He was a good groom, watchful, quick, and on the spot in an instant if anything went wrong. He had a curious quiet power over the horses, unemotional, unsympathetic, but silently potent. In the same way, watching the traffic of Piccadilly with his blank, glinting eye, he would calculate everything instinctively, as if it were an enemy, and pilot Mrs. Witt by the strength of his silent will. He threw around her the tense watchfulness of her own America, and made her feel at home.
“Phoenix,” she said, turning abruptly in her saddle as they walked the horses past the sheltering policeman at Hyde Park Corner, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have something a hundred per cent American at the back of me when I go through these gates.”
She looked at him from dangerous grey eyes as if she meant it indeed, in vindictive earnest. A ghost of a smile went up to his high cheek-bones, but he did not answer.
“Why, mother?” said Lou, sing-song. “It feels to me so friendly — !”
“Yes, Louise, it does. So friendly! That’s why I mistrust it so entirely — ”
And she set off at a canter up the Row, under the green trees, her face like the face of Medusa at fifty, a weapon in itself. She stared at everything and everybody, with that stare of cold dynamite waiting to explode them all. Lou posted trotting at her side, graceful and elegant, and faintly amused. Behind came Phoenix, like a shadow, with his yellowish, high-boned face still looking sick. And at his side, on the big brilliant bay horse, the smallish, black-bearded Welshman.
Between Phoenix and Lewis there was a latent, but unspoken and wary sympathy. Phoenix was terribly impressed by St. Mawr, he could not leave off staring at him. And Lewis rode the brilliant, handsome-moving stallion so very quietly, like an insinuation.
Of the two men, Lewis looked the darker, with his black beard coming up to his thick black eyebrows. He was swarthy, with a rather short nose, and the uncanny pale-grey eyes that watched everything and cared about nothing. He cared about nothing in the world, except, at the present, St. Mawr. People did not matter to him. He rode his horse and watched the world from the vantage ground of St. Mawr, with a final indifference.
“You have been with that horse long?” asked Phoenix. “Since he was born.”
Phoenix watched the action of St. Mawr as they went. The bay moved proud and springy, but with perfect good sense, among the stream of riders. It was a beautiful June morning, the leaves overhead were thick and green; there came the first whiff of lime tree scent. To Phoenix, however, the city was a sort of nightmare mirage, and to Lewis, it was a sort of prison. The presence of people he felt as a prison around him.
Mrs. Witt and Lou were turning at the end of the Row, bowing to some acquaintances. The grooms pulled aside Mrs. Witt looked at Lewis with a cold eye.
“It seems an extraordinary thing to me, Louise,” she said, “to see a groom with a beard.”
“It isn’t usual, mother,” said Lou. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. At least, I think I don’t. I get very tired of modern, bare-faced young men, very! The clean, pure boy, don’t you know! Doesn’t it make you tired? — No, I think a groom with a beard is quite attractive.”
She gazed into the crowd defiantly, perching her finely-shod toe with war-like firmness on the stirrup-iron. Then suddenly she reined in, and turned her horse towards the grooms.
“Lewis!” she said, “I want to ask you a question. Supposing, now, that Lady Carrington wanted you to shave off that beard, what should you say?”
Lewis instinctively put up his hand to the said beard. “They’ve wanted me to shave it off, Mam,” he said. “But I’ve never done it.”
“But why? Tell me why?”
“It’s part of me, Mam.”
Mrs. Witt pulled on again.
“Isn’t that extraordinary, Louise?” she said. “Don’t you like the way he says Mam? It sounds so impossible to me. Could any woman think of herself as Mam? Never! — Since Queen Victoria. But, do you know it hadn’t occurred to me that a man’s beard was really part of him. It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show. I shall always remember Lewis for saying his beard was part of him. Isn’t it curious, the way he rides? He seems to sink himself in the horse. When I speak to him, I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to a man or to a horse.”
A few days later, Rico himself appeared on St. Mawr for the morning ride. He rode self-consciously, as he did everything, and he was just a little nervous. But his mother-in-law was benevolent. She made him ride between her and Lou, like three ships slowly sailing abreast.
