When Daphne had hung up the receiver she sat down almost in a faint. What was it that so frightened her? His terrible, terrible altered voice, like cold, blue steel. She had no time to think. She rang for her maid.
‘Oh, my lady, it isn’t bad news?’ cried Millicent, when she caught sight of her mistress white as death.
‘No, good news. Major Apsley will be here in half an hour. Help me to dress. Ring to Murry’s first to send in some roses, red ones, and some lilac-coloured iris — two dozen of each, at once.’
Daphne went to her room. She didn’t know what to wear, she didn’t know how she wanted her hair dressed. She spoke hastily to her maid. She chose a violet-coloured dress. She did not know what she was doing. In the middle of dressing the flowers came, and she left off to put them in the bowls. So that when she heard his voice in the hall, she was still standing in front of the mirror reddening her lips and wiping it away again.
‘Major Apsley, my lady!’ murmured the maid, in excitement.
‘Yes, I can hear. Go and tell him I shall be one minute.’
Daphne’s voice had become slow and sonorous, like bronze, as it always did when she was upset. Her face looked almost haggard, and in vain she dabbed with the rouge.
‘How does he look?’ she asked curtly, when her maid came back.
‘A long scar here,’ said the maid, and she drew her finger from the left-hand corner of her mouth into her cheek, slanting downwards.
‘Make him look very different?’ asked Daphne.
‘Not so very different, my lady,’ said Millicent gently. ‘His eyes are the same, I think.’ The girl also was distressed.
‘All right,’ said Daphne. She looked at herself a long, last look as she turned away from the mirror. The sight of her own face made her feel almost sick. She had seen so much of herself. And yet even now she was fascinated by the heavy droop of her lilac-veined lids over her slow, strange, large, green-blue eyes. They were mysterious-looking. And she gave herself a long, sideways glance, curious and Chinese. How was it possible there was a touch of the Chinese in her face? — she so purely an English blonde, an Aphrodite of the foam, as Basil had called her in poetry. Ah well! She left off her thoughts and went through the hall to the drawing-room.
He was standing nervously in the middle of the room in his uniform. She hardly glanced at his face — and saw only the scar.
‘Hullo, Daphne,’ he said, in a voice full of the expected emotion. He stepped forward and took her in his arms, and kissed her forehead.
‘So glad! So glad it’s happened at last,’ she said, hiding her tears.
‘So glad what has happened, darling?’ he asked, in his deliberate manner.
‘That you’re back.’ Her voice had the bronze resonance, she spoke rather fast.
‘Yes, I’m back, Daphne darling — as much of me as there is to bring back.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘You’ve come back whole, surely?’ She was frightened.
‘Yes, apparently I have. Apparently. But don’t let’s talk of that. Let’s talk of you, darling. How are you? Let me look at you. You are thinner, you are older. But you are more wonderful than ever. Far more wonderful.’
‘How?’ said she.
‘I can’t exactly say how. You were only a girl. Now you are a woman. I suppose it’s all that’s happened. But you are wonderful as a woman, Daphne darling — more wonderful than all that’s happened. I couldn’t have believed you’d be so wonderful. I’d forgotten — or else I’d never known. I say, I’m a lucky chap really. Here I am, alive and well, and I’ve got you for a wife. It’s brought you out like a flower. I say, darling, there is more now than Venus of the foam — grander. How beautiful you are! But you look like the beauty of all life — as if you were moon-mother of the world — Aphrodite. God is good to me after all, darling. I ought never to utter a single complaint. How lovely you are — how lovely you are, my darling! I’d forgotten you — and I thought I knew you so well. Is it true that you belong to me? Are you really mine?’
They were seated on the yellow sofa. He was holding her hand, and his eyes were going up and down, from her face to her throat and her breast. The sound of his words, and the strong, cold desire in his voice excited her, pleased her, and made her heart freeze. She turned and looked into his light blue eyes. They had no longer the amused light, nor the young look. They burned with a hard, focused light, whitish.
