“When he wants a thing really, he can’t change,” said Mary gloomily. “He is like that.”
“An obstinate young fool that’s never had enough lickings,” said Old George. “Devil’s blood of his mother’s devil of an obstinate father. But very well then, let him have her, with a couple of babies for a dowry. Make himself the laughing stock of the colony.”
So he wrote to Monica: “If you care about seeing Jack Grant again, you’d better stop in this colony. He sticks to it he wants to see you, being more of a fool than a knave, unlike many people in Western Australia.”
She being obstinate like the rest, stayed on in Albany, though Percy, angry and upset, sailed on to Melbourne. He said she could join him if she liked. He stayed till her baby was born, then went because he didn’t want to face Jack.
Jack arrived by sea. He was still not strong enough to travel by land. He got a vessel going to Adelaide, that touched at Albany.
Monica, thinner than ever, with a little baby in her arms, and her flower-face like a chilled flower, was on the dock to meet him. He saw her at once, and his heart gave a queer lurch.
As he came forward to meet her, their eyes met. Her yellow eyes looked straight into his, with the same queer, panther-like scrutiny, and the eternal question. She was a question, and she had got to be answered. It made her fearless, almost shameless, whatever she did.
But with Percy, the fear had nipped her, the fear that she should go forever unanswered, as if life had rejected her.
This nipped look and her strange yellow flare of question as she peered at him under her brows, like a panther, made Jack’s cheeks slowly darken, and the life-blood flow into him stronger, heavier. He knew his passion for her was the same. Thank God he met her at last.
“You’re awfully thin,” she said.
“So are you,” he answered.
And she laughed her quick, queer, breathless little laugh, showing her pointed teeth. She had seen the death-look in his eyes and it was her answer, a bitter answer enough. She stopped to put straight the tiny bonnet over her little baby’s face, with a delicate, remote movement. He watched her in silence.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked him, without looking at him.
“With you,” he said.
Then she looked at him again, with the dry-eyed question. But she saw the unapproachable death-look there in his eyes, at the back of their dark-blue, dilated emotion and passion. And her heart gave up. She looked down the pier, as if to walk away. He carried his own bag. They set off side by side.
She lived in a tiny slab cottage in a side lane. But she called first at a neighbour’s house, for her other child. It was a tiny, toddling thing with a defiant stare in its pale-blue eyes. Monica held her baby on one arm, and led this tottering child by the other. Jack walked at her side in silence.
The cottage had just two rooms, poorly furnished. But it was clean, and had bright cotton curtains and a sofa-bed, and a pale-blue convolvulus vine mingling with a passion vine over the window.
She laid the baby down in its cradle, and began to take off the bonnet of the little girl. She had called it Jane.
Jack watched the little Jane as if fascinated. The infant had curly reddish hair, of a lovely fine texture and a beautiful tint, something like raw silk with threads of red. Her eyes were round and bright blue, and rather defiant, and she had the delicate complexion of her kind. She fingered her mother’s brooch, like a little monkey touching a bit of glittering gold, as Monica stooped to her.
“Daddy gone!” she said in her chirping, bird-like, quite emotionless tone.
“Yes, Daddy gone!” replied Monica, as emotionlessly.
The child then glanced with unmoved curiosity at Jack. She kept on looking and looking at him, sideways. And he watched her just as sharply, her sharp, pale-blue eyes.
“Him more Daddy?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Monica, who was suckling her baby.
“Yes,” said Jack in a rather hard tone, smiling with a touch of mockery. “I’m your new father.”
The child smiled back at him a faint, mocking little grin, and put her finger in her mouth.
The day passed slowly in the strange place, Monica busy all the time with the children and the house. Poor Monica, she was already a drudge. She was still careless and hasty in her methods, but clean, and uncomplaining. She kept herself to herself, and did what she had to do. And Jack watched, mostly silent.
At last the lamp was lighted, the children were both in bed. Monica cooked a little supper over the fire.
Before he came to the table, Jack asked:
“Is Jane Easu’s child?”
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“No one has told me. Is she?”
Monica turned and faced him, with the yellow flare in her eyes, as she looked into his eyes, challenging.
“Yes,” she said.
But his eyes did not change. The remoteness at the back of them did not come any nearer.
“Shall you hate her?” she asked, rather breathlessly.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“Don’t!” she pleaded, in the same breathlessness. “Because I rather hate her.”
“She’s too little to hate,” said Jack.
“I know,” said Monica rather doubtfully.
She put the food on the table. But she herself ate nothing.
“Aren’t you well? You don’t eat,” he asked.
“I can’t eat just now,” she said.
“If you have a child to suckle, you should,” he replied.
But she only became more silent, and her hands hung dead in her lap. Then the baby began to cry, a thin, poor, frail noise, and she went to soothe it.
When she came back, Jack had left the table and was sitting m Percy’s wooden arm-chair.
“Percy’s child doesn’t seem to have much life in it,” he said.
“Not very much,” she replied. And her hands trembled as she cleared away the dishes.
When she had finished, she moved about, afraid to sit down. He called her to him.