And that very day, who should come driving in an open carriage through the Park but the Queen Mother! Dear old Queen Alexandra, there was a flutter everywhere. And she bowed expressly to Rico, mistaking him, no doubt, for somebody else.
“Do you know,” said Rico as they sat at lunch, he and Lou and Mrs. Witt, in Mrs. Witt’s sitting-room in the dark, quiet hotel in Mayfair, “I really like riding St. Mawr so much. He really is a noble animal. — If ever I am made a lord — which heaven forbid! — I shall be Lord St. Mawr.”
“You mean,” said Mrs. Witt, “his real lordship would be the horse?”
“Very possible, I admit,” said Rico, with a curl of his long upper lip.
“Don’t you think, mother,” said Lou, “there is something quite noble about St. Mawr? He strikes me as the first noble thing I have ever seen.”
“Certainly I’ve not seen any man that could compare with him. Because these English noblemen — well! I’d rather look at a negro Pullman-boy, if I was looking for what I call nobility.”
Poor Rico was getting crosser and crosser. There was a devil in Mrs. Witt. She had a hard, bright devil inside her that she seemed to be able to let loose at will.
She let it loose the next day, when Rico and Lou joined her in the Row. She was silent but deadly with the horses, balking them in every way. She suddenly crowded over against the rail in front of St. Mawr, so that the stallion had to rear to pull himself up. Then, having a clear track, she suddenly set off at a gallop, like an explosion, and the stallion, all on edge, set off after her.
It seemed as if the whole Park, that morning, were in a state of nervous tension. Perhaps there was thunder in the air. But St. Mawr kept on dancing and pulling at the bit and wheeling sideways up against the railing, to the terror of the children and the onlookers, who squealed and jumped back suddenly, sending the nerves of the stallion into a rush like rockets. He reared and fought as Rico pulled him round.
Then he went on: dancing, pulling, springily progressing sideways, possessed with all the demons of perversity. Poor Rico’s face grew longer and angrier. A fury rose in him, which he could hardly control. He hated his horse, and viciously tried to force him to a quiet, straight trot. Up went St. Mawr on his hind legs, to the terror of the Row. He got the bit in his teeth and began to fight.
But Phoenix, cleverly, was in front of him.
“You get off, Rico!” called Mrs. Witt’s voice, with all the calm of her wicked exultance.
And almost before he knew what he was doing, Rico had sprung lightly to the ground, and was hanging on to the bridle of the rearing stallion.
Phoenix also lightly jumped down, and ran to St. Mawr, handing his bridle to Rico. Then began a dancing and a splashing, a rearing and a plunging. St. Mawr was being wicked. But Phoenix, the indifference of conflict in his face, sat tight and immovable, without any emotion, only the heaviness of his impersonal will settling down like a weight, all the time, on the horse. There was, perhaps, a curious barbaric exultance in bare, dark will devoid of emotion or personal feeling.
So they had a little display in the Row for almost five minutes, the brilliant horse rearing and fighting. Rico, with a stiff, long face, scrambled on to Phoenix’s horse and withdrew to a safe distance. Policemen came, and an officious mounted policeman rode up to save the situation. But it was obvious that Phoenix, detached and apparently unconcerned, but barbarically potent in his will, w
ould bring the horse to order.
Which he did, and rode the creature home. Rico was requested not to ride St. Mawr in the Row any more, as the stallion was dangerous to public safety. The authorities knew all about him.
Where ended the first fiasco of St. Mawr.
“We didn’t get on very well with his lordship this morning,” said Mrs. Witt triumphantly.
“No, he didn’t like his company at all!” Rico snarled back. He wanted Lou to sell the horse again.
“I doubt if anyone would buy him, dear,” she said. “He’s a known character.”
“Then make a gift of him — to your mother,” said Rico with venom.
“Why to mother?” asked Lou innocently.
“She might be able to cope with him — or he with her!” The last phrase was deadly. Having delivered it, Rico departed.
