“Not me,” he said. “I don’t want nothing. Nothing, I want.”
“Poor mother!” said Lou. “She thinks if she feels moved by a man, it must result in marriage — or that kind of thing. Surely she makes a mistake. I think you and Phoenix and mother and I might live somewhere in a far-away wild place, and make a good life: so long as we didn’t begin to mix up marriage, or love or that sort of thing into it. It seems to me men and women have really hurt one another so much nowadays that they had better stay apart till they have learned to be gentle with one another again. Not all this forced passion and destructive philandering. Men and women should stay apart till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again. Now, it’s only each one fighting for his own — or her own — underneath the cover of tenderness.”
“Dear! — darling! — Yes, my love!” mocked Lewis, with a faint smile of amused contempt.
“Exactly. People always say dearest! when they hate each other most.”
Lewis nodded, looking at her with a sudden sombre gloom in his eyes. A queer bitterness showed on his mouth. But even then he was so still and remote.
The housekeeper came and announced The Honourable Laura Ridley. This was like a blow in the face to Lou. She rose hurriedly — and Lewis rose, moving to the door.
“Don’t go, please, Lewis,” said Lou — and then Laura Ridley appeared in the doorway. She was a woman a few years older than Lou, but she looked younger. She might have been a shy girl of twenty-two, with her fresh complexion, her hesitant manner, her round, startled brown eyes, her bobbed hair.
“Hello!” said the newcomer. “Imagine your being back! I saw you in Paddington.”
Those sharp eyes would see everything.
“I thought everyone was out of town,” said Lou. “This is Mr. Lewis.”
Laura gave him a little nod, then sat on the edge of her chair.
“No,” she said. “I did go to Ireland to my people, but I came back. I prefer London when I can be more or less alone in it. I thought I’d just run in for a moment before you’re gone again. — Scotland, isn’t it?”
“No, mother and I are going to America.”
“America! Oh, I thought it was Scotland.”
“It was. But we have suddenly to go to America.”
“I see! — And what about Rico?”
“He is staying on in Shropshire. Didn’t you hear of his accident?”
Lou told about it briefly.
“But how awful!” said Laura. “But there! I knew it! I had a premonition when I saw that ‘horse. We had a horse that killed a man. Then my father got rid of it. But ours was a mare, that one. Yours is a boy.”
“A full-grown man, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, of course, I remember. — But how awful! I suppose you won’t ride in the Row. The awful people that ride there nowadays, anyhow! Oh, aren’t they awful! Aren’t people monstrous, really! My word, when I see the horses crossing Hyde Park Corner on a wet day and coming down smash to those slippery stones, giving their riders a fractured skull! — No joke!”
She inquired details of Rico.
“Oh, I suppose I shall see him when he gets back,” she said. “But I’m sorry you are going. I shall miss you, I’m afraid. Though you won’t be staying long in America. No one stays there longer than they can help.”
“I think the winter through, at least,” said Lou.
“Oh, all the winter! So long? I’m sorry to hear that. You’re one of the few, very few people one can talk really simply with. Extraordinary, isn’t it, how few really simple people there are! And they get fewer and fewer. I stayed a fortnight with my people, and a week of that I was in bed. It was really horrible. They really try to take the life out of me, really! Just because one won’t be as they are, and play their game. I simply refused, and came away.”
“But you can’t cut yourself off altogether,” said Lou.
“No, I suppose not. One has to see somebody. Luckily one has a few artists for friends. They’re the only real people, anyhow — ” She glanced round inquisitively at Lewis, and said with a slight, impertinent, elvish smile on her virgin face:
“Are you an artist?”
“No, Mam!” he said. “I’m a groom.”
“Oh, I see!” She looked him up and down.
“Lewis is St. Mawr’s master,” said Lou.
“Oh, the horse! the terrible horse!” She paused a moment. Then again she turned to Lewis with that faint smile, slightly condescending, slightly impertinent, slightly flirtatious.
“Aren’t you afraid of him?” she asked.
“No, Mam.”
“Aren’t you, really! — And can you always master him?”
“Mostly. He knows me.”
“Yes! I suppose that’s it.” — She looked him up and down again, then turned away to Lou.
“What have you been painting lately?” said Lou. Laura was not a bad painter.
“Oh, hardly anything. I haven’t been able to get on at all. This is one of my bad intervals.”
Here Lewis rose and looked at Lou.
“All right,” she said. “Come in after lunch, and we’ll finish those arrangements.”
Laura gazed after the man, as he dived out of the room, as if her eyes were gimlets that could bore into his secret. In the course of the conversation she said:
“What a curious little man that was!”
“Which?”
“The groom who was here just now. Very curious! Such peculiar eyes. I shouldn’t wonder if he had psychic powers.”
“What sort of psychic powers?” said Lou.
“Could see things. — And hypnotic, too. He might have hypnotic powers.”
“What makes you think so?”
“He gives me that sort of feeling. Very curious! Probably he hypnotises the horse. — Are you leaving the horse here, by the way, in stable?”
“No, taking him to America.”
“Taking him to America! How extraordinary!”
“It’s mother’s idea. She thinks he might be valuable as a stock horse on a ranch. You know we still have interest in a ranch in Texas.”
“Oh, I see! Yes, probably he’d be very valuable to improve the breed of the horses over there. — My father has some very lovely hunters. Isn’t it disgraceful, he would never let me ride!”
“Why?”
