“Phoenix thinks you intend to go to America with St. Mawr, and that I am coming too, leaving Rico this side. — I wonder. I feel so unreal, nowadays, as if I too were nothing more than a painting by Rico on a millboard. I feel almost too unreal even to make up my mind to anything. It is terrible when the life-flow dies out of one, and everything is like cardboard, and oneself is like cardboard. I’m sure it is worse than being dead. I realised it yesterday when Phoenix and I had a picnic lunch by a stream. You see, I must imitate you in all things. He found me some watercresses, and they tasted so damp and alive, I knew how deadened I was. Phoenix wants us to go and have a ranch in Arizona, and raise horses, with St. Mawr, if willing, for Father Abraham. I wonder if it matters what one does: if it isn’t all the same thing over again? Only Phoenix, his funny blank face, makes my heart melt and go sad. But I believe he’d be cruel too. I saw it in his face when he didn’t know I was looking. Anything, though, rather than this deadness and this paint-Priapus business. Au revoir, mother dear! Keep on having a good time — ”
“Dear Mother: I had your letter from Merriton: am so glad you arrived safe and sound in body and temper. There was such a funny letter from Lewis, too: I enclose it. What makes him take this extraordinary line? But I’m writing to tell him to take St. Mawr to London, and wait for me there. I have telegraphed Mrs. Squire to get the house ready for me. I shall go straight there.
“Things developed here, as they were bound to. I just couldn’t bear it. No sooner was Rico put in the automobile than a self-conscious importance came over him, like when the wounded hero is carried into the middle of the stage. ‘Why so solemn, Rico dear?’ I asked him, trying to laugh him out of it. ‘Not solemn, dear, only feeling a little transient.’ I don’t think he knew himself what he meant. Flora was on the steps as the car drew up, dressed in severe white. She only needed an apron to become a nurse: or a veil to become a bride. Between the two, she had an unbearable air of a woman in seduced circumstances, as The Times said. She ordered two menservants about in subdued, you would have said hushed, but competent tones. And then I saw there was a touch of the priestess about her as well: Cassandra preparing for her violation: Iphigenia, with Rico for Orestes, on a stretcher: he looking like Adonis, fully prepared to be an unconscionable time in dying. They had given him a lovely room downstairs, with doors opening on to a little garden all of its own. I believe it was Flora’s boudoir. I left nurse and the men to put him to bed. Flora was hovering anxiously in the passage outside. ‘Oh, what a marvellous room! Oh, how colourful, how beautiful!’ came Rico’s tones, the hero behind the scenes. I must say, it was like a harvest festival, with roses and gaillardias in the shadow, and cornflowers in the light, and a bowl of grapes, and nectarines among leaves. ‘I’m so anxious that he should be happy,’ Flora said to me in the passage. ‘You know him best. Is there anything else I could do for him?’ Me: ‘Why, if you went to the piano and sang, I’m sure he’d love it. Couldn’t you sing: Oh, my love is like a rred, rred rrose! ‘ — You know how Rico imitates Scotch!
“Thank goodness I have a bedroom upstairs: nurse sleeps in a little ante-chamber to Rico’s room. The Edwards are still here, the blond young man with some very futuristic plaster on his face. ‘Awfully good of you to come!’ he said to me, looking at me out of one eye, and holding my hand fervently. How’s that for cheek: ‘It’s awfully good of Miss Manby to let me come,’ said I. He: `Ah, but Flora is always a sport, a topping good sport!’
“I don’t know what’s the matter, but it just all put me into a fiendish temper. I felt I couldn’t sit there at luncheon with that bright, youthful company, and hear about their tennis and their polo and their hunting and have their flirtatiousness making me sick. So I asked for a tray in my room. Do as I might, I couldn’t help being horrid.
“Oh, and Rico! He really is too awful. Lying there in bed with every ear open, like Adonis waiting to be persuaded not to die. Seizing a hushed moment to take Flora’s hand and press it to his lips, murmuring: ‘How awfully good you are to me, dear Flora!’ And Flora: ‘I’d be better if I knew how, Harry!’ So cheerful with it all! No, it’s too much. My sense of humour is leaving me: which means, I’m getting into too bad a temper to be able to ridicule it all. I suppose I feel in the minority. It’s an awful thought, to think that most all the young people in the world are like this: so bright and cheerful, and sporting, and so brimming with libido. How awful!