‘It’s all right. You are mine, aren’t you, Daphne darling?’ came his cultured, musical voice, that had always the well-bred twang of diffidence.
She looked back into his eyes.
‘Yes, I am yours,’ she said, from the lips.
‘Darling! Darling!’ he murmured, kissing her hand.
Her heart beat suddenly so terribly, as if her breast would be ruptured, and she rose in one movement and went across the room. She leaned her hand on the mantelpiece and looked down at the electric fire. She could hear the faint, faint noise of it. There was silence for a few moments.
Then she turned and looked at him. He was watching her intently. His face was gaunt, and there was a curious deathly sub-pallor, though his cheeks were not white. The scar ran livid from the side of his mouth. It was not so very big. But it seemed like a scar in him himself, in his brain, as it were. In his eyes was that hard, white, focused light that fascinated her and was terrible to her. He was different. He was like death; like risen death. She felt she dared not touch him. White death was still upon him. She could tell that he shrank with a kind of agony from contact. ‘Touch me not, I am not yet ascended unto the Father.’ Yet for contact he had come. Something, someone seemed to be looking over his shoulder. His own young ghost looking over his shoulder. Oh, God! She closed her eyes, seeming to swoon. He remained leaning forward on the sofa, watching her.
‘Aren’t you well, darling?’ he asked. There was a strange, incomprehensible coldness in his very fire. He did not move to come near her.
‘Yes, I’m well. It is only that after all it is so sudden. Let me get used to you,’ she said, turning aside her face from him. She felt utterly like a victim of his white, awful face.
‘I suppose I must be a bit of a shock to you,’ he said. ‘I hope you won’t leave off loving me. It won’t be that, will it?’
The strange coldness in his voice! And yet the white, uncanny fire.
‘No, I shan’t leave off loving you,’ she admitted, in a low tone, as if almost ashamed. She dared not have said otherwise. And the saying it made it true.
‘Ah, if you’re sure of that,’ he said. ‘I’m a pretty unlovely sight to behold, I know, with this wound-scar. But if you can forgive it me, darling. Do you think you can?’ There was something like compulsion in his tone.
She looked at him, and shivered slightly.
‘I love you — more than before,’ she said hurriedly.
‘Even the scar?’ came his terrible voice, inquiring.
She glanced again, with that slow, Chinese side-look, and felt she would die.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking away at nothingness. It was an awful moment to her. A little, slightly imbecile smile widened on his face.
He suddenly knelt at her feet, and kissed the toe of her slipper, and kissed the instep, and kissed the ankle in the thin black stocking.
‘I knew,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I knew you would make good. I knew if I had to kneel, it was before you. I knew you were divine, you were the one — Cybele — Isis. I knew I was your slave. I knew. It has all been just a long initiation. I had to learn how to worship you.’
He kissed her feet again and again, without the slightest self-consciousness, or the slightest misgiving. Then he went back to the sofa, and sat there looking at her, saying:
‘It isn’t love, it is worship. Love between me and you will be a sacrament, Daphne. That’s what I had to learn. You are beyond me. A mystery to me. My God, how great it all is. How marvellous!’
She stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, looking down and not a
nswering. She was frightened — almost horrified: but she was thrilled deep down to her soul. She really felt she could glow white and fill the universe like the moon, like Astarte, like Isis, like Venus. The grandeur of her own pale power. The man religiously worshipped her, not merely amorously. She was ready for him — for the sacrament of his supreme worship.
He sat on the sofa with his hands spread on the yellow brocade and pushing downwards behind him, down between the deep upholstery of the back and the seat. He had long, white hands with pale freckles. And his fingers touched something. With his long white fingers he groped and brought it out. It was the lost thimble. And inside it was the bit of screwed-up blue paper.
‘I say, is that your thimble?’ he asked.
She started, and went hurriedly forward for it.
‘Where was it?’ she said, agitated.
But he did not give it to her. He turned it round and pulled out the bit of blue paper. He saw the faint pencil marks on the screwed-up ball, and unrolled the band of paper, and slowly deciphered the verse.
