She, with her odd little museau, not exactly pretty, but very attractive; and her quaint air of playing at being well bred, in a sort of charade game; and her queer familiarity with foreign cities and foreign languages; and the lurking sense of being an outsider everywhere, like a sort of gipsy, who is at home anywhere and nowhere: all this made up her charm and her failure. She didn’t quite belong.
Of course she was American: Louisiana family, moved down to Texas. And she was moderately rich, with no close relation except her mother. But she had been sent to school in France when she was twelve, and since she had finished school, she had drifted from Paris to Palermo, Biarritz to Vienna and back via Munich to London, then down again to Rome. Only fleeting trips to her America.
So what sort of American was she, after all?
And what sort of European was she either? She didn’t ‘belong’ anywhere. Perhaps most of all in Rome, among the artists and the Embassy people.
It was in Rome she had met Rico. He was an Australian, son of a government official in Melbourne, who had been made a baronet. So one day Rico would be Sir Henry, as he was the only son. Meanwhile he floated round Europe on a very small allowance — his father wasn’t rich in capital — and was being an artist.
They met in Rome when they were twenty-two, and had a love affair in Capri. Rico was handsome, elegant, but mostly he had spots of paint on his trousers and he ruined a neck-tie pulling it off. He behaved in a most floridly elegant fashion, fascinating to the Italians. But at the same time he was canny and shrewd and sensible as any young poser could be and, on principle, good-hearted, anxious. He was anxious for his future, and anxious for his place in the world, he was poor, and suddenly wasteful in spite of all his tension of economy, and suddenly spiteful in spite of all his ingratiating efforts, and suddenly ungrateful in spite of all his burden of gratitude, and suddenly rude in spite of all his good manners, and suddenly detestable in spite of all his suave, courtier-like amiability.
He was fascinated by Lou’s quaint aplomb, her experiences, her ‘knowledge’, her gamine knowingness, her aloneness, her pretty clothes that were sometimes an utter failure, and her southern ‘drawl’ that was sometimes so irritating. That singsong which was so American. Yet she used no Americanisms at all, except when she lapsed into her odd spasms of acid irony, when she was very American indeed!
And she was fascinated by Rico. They played to each other like two butterflies at one flower. They pretended to be very poor in Rome — he was poor: and very rich in Naples. Everybody stared their eyes out at them. And they had that love affair in Capri.
But they reacted badly on each other’s nerves. She became ill. Her mother appeared. He couldn’t stand Mrs. Witt, and Mrs. Witt couldn’t stand him. There was a terrible fortnight. Then Lou was popped into a convent nursing-home in Umbria, and Rico dashed off to Paris. Nothing would stop him. He must go back to Australia.
He went to Melbourne, and while there his father died, leaving him a baronet’s title and an income still very moderate. Lou visited America once more, as the strangest of strange lands to her. She came away disheartened, panting for Europe, and, of course, doomed to meet Rico again.
They couldn’t get away from one another, even though in the course of their rather restrained correspondence he informed her that he was ‘probably’ marrying a very dear girl, friend of his childhood, only daughter of one of the oldest families in Victoria. Not saying much.
He didn’t commit the probability, but reappeared in Paris, wanting to paint his head off, terribly inspired by Cézanne and by old Renoir. He dined at the Rotonde with Lou and Mrs. Witt, who, with her queer democratic New Orleans sort of conceit, looked round the drinking-hall with savage contempt, and at Rico as part of the show. “Certainly,” she said, “when these people here have got any money, they fall in love on a full stomach. And when they’ve got no money, they fall in love with a full pocket. I never was in a more disgusting place. They take their love like some people take after-dinner pills.”
She would watch with her arching, full, strong grey eyes, sitting there erect and silent in her well-bought American clothes. And then she would deliver some such charge of grape-shot. Rico always writhed.
Mrs. Witt hated Paris: “this sordid, unlucky city,” she called it. “Something unlucky is bound to happen to me in this sinister, unclean town,” she said. “I feel contagion in the air of this place. For heaven’s sake, Louise, let us go to Morocco or somewhere.”
