‘Fourth Cavalry,’ said Daphne. ‘Poor Count Dionys. Such a lovely name, I always thought: Count Johann Dionys Psanek. Extraordinary dandy he was. And an amazingly good dancer, small, yet electric. Wonder if he minds dying.’
‘He was so full of life, in his own little animal way. They say small people are always conceited. But he doesn’t look conceited now, dear. Something ages old in his face — and, yes, a certain beauty, Daphne.’
‘You mean long lashes.’
‘No. So still, so solitary — and ages old, in his race. I suppose he must belong to one of those curious little aboriginal races of Central Europe. I felt quite new beside him.’
‘How nice of you,’ said Daphne.
Nevertheless, next day Daphne telephoned to Hurst Place to ask for news of him. He was about the same. She telephoned every day. Then she was told he was a little stronger. The day she received the message that her husband was wounded and a prisoner in Turkey, and that his wounds were healing, she forgot to telephone for news of the little enemy Count. And the following day she telephoned that she was coming to the hospital to see him.
He was awake, more restless, more in physical excitement. They could see the nausea of pain round his nose. His face seemed to Daphne curiously hidden behind the black beard, which nevertheless was thin, each hair coming thin and fine, singly, from the sallow, slightly translucent skin. In the same way his moustache made a thin black line round his mouth. His eyes were wide open, very black, and of no legible expression. He watched the two women coming down the crowded, dreary room, as if he did not see them. His eyes seemed too wide.
It was a cold day, and Daphne was huddled in a black sealskin coat with a skunk collar pulled up to her ears, and a dull gold cap with wings pulled down on her brow. Lady Beveridge wore her sable coat, and had that odd, untidy elegance which was natural to her, rather like a ruffled chicken.
Daphne was upset by the hospital. She looked from right to left in spite of herself, and everything gave her a dull feeling of horror: the terror of these sick, wounded enemy men. She loomed tall and obtrusive in her furs by the bed, her little mother at her side.
‘I hope you don’t mind my coming!’ she said in German to the sick man. Her tongue felt rusty, speaking the language.
‘Who is it then?’ he asked.
‘It is my daughter, Lady Daphne. You remembered me, Lady Beveridge! This is my daughter, whom you knew in Saxony. She was so sorry to hear you were wounded.’
The black eyes rested on the little lady. Then they returned to the looming figure of Daphne. And a certain fear grew on the low, sick brow. It was evident the presence loomed and frightened him. He turned his face aside. Daphne noticed how his fine black hair grew uncut over his small, animal ears.
‘You don’t remember me, Count Dionys?’ she said dully.
‘Yes,’ he said. But he kept his face averted.
She stood there feeling confused and miserable, as if she had made a faux pas in coming.
‘Would you rather be left alone?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Her voice was monotonous. She felt suddenly stifled in her closed furs, and threw her coat open, showing her thin white throat and plain black slip dress on her flat breast. He turned again unwillingly to look at her. He looked at her as if she were some strange creature standing near him.
‘Good-bye,’ she said. ‘Do get better.’
She was looking at him with a queer, slanting, downward look of her heavy eyes as she turned away. She was still a little red round the eyes, with nervous exhaustion.
‘You are so tall,’ he said, still frightened.
‘I was always tall,’ she replied, turning half to him again.
‘And I, small,’ he said.
‘I am so glad you are getting better,’ she said.
‘I am not glad,’ he said.
‘Why? I’m sure you are. Just as we are glad because we want you to get better.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I have wished to die.’
‘Don’t do that, Count Dionys. Do get better,’ she said, in the rather deep, laconic manner of her girlhood. He looked at her with a farther look of recognition. But his short, rather pointed nose was lifted with the disgust and weariness of pain, his brows were tense. He watched her with that curious flame of suffering which is forced to give a little outside attention, but which speaks only to itself.
‘Why did they not let me die?’ he said. ‘I wanted death now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t. You must live. If we can live we must.’