“I said to Rico: ‘You’re very comfortable here, aren’t you?’ He: ‘Comfortable! It’s comparative heaven.’ Me: ‘Would you mind if I went away?’ A deadly pause. He is deadly afraid of being left alone with Flora. He feels safe so long as I am about, and he can take refuge in his marriage ties. He: ‘Where do you want to go, dear?’ Me: ‘To mother. To London. Mother is planning to go to America, and she wants me to go.’ Rico: ‘But you don’t want to go t — he — e — re — e I’ You know, mother, how Rico can put a venomous emphasis on a word, till it suggests pure poison. It nettled me. `I’m not sure,’ I said. Rico: ‘Oh, but you can’t stand that awful America.’ Me: ‘I want to try again.’ Rico: ‘But Lou dear, it will be winter before you get there. And this is absolutely the wrong moment for me to go over there. I am only just making headway over here. When I am absolutely sure of a position in England, then we nip across the Atlantic and scoop in a few dollars, if you like. Just now, even when I am well, would be fatal. I’ve only just sketched in the outline of my success in London, and one ought to arrive in New York ready-made as a famous and important Artist.’ Me: ‘But mother and I didn’t think of going to New York. We thought we’d sail straight to New Orleans — if we could: or to Havana. And then go west to Arizona.’ The poor boy looked at me in such distress. ‘But Loulina darling, do you mean you want to leave me in the lurch for the winter season? You can’t mean it. We’re just getting on so splendidly, really!’ — I was surprised at the depth of feeling in his voice: how tremendously his career as an artist — a popular artist — matters to him. I can never believe it. — You know, mother, you and I feel alike about daubing paint on canvas: every possible daub that can be daubed has already been done, so people ought to leave off. Rico is so shrewd. I always think he’s got his tongue in his cheek, and I’m always staggered once more to find that he takes it absolutely seriously. His career! The Modern British Society of Painters: perhaps even the Royal Academy! Those people we see in London, and those portraits Rico does! He may even be a second Laszlo, or a thirteenth Orpen, and die happy! Oh! mother! How can it really matter to anybody!
“But I was really rather upset when I realised how his heart was fixed on his career, and that I might be spoiling everything for him. So I went away to think about it. And then I realised how unpopular you are, and how unpopular I shall be myself, in a little while. A sort of hatred for people has come over me. I hate their ways and their bunk, and I feel like kicking them in the face, as St. Mawr did that young man. Not that I should ever do it. And I don’t think I should ever have made my final announcement to Rico, if he hadn’t been such a beautiful pig in clover, here at Corrabach Hall. He has known the Manbys all his life; they and he are sections of one engine. He would be far happier with Flora: or I won’t say happier, because there is something in him which rebels: but he would on the whole fit much better. I myself am at the end of my limit, and beyond it. I can’t ‘mix’ any more, and I refuse to. I feel like a bit of egg-shell in the mayonnaise: the only thing is to take it out, you can’t beat it in. I know I shall cause a fiasco, even in Rico’s career, if I stay. I shall go on being rude and hateful to people as I am at Corrabach, and Rico will lose all his nerve.
“So I have told him. I said this evening, when no one was about: ‘Rico dear, listen to me seriously. I can’t stand these people. If you ask me to endure another week of them, I shall either become ill, or insult them, as mother does. And I don’t want to do either.’ Rico: ‘But darling, isn’t everybody perfect to you?’ Me: ‘I tell you, I shall just make a break, like St. Mawr, if
I don’t get out. I simply can’t stand people.’ — The poor darling, his face goes so blank and anxious. He knows what I mean, because, except that they tickle his vanity all the time, he hates them as much as I do. But his vanity is the chief thing to him. He: ‘Lou darling, can’t you wait till I get up, and we can go away to the Tyrol or somewhere for a spell?’ Me: ‘Won’t you come with me to America, to the South-West? I believe it’s marvellous country: — I saw his face switch into hostility; quite vicious. He: ‘Are you so keen on spoiling everything for me? Is that what I married you for? Do you do it deliberately?’ Me: ‘Everything is already spoilt for me. I tell you I can’t stand people, your Floras and your Aspasias, and your forthcoming young Englishmen. After all, I am an American, like mother, and I’ve got to go back.’ He: ‘Really! And am I to come along as part of the luggage? Labelled cabin!’ Me: ‘You do as you wish, Rico.’ He: ‘I wish to God you did as you wished, Lou dear. I’m afraid you do as Mrs. Witt wishes. I always heard that the holiest thing in the world was a mother.’ Me: ‘No, dear, it’s just that I can’t stand people.’ He (with a snarl): ‘And I suppose I’m lumped in as PEOPLE!’ And when he’d said it, it was true. We neither of us said anything for a time. Then he said, calculating: ‘Very well, dear! You take a trip to the land of stars and stripes, and I’ll stay here and go on with my work. And when you’ve seen enough of their stars and tasted enough of their stripes, you can come back and take your place again with me.’ — We left it at that.