Lou remained at a loss. She felt almost always a little bit dazed, as if she could not see clear nor feel clear. A curious deadness upon her, like the first touch of death. And through this cloud of numbness, or deadness, came all her muted experiences.
Why was it? She did not know. But she felt that in some way it came from a battle of wills. Her mother, Rico, herself, it was always an unspoken, unconscious battle of wills, which was gradually numbing and paralysing her. She knew Rico meant nothing but kindness by her. She knew her mother only wanted to watch over her. Yet always there was this tension of will, that was no numbing. As if at the depths of him, Rico were always angry, though he seemed so ‘happy’ on top. And Mrs. Witt was organically angry. So they were like a couple of bombs, timed to explode some day, but ticking on like two ordinary timepieces, in the meanwhile.
She had come definitely to realise this: that Rico’s anger was wound up tight at the bottom of him, like a steel spring that kept his works going, while he himself was ‘charming’, like a bomb-clock with Sevres paintings or Dresden figures on the outside. But his very charm was a sort of anger, and his love was a destruction in itself. He just couldn’t help it.
And she? Perhaps she was a good deal the same herself. Wound up tight inside, and enjoying herself being ‘lovely’. But wound up tight on some tension that, she realised now with wonder, was really a sort of anger. This, the mainspring that drove her on the round of ‘joys’.
She used really to enjoy the tension, and the élan it gave her. While she knew nothing about it. So long as she felt it really was life and happiness, this élan, this tension and excitement of ‘enjoying oneself’.
Now suddenly she doubted the whole show. She attributed to it the curious numbness that was overcoming her, as if she couldn’t feel any more.
She wanted to come unwound. She wanted to escape this battle of wills.
Only St. Mawr gave her some hint of the possibility. He was so powerful, and so dangerous. But in his dark eye, that looked, with its cloudy brown pupil, a cloud within a dark fire, like a world beyond our world, there was a dark vitality glowing, and within the fire another sort of wisdom. She felt sure of it: even when he put his ears back, and bared his teeth, and his great eyes came bolting out of his naked horse’s head, and she saw demons upon demons in the chaos of his horrid eyes.
Why did he seem to her like some living background, into which she wanted to retreat? When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her. And there she wanted to go.
She kept it utterly a secret to herself. Because Rico would just have lifted his long upper lip, in his bare face, in a condescending sort of ‘understanding’. And her mother would, as usual, have suspected her of side-stepping. People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let’s-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness, or fun, or the-best-ever. This ghastly cheery-o! touch, that made all her blood go numb.
Since she had really seen St. Mawr looming fiery and terrible in an outer darkness, she could not believe the world she lived in. She could not believe it was actually happening, when she was dancing in the afternoon at Claridge’s, or in the evening at the Carlton, slid about with some suave young man who wasn’t like a man at all to her. Or down in Sussex for the week-end with the Enderleys: the talk, the eating and drinking, the flirtation, the endless dancing: it all seemed far more bodiless and, in a strange way, wraith-like, than any fairy story. She seemed to be eating Barmecide food, that had been conjured up out of thin air, by the power of words. She seemed to be talking to handsome, young, bare-faced unrealities, not men at all: as she slid about with them, in the perpetual dance, they too seemed to have been conjured up out of air, merely for this soaring, slithering dance business. And she could not believe that, when the lights went out, they wouldn’t melt back into thin air again and complete non-entity. The strange nonentity of it all! Everything just conjured up, and nothing real. ‘Isn’t this the best ever!’ they would beamingly assert, like wraiths of enjoyment, without any genuine substance. And she would beam back: ‘Lots of fun!’
She was thankful the season was over, and everybody was leaving London. She and Rico were due to go to Scotland, but not till August. In the meantime they would go to her mother.
Mrs. Witt had taken a cottage in Shropshire, on the Welsh border, and had moved down there with Phoenix and her horses. The open, heather-and-bilberry-covered hills were splendid for riding.
Rico consented to spend the month in Shropshire, because for near neighbours Mrs. Witt had the Manbys, at Corrabach Hall. The Manbys were rich Australians returned to the old country and set up as squires, all in full blow. Rico had known them in Victoria: they were of good family: and the girls made a great fuss of him.