‘I wanted death,’ he said.
‘Ah, well,’ she said, ‘even death we can’t have when we want it, or when we think we want it.’
‘That is true,’ he said, watching her with the same wide black eyes. ‘Please to sit down. You are too tall as you stand.’
It was evident he was a little frightened still by her looming, overhanging figure.
‘I am sorry I am too tall,’ she said, taking a chair which a man-nurse had brought her. Lady Beveridge had gone away to speak with the men. Daphne sat down, not knowing what to say further. The pitch-black look in the Count’s wide eyes puzzled her.
‘Why do you come here? Why does your lady mother come?’ he said.
‘To see if we can do anything,’ she answered.
‘When I am well, I will thank your ladyship.’
‘All right,’ she replied. ‘When you are well I will let my lord the Count thank me. Please do get well.’
‘We are enemies,’ he said.
‘Who? You and I and my mother?’
‘Are we not? The most difficult thing is to be sure of anything. If they had let me die!’
‘That is at least ungrateful, Count Dionys.’
‘Lady Daphne! Yes. Lady Daphne! Beautiful, the name is. You are always called Lady Daphne? I remember you were so bright a maiden.’
‘More or less,’ she said, answering his question.
‘Ach! We should all have new names now. I thought of a name for myself, but I have forgotten it. No longer Johann Dionys. That is shot away. I am Karl or Wilhelm or Ernst or Georg. Those are names I hate. Do you hate them?’
‘I don’t like them — but I don’t hate them. And you mustn’t leave off being Count Johann Dionys. If you do I shall have to leave off being Daphne. I like your name so much.’
‘Lady Daphne! Lady Daphne!’ he repeated. ‘Yes, it rings well, it sounds beautiful to me. I think I talk foolishly. I hear myself talking foolishly to you.’ He looked at her anxiously.
‘Not at all,’ she said.
‘Ach! I have a head on my shoulders that is like a child’s windmill, and I can’t prevent its making foolish words. Please to go away, not to hear me. I can hear myself.’
‘Can’t I do anything for you?’ she asked.
‘No, no! No, no! If I could be buried deep, very deep down, where everything is forgotten! But they draw me up, back to the surface. I would not mind if they buried me alive, if it were very deep, and dark, and the earth heavy above.’
‘Don’t say that,’ she replied, rising.
‘No, I am saying it when I don’t wish to say it. Why am I here? Why am I here? Why have I survived into this? Why can I not stop talking?’
He turned his face aside. The black, fine, elfish hair was so long, and pushed up in tufts from the smooth brown nape of his neck. Daphne looked at him in sorrow. He could not turn his body. He could only move his head. And he lay with his face hard averted, the fine hair of his beard coming up strange from under his chin and from his throat, up to the socket of his ear. He lay quite still in this position. And she turned away, looking for her mother. She had suddenly realized that the bonds, the connexions between him and his life in the world had broken, and he lay there, a bit of loose, palpitating humanity, shot away from the body of humanity.
It was ten days before she went to the hospital again. She had wanted never to go again, to forget him, as one tries to forget incurable things. But
she could not forget him. He came again and again into her mind. She had to go back. She had heard that he was recovering very slowly.
He looked really better. His eyes were not so wide open, they had lost that black, inky exposure which had given him such an unnatural look, unpleasant. He watched her guardedly. She had taken off her furs, and wore only her dress and a dark, soft feather toque.
‘How are you?’ she said, keeping her face averted, unwilling to meet his eyes.
‘Thank you, I am better. The nights are not so long.’
She shuddered, knowing what long nights meant. He saw the worn look in her face too, the reddened rims of her eyes.
‘Are you not well? Have you some trouble?’ he asked her.
‘No, no,’ she answered.
She had brought a handful of pinky, daisy-shaped flowers.
‘Do you care for flowers?’ she asked.