“You and I are supposed to have important business connected with our estates in Texas — it sounds so well — so we are making a hurried trip to the States, as they call them. I shall leave for London early next week — ”
Mrs. Witt read this long letter with satisfaction. She herself had one strange craving: to get back to America. It was not that she idealised her native country: she was a tartar of restlessness there, quite as much as in Europe. It was not that she expected to arrive at any blessed abiding place. No, in America she would go on fuming and chafing the same. But at least she would be in America, in her own country. And that was what she wanted.
She picked up the sheet of poor paper that had been folded in Lou’s letter. It was the letter from Lewis, quite nicely written. “Lady Carrington, I write to tell you and Sir Henry that I think I had better quit your service, as it would be more comfortable all round. If you will write and tell me what you want me to do with St. Mawr, I will do whatever you tell me. With kind regards to Lady Carrington and Sir Henry, I remain, Your obedient servant, Morgan Lewis.”
Mrs. Witt put the letter aside, and sat looking out of the window. She felt, strangely, as if already her soul had gone away from her actual surroundings. She was there, in Oxfordshire, in the body, but her spirit had departed elsewhere. A listlessness was upon her. It was with an effort she roused herself, to write to her lawyer in London, to get her release from her English obligations. Then she wrote to the London hotel.
For the first time in her life she wished she had a maid to do little things for her. All her life she had had too much energy to endure anyone hanging round her, personally. Now she gave up. Her wrists seemed numb, as if the power in her were switched off.
When she went down they said Lewis had asked to speak to her. She had hardly seen him since they arrived at Merriton.
“I’ve had a letter from Lady Carrington, Mam. She says will I take St. Mawr to London and wait for her there. But she says I am to come to you, Mam, for definite orders.”
“Very well, Lewis. I shall be going to London in a few days’ time. You arrange for St. Mawr to go up one day this week, and you will take him to the Mews. Come to me for anything you want. And don’t talk of leaving my daughter. We want you to go with St. Mawr to America, with us and Phoenix.”
“And your horse, Mam?”
“I shall leave him here at Merriton. I shall give him to Miss Atherton.”
“Very good, Mam!”
“Dear Daughter: I shall be in my old quarters in Mayfair next Saturday, calling the same day at your house to see if everything is ready for you. Lewis has fixed up with the railway: he goes to town to-morrow. The reason of his letter was that I had asked him if he would care to marry me, and he turned me down with emphasis. But I will tell you about it. You and I are the scribe and the Pharisee; I never could write a letter, and you could never leave off — ”
“Dearest Mother: I smelt something rash, but I know it’s no use saying: How could you? I only wonder, though, that you should think of marriage. You know, dear, I ache in every fibre to be left alone, from all that sort of thing. I feel all bruises, like one who has been assassinated. I do so understand why Jesus said: ‘Noli me tangere.’ Touch me not, I am not yet ascended unto the Father. Everything had hurt him so much, wearied him so beyond endurance, he felt he could not bear one little human touch on his body. I am like that. I can hardly bear even Elena to hand me a dress. As for a man — and marriage — ah, no! Noli me tangere, homine! I am not yet ascended unto the Father. Oh, leave me alone, leave me alone! That is all my cry to all the world.