‘Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär’
Und auch zwei Flüglein hätt’
Flög’ ich zu dir — ’
‘How awfully touching that is,’ he said. ‘A Vöglein with two little Flüglein! But what a precious darling child you are! Whom did you want to fly to, if you were a Vöglein?’ He looked up at her with a curious smile.
‘I can’t remember,’ she said, turning aside her head.
‘I hope it was to me,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, I shall consider it was, and shall love you all the more for it. What a darling child! A Vöglein if you please, with two little wings! Why, how beautifully absurd of you, darling!’
He folded the scrap of paper carefully, and put it in his pocket-book, keeping the thimble all the time between his knees.
‘Tell me when you lost it, Daphne,’ he said, examining the bauble.
‘About a month ago — or two months.’
‘About a month ago — or two months. And what were you sewing? Do you mind if I ask? I like to think of you then. I was still in that beastly El Hasrun. What were you sewing, darling, two months ago, when you lost your thimble?’
‘A shirt.’
‘I say, a shirt! Whose shirt?’
‘Yours.’
‘There. Now we’ve run it to earth. Were you really sewing a shirt for me! Is it finished? Can I put it on at this minute?’
‘That one isn’t finished, but the first one is.’
‘I say, darling, let me go and put it on. To think I should have it next my skin! I shall feel you all round me, all over me. I say how marvellous that will be! Won’t you come?’
‘Won’t you give me the thimble?’ she said.
‘Yes, of course. What a noble thimble too! Who gave it you?’
‘Count Dionys Psanek.’
‘Who was he?’
‘A Bohemian Count, in Dresden. He once stayed with us in Thoresway — with a tall wife. Didn’t you meet them?’
‘I don’t think I did. I don’t think I did. I don’t remember. What was he like?’
‘A little man with black hair and a rather low, dark forehead — rather dressy.’
‘No, I don’t remember him at all. So he gave it you. Well, I wonder where he is now? Probably rotted, poor devil.’
‘No, he’s interned in Voynich Hall. Mother and I have been to see him several times. He was awfully badly wounded.’
‘Poor little beggar! In Voynich Hall! I’ll look at him before he goes. Odd thing, to give you a thimble. Odd gift! You were a girl then, though. Do you think he had it made, or do you think he found it in a shop?’
‘I think it belonged to the family. The ladybird at the top is part of their crest — and the snake as well, I think.’
‘A ladybird! Funny thing for a crest. Americans would call it a bug. I must look at him before he goes. And you were sewing a shirt for me! And then you posted me this little letter into the sofa. Well, I’m awfully glad I received it, and that it didn’t go astray in the post, like so many things. “Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär” — you perfect child! But that is the beauty of a woman like you: you are so superb and beyond worship, and then such an exquisite naïve child. Who could help worshipping you and loving you: immortal and mortal together. What, you want the thimble? Here! Wonderful, wonderful, white fingers. Ah, darling, you are more goddess than child, you long, limber Isis with sacred hands. White, white, and immortal! Don’t tell me your hands could die, darling: your wonderful Proserpine fingers. They are immortal as February and snowdrops. If you lift your hands the spring comes. I can’t help kneeling before you, darling. I am no more than a sacrifice to you, an offering. I wish I could die in giving myself to you, give you all my blood on your altar, for ever.’
She looked at him with a long, slow look, as he turned his face to her. His face was white with ecstasy. And she was not afraid. Somewhere, saturnine, she knew it was absurd. But she chose not to know. A certain swoon-sleep was on her. With her slow, green-blue eyes she looked down on his ecstasized face, almost benign. But in her right hand unconsciously she held the thimble fast, she only gave him her left hand. He took her hand and rose to his feet in that curious priestly ecstasy which made him more than a man or a soldier, far, far more than a lover to her.