He looked at them. Then he slowly shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘If I am on horseback, riding through the marshes or through the hills, I like to see them below me. But not here. Not now. Please do not bring flowers into this grave. Even in gardens, I do not like them. When they are upholstery to human life.’
‘I will take them away again,’ she said.
‘Please do. Please give them to the nurse.’
Daphne paused.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘you wish I would not come to disturb you.’
He looked into her face.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are like a flower behind a rock, near an icy water. No, you do not live too much. I am afraid I cannot talk sensibly. I wish to hold my mouth shut. If I open it, I talk this absurdity. It escapes from my mouth.’
‘It is not so very absurd,’ she said.
But he was silent — looking away from her.
‘I want you to tell me if there is really nothing I can do for you,’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ he answered.
‘If I can write any letter for you.’
‘None,’ he answered.
‘But your wife and your two children. Do they know where you are?’
‘I should think not.’
‘And where are they?’
‘I do not know. Probably they are in Hungary.’
‘Not at your home?’
‘My castle was burnt down in a riot. My wife went to Hungary with the children. She has her relatives there. She went away from me. I wished it too. Alas for her, I wished to be dead. Pardon me the personal tone.’
Daphne looked down at him — the queer, obstinate little fellow.
‘But you have somebody you wish to tell — somebody you want to hear from?’
‘Nobody. Nobody. I wish the bullet had gone through my heart. I wish to be dead. It is only I have a devil in my body that will not die.’
She looked at him as he lay with closed, averted face.
‘Surely it is not a devil which keeps you alive,’ she said. ‘It is something good.’
‘No, a devil,’ he said.
She sat looking at him with a long, slow, wondering look.
‘Must one hate a devil that makes one live?’ she asked.
He turned his eyes to her with a touch of a satiric smile.
‘If one lives, no,’ he said.
She looked away from him the moment he looked at her. For her life she could not have met his dark eyes direct.
She left him, and he lay still. He neither read nor talked throughout the long winter nights and the short winter days. He only lay for hours with black, open eyes, seeing everything around with a touch of disgust, and heeding nothing.
Daphne went to see him now and then. She never forgot him for long. He seemed to come into her mind suddenly, as if by sorcery.
One day he said to her:
‘I see you are married. May I ask you who is your husband?’
She told him. She had had a letter also from Basil. The Count smiled slowly.
‘You can look forward,’ he said, ‘to a happy reunion and new, lovely children, Lady Daphne. Is it not so?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said.
‘But you are ill,’ he said to her.
‘Yes — rather ill.’
‘Of what?’
‘Oh!’ she answered fretfully, turning her face aside. ‘They talk about lungs.’ She hated speaking of it. ‘Why, how do you know I am ill?’ she added quickly.
Again he smiled slowly.
‘I see it in your face, and hear it in your voice. One would say the Evil One had cast a spell on you.’
‘Oh no,’ she said hastily. ‘But do I look ill?’
‘Yes. You look as if something had struck you across the face, and you could not forget it.’
‘Nothing has,’ she said. ‘Unless it’s the war.’
‘The war!’ he repeated.
‘Oh, well, don’t let us talk of it,’ she said.
Another time he said to her:
‘The year has turned — the sun must shine at last, even in England. I am afraid of getting well too soon. I am a prisoner, am I not? But I wish the sun would shine. I wish the sun would shine on my face.’
‘You won’t always be a prisoner. The war will end. And the sun does shine even in the winter in England,’ she said.
‘I wish it would shine on my face,’ he said.
So that when in February there came a blue, bright morning, the morning that suggests yellow crocuses and the smell of a mezereon tree and the smell of damp, warm earth, Daphne hastily got a taxi and drove out to the hospital.
‘You have come to put me in the sun,’ he said the moment he saw her.
‘Yes, that’s what I came for,’ she said.