“No, mother dear, I can’t now. Rico has proposed to me, and I have accepted him. Let us think about a wedding, shall we?”
“There!” said Mrs. Witt. “I said it was an unlucky city!”
And the peculiar look of extreme New Orleans annoyance came round her sharp nose. But Lou and Rico were both twenty-four years old, and beyond management. And, anyhow, Lou would be Lady Carrington. But Mrs. Witt was exasperated beyond exasperation. She would almost rather have preferred Lou to elope with one of the great, evil porters at Les Halles. Mrs. Witt was at the age when the malevolent male in man, the old Adam, begins to loom above all the social tailoring. And yet — and yet — it was better to have Lady Carrington for a daughter, seeing Lou was that sort.
There was a marriage, after which Mrs. Witt departed to America, Lou and Rico leased a little old house in Westminster, and began to settle into a certain layer of English society. Rico was becoming an almost fashionable portrait-painter. At least, he was almost fashionable, whether his portraits were or not. And Lou, too, was almost fashionable: almost a hit. There was some flaw somewhere. In spite of their appearances, both Rico and she would never quite go down in any society. They were the drifting artist sort. Yet neither of them was content to be of the drifting artist sort. They wanted to fit in, to make good.
Hence the little house in Westminster, the portraits, the dinners, the friends, and the visits. Mrs. Witt came and sardonically established herself in a suite in a quiet but good-class hotel not far off. Being on the spot. And her terrible grey eyes with the touch of a leer looked on at the hollow mockery of things. As if she knew of anything better!
Lou and Rico had a curious exhausting effect on one another: neither knew why. They were fond of one another. Some inscrutable bond held them together. But it was a strange vibration of the nerves, rather than of the blood. A nervous attachment, rather than a sexual love. A curious tension of will, rather than a spontaneous passion. Each was curiously under the domination of the other. They were a pair — they had to be together. Yet quite soon they shrank from one another. This attachment of the will and the nerves was destructive. As soon as one felt strong, the other felt ill. As soon as the ill one recovered strength, down went the one who had been well.
And soon, tacitly, the marriage became more like a friendship, platonic. It was a marriage, but without sex. Sex was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it, and became like brother and sister. But still they were husband and wife. And the lack of physical relation was a secret source of uneasiness and chagrin to both of them. They would neither of them accept it. Rico looked with contemplative, anxious eyes at other women.
Mrs. Witt kept track of everything, watching, as it were, from outside the fence, like a potent well-dressed demon, full of uncanny energy and a shattering sort of sense. She said little: but her small, occasionally biting remarks revealed her attitude of contempt for the ménage.
Rico entertained clever and well-known people. Mrs. Witt would appear, in her New York gowns and few good jewels. She was handsome, with her vigorous grey hair. But her heavy-lidded grey eyes were the despair of any hostess. They looked too many shattering things. And it was but too obvious that these clever, well-known English people got on her nerves terribly, with their finickiness and their fine-drawn discriminations. She wanted to put her foot through all these fine-drawn distinctions. She thought continually of the house of her girlhood, the plantation, the negroes, the planters: the sardonic grimness that underlay all the big, shiftless life. And she
wanted to cleave with some of this grimness of the big, dangerous America, into the safe, finicky drawing-rooms of London. So naturally she was not popular.
But being a woman of energy, she had to do something. During the latter part of the war she had worked in the American Red Cross in France, nursing. She loved men — real men. But, on close contact, it was difficult to define what she meant by ‘real’ men. She never met any.
Out of the débacle of the war she had emerged with an odd piece of débris, in the shape of Geronimo Trujillo. He was an American, son of a Mexican father and a Navajo Indian mother, from Arizona. When you knew him well, you recognised the real half-breed, though at a glance he might pass as a sunburnt citizen of any nation, particularly of France. He looked like a certain sort of Frenchman, with his curiously-set dark eyes, his straight black hair, his thin black moustache, his rather long cheeks, and his almost slouching, diffident, sardonic bearing. Only when you knew him, and looked right into his eyes, you saw that unforgettable glint of the Indian.
