand trembled as she went for his medicine. There was something prophetic and terrible in his sallow face and burning, blood-shot eyes.
“Be still,” she murmured to him. “Only be still.”
“I shan’t ever really drop you,” he said to her. “But I want Monica. first. That’s my way.”
He seemed curiously victorious, making these assertions.
CHAPTER XXIII
GOLD
I
The boy Jack never rose from that fever. It was a man who got up again. A man with all the boyishness cut away from him, all the childishness gone, and a certain unbending recklessness in its place.
He was thin, and pale, and the cherubic look had left his face forever. His cheeks were longer, leaner, and when he got back his brown-faced strength again, he was handsome. But it was not the handsomeness, any more, that would make women like Aunt Matilda exclaim involuntarily: “Dear boy!” They would look at him twice, but with misgiving, and a slight recoil.
It was his eyes that had changed most. From being the warm, emotional dark-blue eyes of a boy, they had become impenetrable, and had a certain fixity. There was a touch of death in them, a little of the fixity and changelessness of death. And with this, a peculiar power. As if he had lost his softness in the otherworld of death, and brought back instead some of the relentless power that belongs there. And the inevitable touch of mockery.
As soon as he began to walk about, he was aware of the change. He walked differently, he put his feet down differently, he carried himself differently. The old drifting, diffident, careless bearing had left him. He felt his uprightness hard, bony. Sometimes he was aware of the skeleton of himself. He was a hard skeleton, built upon the solid bony column of the back-bone, and pitched for balance on the great bones of the hips. But the plumb-weight was in the cage of his chest. A skeleton!
But not the dead skeleton. The living bone, the living man of bone, unyielding and imperishable. The bone of his forehead like iron against the world, and the blade of his breast like an iron wedge held forward. He was thin, and built of bone.
And inside this living, rigid man of bone, the dark heart heavy with its wisdom and passions and emotions and its correspondences. It was living, softly and intensely living. But heavy and dark, plumb to the earth’s center.
During his convalescence, he got used to this man of bone which he had become, and accepted his own inevitable. His bones, his skeleton was isolatedly itself. It had no contact. Except that it was forged in the kingdom of death, to be durable and effectual. Some strange Lord had forged his bones in the dark smithy where the dead and the unborn came and went.
And this was his only permanent contact: the contact with the Lord who had forged his bones, and put a dark heart in the midst.
But the other contacts, they were alive and quivering in his flesh. His passive but enduring affection for Tom and Lennie, and the strange quiescent hold he held over Mary. Beyond these, the determined molten stirring of his desire for Monica.
And the other desires. The desire in his heart for masterhood. Not mastery. He didn’t want to master anything. But to be the dark lord of his own folk: that was a desire in his heart. And the concurrent knowledge that, to achieve this, he must be master too of gold. Not gold for the having’s sake. Not for the spending’s sake. Nor for the sake of the power to hire services, which is the power of money. But the mastery of gold, so that gold should no longer be like a yellow star to which men hitched the wagon of their destinies. To be Master of Gold, in the name of the dark Lord who had forged his bones neither of gold nor silver nor iron, but of the white glisten of knife. Masterhood, as a man forged by the Lord of Hosts, in the innermost fires of life and death. Because, just as a red fire burning on the hearth is a fusion of death into what was once live leaves, so the creation of man in the dark is a fusion of life into death, with the life dominant.
The two are never separate, life and death. And in the vast dark kingdom of afterwards, the Lord of Death is Lord of Life, and the God of life and creation is Lord of Death.
But Jack knew his Lord as the Lord of Death. The rich, dark mystery of death, which lies ahead, and the dark sumptuousness of the halls of death. Unless Life moves on to the beauty of the darkness of death, there is no life, there is only automatism. Unless we see the dark splendour of death ahead, and travel to be lords of darkness at last, peers in the realms of death, our life is nothing but a petulant, pitiful backing, like a frightened horse,
back, back to the stable, the manger, the cradle. But onward ahead is the great porch of the entry into death, with its columns of bone-ivory. And beyond the porch is the heart of darkness, where the lords of death arrive home out of the vulgarity of life, into their own dark and silent domains, lordly, ruling the incipience of life.
II
At the trial Jack said, in absolute truth, he shot Easu in self-defence. He had not the faintest thought of shooting him when he rode up to the paddock: nor of shooting anybody. He had called in passing, just to say good-day. And then he had fired at Easu because he knew the axe would come down in his skull if he didn’t.
Herbert gave the same deposition. The shot was entirely in self-defence.
So Jack was free again. There had been no further mention of Monica, after Jack had said he was riding south to see her, because he had always cared for her. No one hinted that Easu was the father of her child, though Mrs. Ellis knew and Old George knew.
Afterwards Jack wondered why he had called at the Reds’ place that morning. Why had he taken the trail past where he and Easu had fought? He had intended to see Easu, that was why. But for what unconscious purpose, who shall say? The death was laid at the door of the old feud between Jack and Red. Only Old George knew the whole, and he, subtle and unafraid, pushed justice as it should go, according to his own sense of justice, like a real Australian.
Meanwhile he had been corresponding with Monica and Percy. They were in Albany, and on the point of sailing to Melbourne, where Percy would enter some business or other, and the two would live as man and wife. Monica was expecting another child. At this news, Mr. George wanted to let them go, and be damned to them. But he talked to Mary, and Mary said Jack would want Monica, no matter what happened.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 417