“Monica!” he said with a little jerk of his head, meaning she should come to him.
She came rather slowly, her queer, pure-seeming face looking like a hurt. She stood with her thin hands hanging in front of her apron.
“Monica!” he said, rising and taking her hands. “I should still want you if you had a hundred children. So we won’t say any more about that. And you won’t oppose me when there’s anything I want to do, will you?”
She shook her head.
“No, I won’t oppose you,” she said, in a dead little voice.
“Let me come to you, then,” he said. “I should have to come to you if you went to Melbourne or all round the world. And I should be glad to come,” he added whimsically, with the warmth of his old smile coming into his eyes. “I suppose I should be glad to come, if it was in hell.”
“But it isn’t hell, is it?” she asked, wistfully and a little defiantly.
“Not a bit,” he said. “You’ve got too much pluck in you to spoil. You’re as good to me as you were the first time I knew you. Only Easu might have spoiled you.”
“And you killed him,” she said quickly, half in reproach.
“Would you rather he’d killed me?” he asked.
She looked a long time into his eyes, with that watchful, searching look that used to hurt him. Now it hurt him no more.
She shook her head, saying:
“I’m glad you killed him. I couldn’t bear to think of him living on, and sneering — sneering! — I was always in love with you, really.”
“Ah, Monica!” he exclaimed softly, teasingly, with a little smile. And she flushed, and flashed with anger.
“If you never knew, it was your own fault!” she jerked out.
“Really,” he said, quoting and echoing the word as she had said it, and smiling with a touch of raillery at her, before he added:
“You always l
oved me really, but you loved the others as well, unreally.”
“Yes,” she said, baffled, defiant.
“All right, that day is over. You’ve had your unreal loves. Now come and have your real one.”
In the next room Easu’s child was sleeping in its odd little way, a sleep that was neither innocent nor not innocent, queer and naïvely “knowing,” even in its sleep. Jack watched it as he took off his things: this little inheritance he had from Easu. An odd little thing. With an odd, loveless little spirit of its own, cut off and not daunted. He wouldn’t love it, because it wasn’t lovable. But its odd little dauntlessness and defiance amused him, he would see it had fair play.
And he took Monica in his arms, glad to get into grips with his own fate again. And it was good. It was better, perhaps, than his passionate desirings of earlier days had imagined. Because he didn’t lose and scatter himself. He gathered, like a reaper at harvest gathering.
And Monica, who woke for her baby, looked at him as he slept soundly and she sat in bed suckling her child. She saw in him the eternal stranger. There he was, the eternal stranger, lying in her bed sleeping at her side. She rocked her baby slightly as she sat up in the night, still rocking in the last throes of rebellion. The eternal stranger, whom she feared, because she could never finally possess him, and never finally know him! He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel so terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against, but could no longer withstand. Because the emptiness of the other men, Easu, Percy, all the men she knew, was worse than the doom of this man who would never give her his ultimate intimacy, but who would be able to hold her till the end of time. There was something enduring and changeless in him. But she would never hold him entirely. Never! She would have to resign herself to this.
Well, so be it. At least it relieved her of the burden of responsibility for life. It took away from her her own strange and fascinating female power, which she couldn’t bear to part with. But at the same time she felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her. After all, this man was magical.
She put her child in its cradle, and returning waked the man. He put out his hand quickly for her, as if she were a new, blind discovery. She quivered and thrilled, and left it to him. It was his mystery, since he would have it so.
III
They were married in Albany, and stayed there another month waiting for a ship. Then they sailed away, all the family, away to the North-West. They did not go to Perth: they did not go to Wandoo. Only Jack saw Mr. George in Fremantle, and waved to him Good-bye as the ship proceeded North.
Then came two months of wandering, a pretty business with a baby and a toddling infant. The second month, Percy’s baby suddenly died in the heat, and Monica hardly mourned for it. As Jack looked at its pinched little dead face, he said: You are better dead. And that was true.
The little Jane, however, showed no signs of dying. The knocking about seemed to suit her. Monica remained very thin. It was a sort of hell-life to her, this struggling from place to place in the heat and dust, no water to wash in, sleeping anywhere like a lost dog, eating the food that came. Because she loved to be clean and good-looking and in graceful surroundings. What fiend of hell had ordained that she must be a sort of tramp-woman in the back of beyond?
She did not know, so it was no good asking. Jack seemed to know what he wanted. And she was his woman, fated to him. There was no more to it. Through the purgatory of discomfort she had to go. And he was good to her, thoughtful for her, in material things. But at the centre of his soul he was not thoughtful for her. He just possessed her, mysteriously owned her, and went ahead with his own obsessions.
Sometimes she tried to rebel. Sometimes she wanted to refuse to go any further, to refuse to be a party to his will. But then he suddenly looked so angry, and so remote, looked at her with such far-off, cold, haughty eyes, that she was frightened. She was afraid he would abandon her, or ship her back to Perth, and put her out of his life forever.