So down went Lou and Rico, Lewis, Poppy and St. Mawr, to Shrewsbury, then out into the country. Mrs. Witt’s ‘cottage’ was a tall red-brick Georgian house looking straight on to the churchyard, and the dark, looming big church.
“I never knew what a comfort it would be,” said Mrs. Witt, “to have grave-stones under my drawing-room windows, and funerals for lunch.”
She really did take a strange pleasure in sitting in her panelled room, that was painted grey, and watching the Dean or one of the curates officiating at the graveside, among a group of black country mourners with black-bordered handkerchiefs luxuriantly in use.
“Mother!” said Lou. “I think it’s gruesome!”
She had a room at the back, looking over the walled garden and the stables. Nevertheless, there was the boom! boom! of the passing-bell, and the chiming and pealing on Sundays. The shadow of the church, indeed! A very audible shadow, making itself heard insistently.
The Dean was a big, burly, fat man with a pleasant manner. He was a gentleman, and a man of learning in his own line. But he let Mrs. Witt know that he looked down on her just a trifle — as a parvenu American, a Yankee — though she never was a Yankee: and at the same time he had a sincere respect for her, as a rich woman. Yes, a sincere respect for her, as a rich woman.
Lou knew that every Englishman, especially of the upper classes, has a wholesome respect for riches. But then, who hasn’t?
The Dean was more impressed by Mrs. Witt than by little Lou. But to Lady Carrington he was charming: she was almost ‘one of us’, you know. And he was very gracious to Rico: ‘your father’s splendid colonial service.’
Mrs. Witt had now a new pantomime to amuse her: the Georgian house, her own pew in church — it went with the old house: a village of thatched cottages — some of them with corrugated iron over the thatch: the cottage people, farm labourers and their families, with a few, very few, outsiders: the wicked little group of cottagers down at Mile End, famous for ill-living. The Mile-Enders were all Allisons and Jephsons, and in-bred, the Dean said: result of working through the centuries at the Quarry, and living isolated there at Mile End.
Isolated! Imagine it! A mile and a half from the railway station, ten miles from Shrewsbury. Mrs
. Witt thought of Texas, and said:
“Yes, they are very isolated, away down there!”
And the Dean never for a moment suspected sarcasm.
But there she had the whole thing staged complete for her: English village life. Even miners breaking in to shatter the rather stuffy, unwholesome harmony. — All the men touched their caps to her, all the women did a bit of reverence, the children stood aside for her, if she appeared in the street.
They were all poor again: the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War.
“Now I think that is terrible,” said Mrs. Witt. “Not to be able to get away from those stuffy, squalid, picturesque cottages for an hour in the evening, to drink a glass of beer.”
“It’s a pity, I do agree with you, Mrs. Witt. But Mr. Watson has organised a men’s reading-room, where the men can smoke and play dominoes, and read if they wish.”
“But that,” said Mrs. Witt, “is not the same as that cosy parlour in the ‘Moon and Stars’.”
“I quite agree,” said the Dean. “It isn’t”
Mrs. Witt marched to the landlord of the ‘Moon and Stars’ and asked for a glass of cider.
“I want,” she said, in her American accent, “these poor labourers to have their glass of beer in the evenings.”
“They want it themselves,” said Harvey.
“Then they must have it — ”
The upshot was, she decided to supply one large barrel of beer per week and the landlord was to sell it to the labourers at a penny a glass.
“My own country has gone dry,” she asserted. “But not because we can’t afford it.”
By the time Lou and Rico appeared, she was deep in. She actually interfered very little: the barrel of beer was her one public act. But she did know everybody by sight, already, and she did know everybody’s circumstances. And she had attended one prayer-meeting, one mothers’ meeting, one sewing-bee, one ‘social’, one Sunday School meeting, one Band of Hope meeting, and one Sunday School treat. She ignored the poky little Wesleyan and Baptist chapels, and was true-blue Episcopalian.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 540