He had been badly shell-shocked, and was for a time a wreck. Mrs. Witt, having nursed him into convalescence, asked him where he was going next. He didn’t know. His father and mother were dead, and he had nothing to take him back to Phoenix, Arizona. Having had an education in one of the Indian high schools, the unhappy fellow had now no place in life at all. Another of the many misfits.
There was something of the Paris Apache in his appearance but he was all the time withheld, and nervously shut inside himself. Mrs. Witt was intrigued by him.
“Very well, Phoenix,” she said, refusing to adopt his Spanish name, “I’ll see what I can do.”
What she did was to get him a place on a sort of manor farm, with some acquaintances of hers. He was very good with horses, and had a curious success with turkeys and geese and fowls.
Some time after Lou’s marriage, Mrs. Witt reappeared in London, from the country, with Phoenix in tow, and a couple of horses. She had decided that she would ride in the Park in the morning, and see the world that way. Phoenix was to be her groom.
So, to the great misgiving of Rico, behold Mrs. Witt in splendidly tailored habit and perfect boots, a smart black hat on her smart grey hair, riding a grey gelding as smart as she was, and looking down her conceited, inquisitive, scornful, aristocratic-democratic Louisiana nose at the people in Piccadilly, as she crossed to the Row, followed by the taciturn shadow of Phoenix, who sat on a chestnut with three white feet as if he had grown there.
Mrs. Witt, like many other people, always expected to find the real beau monde and the real grand monde somewhere or other. She didn’t quite give in to what she saw in the Bois de Boulogne, or in Monte Carlo, or on the Pincio: all a bit shoddy, and not very beau and not at all grand. There she was, with her grey eagle eye, her splendid complexion and her weapon-like health of a woman of fifty, dropping her eyelids a little, very slightly nervous, but completely prepared to despise the monde she was entering in Rotten Row.
In she sailed, and up and down that regatta-canal of horsemen and horsewomen under the trees of the Park. And yes, there were lovely girls with fair hair down their backs, on happy ponies. And awfully well-groomed papas, arid tight mamas who looked as if they were going to pour tea between the ears of their horses, and converse with banal skill, one eye on the teapot, one on the visitor with whom she was talking, and all the rest of her hostess’s argus eyes upon everybody in sight. That alert argus capability of the English matron was startling and a bit horrifying. Mrs. Witt would at once think of the old negro mammies, away in Louisiana. And her eyes became dagger-like as she watched the clipped, shorn, mincing young Englishmen. She refused to look at the prosperous Jews.
It was still the days before motor-cars were allowed in the Park, but Rico and Lou, sliding round Hyde Park Corner and up Park Lane in their car, would watch the steely horsewoman and the saturnine groom with a sort of dismay. Mrs. Witt seemed to be pointing a pistol at the bosom of every other horseman or horsewoman and announcing: “Your virility or your life! Your femininity or your life!” She didn’t know herself what she really wanted them to be: but it was something as democratic as Abraham Lincoln and as aristocratic as a Russian czar, as highbrow as Arthur Balfour, and as taciturn and unideal as Phoenix. Everything at once.
There was nothing for it: Lou had to buy herself a horse and ride at her mother’s side, for very decency’s sake. Mrs. Witt was so like a smooth, levelled, gunmetal pistol, Lou had to be a sort of sheath. And she really looked pretty, with her clusters of dark, curly, New Orleans hair, like grapes, and her quaint brown eyes that didn’t quite match, and that looked a bit sleepy and vague, and at the same time quick as a squirrel’s. She was slight and elegant, and a tiny bit rakish, and somebody suggested she might be on the movies.
Nevertheless, they were in the society columns next morning — two new and striking figures in the Row this morning were Lady Henry Carrington and her mother, Mrs. Witt, etc. And Mrs. Witt liked it, let her say what she might. So did Lou. Lou liked it immensely. She simply luxuriated in the sun of publicity.