Above all things, she didn’t want to be shipped back to Perth. Here in the wild she could have taken up with another man. She knew that. But she knew that if she did, Jack would just put her out of his life altogether. There would be no return. His passion for her would just take the form of excluding her forever from his being. Because passion can so reverse itself, and from being a great desire that draws the beloved towards itself, it can become an eternal revulsion, excluding the once-beloved forever from any contact at all.
Monica knew this. And whenever she tried to oppose him, and the deathly anger rose in him, she was pierced with a fear so acute she had to hold on to some support, to prevent herself sinking to the ground. It was a strange fear, as if she were going to be cast out of the land of the living, among the unliving that slink like pariahs outside.
Afterwards she was puzzled. Why had he got this power over her? Why couldn’t she be a free woman, to go where she chose, and be a complete thing in herself?
She caught at the idea. But it was no good. When he went away prospecting for a week or more at a time, she would struggle to regain her woman’s freedom. And it would seem to her as if she had got it: she was free of him again. She was a free being, by herself.
But then, when he came back, tired, sunburnt, ragged, and still unsuccessful: and when he looked at her with desire in his eyes, the living desire for her; she was so glad, suddenly, as if she had forgotten, or as if she had never known what his desire of her meant to her. She was so glad, she was weak with gladness instead of fear. And if, in perverseness, she still tried to oppose him, in the light of her supposedly regained freedom; and she saw the strange glow of desire for her go out of his eyes, and the strange loveliness, to her, of his wanting to have her near, in the room, giving him his meal or sitting near him outside in the shade of the evening; then, when his face changed, and took on the curious look of aloofness, as if he glistened with anger looking down on her from a long way off; then she felt all her own world turn to smoke, and her own will mysteriously evaporated, leaving her only wanting to be wanted again, back in his world. Her freedom was worth less than nothing.
Still often, when he was gone, leaving her alone in the little cabin, she was glad. She was free to spread her own woman’s aura round her, she was free to delight in her own woman’s idleness and whimsicality, free to amuse herself half teasing, half loving that little odd female of a Jane. And sometimes she would go to the cabins of other women, and gossip. And sometimes she would flirt with a young miner or prospector who seemed handsome. And she would get back her young, gay liveliness and freedom.
But when the man she flirted with wanted to kiss her, or put his arm round her waist, she found it made her go cold and savagely hostile. It was not as in the old days, when it gave her a thrill to be seized and kissed, whether by Easu, by Percy or Jack, or whatever man it was she was flirting with. Then, there had been a spark between her and many a man. But now, alas, the spark wouldn’t fly. The man might be ever so good-looking and likeable, yet when he touched her, instead of the spark flying from her to him, immediately all the spark went dead in her. And this left her so angry, she could kill herself, or so wretched, she couldn’t even cry.
That little goggle-eyed imp of a Jane, in spite of her one solitary year of age, seemed somehow to divine what was happening inside her mother’s breast, and she seemed to chuckle wickedly. Monica always felt that the brat knew, and that she took Jack’s side.
Jane always wanted Jack to come back. When he was away, she would toddle about on her own little affairs, curiously complacent and impervious to outer influences. But if she heard a horse coming up to the hut, she was at the door in a flash. And Monica saw with a pang, how steadily intent the brat was on the man’s return. Somehow, from Jane, Mon
ica knew that Jack would go with other women. Because of the spark that flashed to him from that brat of a baby of Easu’s.
And at evening, Jane hated going to bed if Jack hadn’t come home. She would be a real little hell-monkey. It was as if she felt the house wasn’t safe, wasn’t real, till he had come in.
Which annoyed Monica exceedingly. Why wasn’t’ the mother enough for the child?
But she wasn’t. And when Jane was in bed, Monica would take up the uneasiness of the manless house. She would sit like a cat shut up in a strange room, unable to settle, unable really to rest, and hating the night for having come and surprised her in her empty loneliness. Her loneliness might be really enjoyable during the day. But after nightfall it was empty, sterile, a mere oppression to her. She wished he would come home, if only so that she could hate him.
And she felt a flash of joy when she heard his footstep on the stones outside, even if the flash served only to kindle a great resentment against him. And he would come in, with his burnt, half-seeing face, unsuccessful, worn, silent, yet not uncheerful. And he spoke his few rather low words, from his chest, asking her something. And she knew he had come back to her. But where from, and what from, she would never know entirely.
She had always known where Percy had been, and what he had been doing. She felt she would always have known, with Easu. But with Jack she never knew. And sometimes this infuriated her. But it was no good. He would tell her anything she asked. And then she felt there was something she couldn’t ask about.
The months went by. He staked his claim, and worked like a navvy. He was a navvy, nothing but a navvy. And she was a navvy’s wife, in a hut of one room, in a desert of heat and sand and grey-coloured bush, sleeping on a piece of canvas stretched on a low trestle, eating on a tin plate, eating sand by the mouthful when the wind blew. Percy’s baby was dead and buried in the sand: another sop to the avid country. And she herself was with child again, and thin as a rat. But it was his child this time, so she had a certain savage satisfaction in it.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 418