Nevertheless, his home-coming made her begin to be ill again. Afterwards, after his love, she had to bear herself in torment. To her shame and her heaviness, she knew she was not strong enough, or pure enough, to bear this awful outpouring adoration-lust. It was not her fault she felt weak and fretful afterwards, as if she wanted to cry and be fretful and petulant, wanted someone to save her. She could not turn to Basil, her husband. After his ecstasy of adoration-lust for her, she recoiled from him. Alas, she was not the goddess, the superb person he named her. She was flawed with the fatal humility of her age. She could not harden her heart and burn her soul pure of this humility, this misgiving. She could not finally believe in her own woman-godhead — only in her own female mortality.
That fierce power of being alone, even with your lover, the fierce power of the woman in excelsis — alas, she could not keep it. She could rise to the height for the time, the incandescent, transcendent, moon-fierce womanhood. But alas, she could not stay intensified and resplendent in her white, womanly powers, her female mystery. She relaxed, she lost her glory, and became fretful. Fretful and ill and never to be soothed. And then naturally her man became ashy and somewhat acrid, while she ached with nerves, and could not eat.
Of course she began to dream about Count Dionys: to yearn wistfully for him. And it was absolutely a fatal thought to her that he was going away. When she thought that — that he was leaving England soon — going away into the dark for ever — then the last spark seemed to die in her. She felt her soul perish, whilst she herself was worn and soulless like a prostitute. A prostitute goddess. And her husband, the gaunt, white, intensified priest of her, who never ceased from being before her like a lust.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said to him, gathering her last courage and looking at him with a side look, ‘I want to go to Voynich Hall.’
‘What, to see Count Psanek? Oh, good! Yes, very good! I’ll come along as well. I should like very much to see him. I suppose he’ll be getting sent back before long.’
It was a fortnight before Christmas, very dark weather. Her husband was in khaki. She wore her black furs and a black lace veil over her face, so that she seemed mysterious. But she lifted the veil and looped it behind, so that it made a frame for her face. She looked very lovely like that — her face pure like the most white hellebore flower, touched with winter pink, amid the blackness of her drapery and furs. Only she was rather too much like the picture of a modern beauty: too much the actual thing. She had half an idea that Dionys would hate her for her effective loveliness. He would see it and hate it. The thought was like a bitter balm to her. For herself, she loved her loveliness almost with obsession.
The Count came cautiously forward, gla
ncing from the lovely figure of Lady Daphne to the gaunt well-bred Major at her side. Daphne was so beautiful in her dark furs, the black lace of her veil thrown back over her close-fitting, dull-gold-threaded hat, and her face fair like a winter flower in a cranny of darkness. But on her face, that was smiling with a slow self-satisfaction of beauty and of knowledge that she was dangling the two men, and setting all the imprisoned officers wildly on the alert, the Count could read that acridity of dissatisfaction and of inefficiency. And he looked away to the livid scar on the Major’s cheek.
‘Count Dionys, I wanted to bring my husband to see you. May I introduce him to you? Major Apsley — Count Dionys Psanek.’
The two men shook hands rather stiffly.
‘I can sympathize with you being fastened up in this place,’ said Basil in his slow, easy fashion. ‘I hated it, I assure you, out there in the East.’
‘But your conditions were much worse than mine,’ smiled the Count.
‘Well, perhaps they were. But prison is prison, even if it were heaven itself.’
‘Lady Apsley has been the one angel of my heaven,’ smiled the Count.
‘I’m afraid I was as inefficient as most angels,’ said she.
The small smile never left the Count’s dark face. It was true as she said, he was low-browed, the black hair growing low on his brow, and his eyebrows making a thick bow above his dark eyes, which had again long black lashes. So that the upper part of his face seemed very dusky-black. His nose was small and somewhat translucent. There was a touch of mockery about him, which was intensified even by his small, energetic stature. He was still carefully dressed in the dark-blue uniform, whose shabbiness could not hinder the dark flame of life which seemed to glow through the cloth from his body. He was not thin — but still had a curious swarthy translucency of skin in his low-browed face.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 516