“Rico dear, you must get a horse.”
The tone was soft and southern and drawling, but the overtone had a decisive finality. In vain Rico squirmed — he had a way of writhing and squirming which perhaps he had caught at Oxford. In vain he protested that he couldn’t ride, and that he didn’t care for riding. He got quite angry, and his handsome arched nose tilted and his upper lip lifted from his teeth, like a dog that is going to bite. Yet daren’t quite bite.
And that was Rico. He daren’t quite bite. Not that he was really afraid of the others. He was afraid of himself, once he let himself go. He might rip up in an eruption of life-long anger all this pretty-pretty picture of a charming young wife and a delightful little home and a fascinating success as a painter of fashionable, and at the same time ‘great’ portraits: with colour, wonderful colour, and at the same time, form, marvellous form. He had composed this little tableau vivant with great effort. He didn’t want to erupt like some suddenly wicked horse — Rico was really more like a horse than a dog, a horse that might go nasty any moment. For the time, he was good, very good, dangerously good.
“Why, Rico dear, I thought you used to ride so much, in Australia, when you were young? Didn’t you tell me all about it, hm?” — and as she ended on that slow, singing hm?, which acted on him like an irritant and a drug, he knew he was beaten.
Lou kept the sorrel mare in a mews just behind the house in Westminster, and she was always slipping round to the stables. She had a funny little nostalgia for the place: something that really surprised her. She had never had the faintest notion that she cared for horses and stables and grooms. But she did. She was fascinated. Perhaps it was her childhood’s Texas associations come back. Whatever it was, her life with Rico in the elegant little house, and all her social engagements seemed like a dream, the substantial reality of which was those mews in Westminster, her sorrel mare, the owner of the mews, Mr. Saintsbury, and the grooms he employed. Mr. Saintsbury was a horsey, elderly man like an old maid, and he loved the sound of titles.
“Lady Carrington! — well I never! You’ve come to us for a bit of company again, I see. I don’t know whatever we shall do if you go away, we shall be that lonely!” and he flashed his old-maid’s smile at her. “No matter how grey the morning, your ladyship would make a beam of sunshine. Poppy is all right, I think...”
Poppy was the sorrel mare with the no white feet and the startled eye, and she was all right. And Mr. Saintsbury was smiling with his old-maid’s mouth, and showing all his teeth.
“Come across with me, Lady Carrington, and look at a new horse just up from the country. I think he’s worth a look, and I believe you have a moment to spare, your Ladyship.”
Her Ladyship had too many moments to spare. She followed the sprightly, elderly, clean-shaven man across the yard to a loose-box, and waited while he opened the door.
In the inner dark she saw a handsome bay horse with his cl
ean ears pricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely round to stare at the open doorway. He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with a sharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betrays an animal that can be dangerous.
“Is he quiet?” Lou asked.
“Why — yes — my Lady! He’s quiet, with those that know how to handle him. Cup! my boy! Cup, my beauty! Cup then! St. Mawr!”
Loquacious even with the animals, he went softly forward and laid his hand on the horse’s shoulder, soft and quiet as a fly settling. Lou saw the brilliant skin of the horse crinkle a little in apprehensive anticipation, like the shadow of the descending hand on a bright red-gold liquid. But then the animal relaxed again.
“Quiet with those that know how to handle him, and a bit of a ruffian with those that don’t. Isn’t that the ticket, eh, St. Mawr?”
“What is his name?” Lou asked.
The man repeated it, with a slight Welsh twist — ”He’s from the Welsh borders, belonging to a Welsh gentleman, Mr. Griffith Edwards. But they’re wanting to sell him.”
“How old is he?” asked Lou.
“About seven years — seven years and five months,” said Mr. Saintsbury, dropping his voice as if it were a secret. “Could one ride him in the Park?”
“Well — yes! I should say a gentleman who knew how to handle him could ride him very well and make a very handsome figure in the Park.”
Lou at once decided that this handsome figure should be Rico’s. For she was already half in love with St. Mawr. He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 538