She spoke to the matron, and had his bed carried out where there was a big window that came low. There he was put full in the sun. Turning, he could see the blue sky and the twinkling tops of purplish, bare trees.
‘The world! The world!’ he murmured.
He lay with his eyes shut, and the sun on his swarthy, transparent, immobile face. The breath came and went through his nostrils invisibly. Daphne wondered how he could lie so still, how he could look so immobile. It was true as her mother had said: he looked as if he had been cast in the mould when the metal was white hot, all his lines were so clean. So small, he was, and in his way perfect.
Suddenly his dark eyes opened and caught her looking.
‘The sun makes even anger open like a flower,’ he said.
‘Whose anger?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. But I can make flowers, looking through my eyelashes. Do you know how?’
‘You mean rainbows?’
‘Yes, flowers.’
And she saw him, with a curious smile on his lips, looking through his almost closed eyelids at the sun.
‘The sun is neither English nor German nor Bohemian,’ he said. ‘I am a subject of the sun. I belong to the fire-worshippers.’
‘Do you?’ she replied.
‘Yes, truly, by tradition.’ He looked at her smiling. ‘You stand there like a flower that will melt,’ he added.
She smiled slowly at him with a slow, cautious look of her eyes, as if she feared something.
‘I am much more solid than you imagine,’ she said.
Still he watched her.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘before I go, let me wrap your hair round my hands, will you?’ He lifted his thin, short, dark hands. ‘Let me wrap your hair round my hands, like a bandage. They hurt me. I don’t know what it is. I think it is all the gun explosions. But if you let me wrap your hair round my hands. You know, it is the hermetic gold — but so much of water in it, of the moon. That will soothe my hands. One day, will you?’
‘Let us wait till the day comes,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he answered, and was still again.
‘It troubles me,’ he said after a while, ‘that I complain like a child, and ask for things. I feel I have lost my manhood for the time being. The continual explosions of guns and shells! It
seems to have driven my soul out of me like a bird frightened away at last. But it will come back, you know. And I am so grateful to you; you are good to me when I am soulless, and you don’t take advantage of me. Your soul is quiet and heroic.’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk!’
The expression of shame and anguish and disgust crossed his face.
‘It is because I can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I have lost my soul, and I can’t stop talking to you. I can’t stop. But I don’t talk to anyone else. I try not to talk, but I can’t prevent it. Do you draw the words out of me?’
Her wide, green-blue eyes seemed like the heart of some curious, full-open flower, some Christmas rose with its petals of snow and flush. Her hair glinted heavy, like water-gold. She stood there passive and indomitable with the wide-eyed persistence of her wintry, blond nature.
Another day when she came to see him, he watched her for a time, then he said:
‘Do they all tell you you are lovely, you are beautiful?’
‘Not quite all,’ she replied.
‘But your husband?’
‘He has said so.’
‘Is he gentle? Is he tender? Is he a dear lover?’
She turned her face aside, displeased.
‘Yes,’ she replied curtly.
He did not answer. And when she looked again he was lying with his eyes shut, a faint smile seeming to curl round his short, transparent nose. She could faintly see the flesh through his beard, as water through reeds. His black hair was brushed smooth as glass, his black eyebrows glinted like a curve of black glass on the swarthy opalescence of his brow.
Suddenly he spoke, without opening his eyes.
‘You have been very kind to me,’ he said.
‘Have I? Nothing to speak of.’
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
‘Everything finds its mate,’ he said. ‘The ermine and the pole-cat and the buzzard. One thinks so often that only the dove and the nightingale and the stag with his antlers have gentle mates. But the pole-cat and the ice-bears of the north have their mates. And a white she-bear lies with her cubs under a rock as a snake lies hidden, and the male bear slowly swims back from the sea, like a clot of snow or a shadow of a white cloud passing on the speckled sea. I have seen her too, and I did not shoot her, nor him when he landed with fish in his mouth, wading wet and slow and yellow-white over the black stones.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 513