“Curiously, I feel that Phoenix understands what I feel. He leaves me so understandingly alone, he almost gives me my sheath of aloneness: or at least, he protects me in my sheath. I am grateful for him.
“Whereas Rico feels my aloneness as a sort of shame to himself. He wants at least a blinding pretence of intimacy. Ah, intimacy! The thought of it fills me with aches, and the pretence of it exhausts me beyond myself.
“Yes, I long to go away to the West, to be away from the world like one dead and in another life, in a valley that life has not yet entered.
“Rico asked me: What are you doing with St. Mawr? When I said we were taking him with us, he said: ‘Oh, the corpus delicti!’ Whether that means anything, I don’t know. But he has grown sarcastic beyond my depth.
“I shall see you to-morrow — ”
Lou arrived in town, at the dead end of August, with her maid and Phoenix. How wonderful it seemed to have London empty of all her set: her own little house to herself, with just the housekeeper and her own maid. The fact of being alone in those surroundings was so wonderful. It made the surroundings themselves seem all the more ghastly. Everything that had been actual to her was turning ghostly: even her little drawing-room was the ghost of a room, belonging to the dead people who had known it, or to all the dead generations that had brought such a room into being, evolved it out of their quaint domestic desires. And now, in herself, those desires were suddenly spent: gone out like a lamp that suddenly dies. And then she saw her pale, delicate room with its little green agate bowl and its two little porcelain birds and its soft, roundish chairs, turned into something ghostly, like a room set out in a museum. She felt like fastening little labels on the furniture: ‘Lady Louise Carrington Lounge Chair, Last used August, 1923: Not for the benefit of posterity: but to remove her own self into another world, another realm of existence.
“My house, my house, my house, how can I ever have taken so much pains about it?” she kept saying to herself. It was like one of her old hats, suddenly discovered neatly put away in an old hat-box. And what a horror: an old ‘fashionable’ hat.
Lewis came to see her, and he sat there in one of her delicate mauve chairs, with his feet on a delicate old carpet from Turkestan, and she just wondered. He wore his leather gaiters and khaki breeches as usual, and a faded blue shirt. But his beard and hair were trimmed, he was tidy. There was a certain fineness of contour about him, a certain subtle gleam, which made him seem, apart from his rough boots, not at all gross, or coarse, in that setting of rather silky, Oriental furnishings. Rather he made the Asiatic, sensuous exquisiteness of her old rugs and her old white Chinese figures seem a weariness. Beauty! What was beauty? she asked herself. The Oriental exquisiteness seemed to her all like dead flowers whose hour had come to be thrown away.
Lou could understand her mother’s wanting, for a moment, to marry him. His detachedness and his acceptance of something in des
tiny which people cannot accept. Right in the middle of him he accepted something from destiny that gave him a quality of eternity. He did not care about persons, people, even events. In his own odd way he was an aristocrat, inaccessible in his aristocracy. But it was the aristocracy of the invisible powers, the greater influences, nothing to do with human society.
“You don’t really want to leave St. Mawr, do you?” Lou asked him. “You don’t really want to quit, as you said?”
He looked at her steadily from his pale grey eyes, without answering, not knowing what to say.
“Mother told me what she said to you. — But she doesn’t mind, she says you are entirely within your rights. She has a real regard for you. But we mustn’t let our regards run us into actions which are beyond our scope, must we? That makes everything unreal. But you will come with us to America with St. Mawr, won’t you? We depend on you.”
“I don’t want to be uncomfortable,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she smiled. “I myself hate unreal situations — I feel I can’t stand them any more. And most marriages are unreal situations. But apart from anything exaggerated, you like being with mother and me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. I like Mrs. Witt as well. But not — ”
“I know. There won’t be any more of that — ”
“You see, Lady Carrington”, he said, with a little heat, “I’m not by nature a marrying man. And I’d feel I was selling myself.”
“Quite! — Why do you think you are not a marrying man, though?”
“Me! I don’t feel myself after I’ve been with women.” He spoke in a low tone, looking down at his hands. “I feel messed up. I’m better to keep to myself. — Because — ” and here he looked up with a flare in his eyes: “women — they only want to make you give in to them, so that they feel almighty, and you feel small.”
“Don’t you like feeling small?” Lou smiled. “And don’t you want to make them give in to you?”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 550