“Because we girls weren’t important, in his opinion. — So you’re taking the horse to America! With the little man?”
“Yes, St. Mawr will hardly behave without him.”
“I see — I see — ee — ee! Just you and Mrs. Witt and the little man. I’m sure you’ll find he has psychic powers.”
“I’m afraid I’m not so good at finding things out,” said Lou.
“Aren’t you? No, I suppose not. I am: I have a flair. I sort of smell things. Then the horse is already here, is he? When do you think you’ll sail?”
“Mother is finding a merchant boat that will go to Galveston, Texas, and take us along with the horse. She knows people who will find the right thing. But it takes time.”
“What a much nicer way to travel than on one of those great liners! Oh, how awful they are! So vulgar! Floating palaces they call them! My word, the people inside the palaces! — Yes, I should say that would be a much pleasanter way of travelling: on a cargo boat.”
Laura wanted to go down to the Mews to see St. Mawr. The two women went together.
St. Mawr stood in his box, bright and tense as usual.
“Yes!” said Laura Ridley, with a slight hiss. “Yes! Isn’t he beautiful. Such very perfect legs!” — She eyed him round with those gimlet, sharp eyes of hers. “Almost a pity to let him go out of England. We need some of his perfect bone, I feel. — But his eye. Hasn’t he got a look in it, my word!”
“I can never see that he looks wicked,” said Lou.
“Can’t you!” — Laura had a slight hiss in her speech, a sort of aristocratic decision in her enunciation, that got on Lou’s nerves. — ”He look
s wicked to me!”
“He’s not mean,” said Lou. “He’d never do anything mean to you.”
“Oh, mean! I dare say not. No! I’ll grant him that, he gives fair warning. His eye says Beware! — But isn’t he a beauty, isn’t he!” Lou could feel the peculiar reverence for St. Mawr’s breeding, his show qualities. Herself, all she cared about was the horse himself, his real nature. “Isn’t it extraordinary,” Laura continued, “that you never get a really perfectly satisfactory animal! There’s always something wrong. And in men too. Isn’t it curious? there’s always something — something wrong — or something missing. Why is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lou. She felt unable to cope with any more. And she was glad when Laura left her.
The days passed slowly, quietly, London almost empty of Lou’s acquaintances. Mrs. Witt was busy getting all sorts of papers and permits: such a fuss! The battle light was still in her eye. But about her nose was a dusky, pinched look that made Lou wonder.
Both women wanted to be gone: they felt they had already flown in spirit, and it was weary, having the body left behind.
At last all was ready: they only awaited the telegram to say when their cargo-boat would sail. Trunks stood there packed, like great stones locked for ever. The Westminster house seemed already a shell. Rico wrote and telegraphed tenderly, but there was a sense of relentless effort in it all, rather than of any tenderness. He had taken his position.
Then the telegram came, the boat was ready to sail.
“There, now!” said Mrs. Witt, as if it had been a sentence of death.
“Why do you look like that, mother?”
“I feel I haven’t an ounce of energy left in my body.”
“But how queer, for you, mother. Do you think you are ill?”
“No, Louise. I just feel that way: as if I hadn’t an ounce of energy left in my body.”
“You’ll feel yourself again, once you are away.”
“Maybe I shall.”
After all, it was only a matter of telephoning. The hotel and the railway porters and taxi-men would do the rest.
It was a grey, cloudy day, cold even. Mother and daughter sat in a cold first-class carriage and watched the little Hampshire country-side go past: little, old, unreal it seemed to them both, and passing away like a dream whose edges only are in consciousness. Autumn! Was this autumn? Were these trees, fields, villages? It seemed but the dim, dissolved edges of a dream, without inward substance.
At Southampton it was raining: and just a chaos, till they stepped on to a clean boat, and were received by a clean young captain, quite sympathetic, and quite a gentleman. Mrs. Witt, however, hardly looked at him, but went down to her cabin and lay down in her bunk.
There, lying concealed, she felt the engines start, she knew the voyage had begun. But she lay still. She saw the clouds and the rain, and refused to be disturbed.
Lou had lunch with the young captain, and she felt she ought to be flirty. The young man was so polite and attentive. And she wished so much she were alone.
Afterwards, she sat on deck and saw the Isle of Wight pass shadowy, in a misty rain. She didn’t know it was the Isle of Wight. To her, it was just the lowest bit of the British Isles. She saw it fading away: and with it, her life, going like a clot of shadow in a mist of nothingness. She had no feelings about it, none: neither about Rico, nor her London house, nor anything. All passing in a grey curtain of rainy drizzle, like a death, and she, with not a feeling left.
They entered the Channel, and felt the slow heave of the sea. And soon the clouds broke in a little wind. The sky began to clear. By mid-afternoon it was blue summer, on the blue, running waters of the Channel. And soon, the ship steering for Santander, there was the coast of France, the rocks twinkling like some magic world.
The magic world! And back of it, that post-war Paris, which Lou knew only too well, and which depressed her so thoroughly. Or that post-war Monte Carlo, the Riviera still more depressing even than Paris. No, no one must land, even on magic coasts. Else you found yourself in a railway station and a centre of civilisation in five minutes.
Mrs. Witt hated the sea, and stayed, as a rule, practically the whole time’ of the crossing in her bunk. There she was now, silent, shut up like a steel trap, as in her tomb. She did not even read. Just lay and stared at the passing sky. And the only thing to do was to leave her alone.
Lewis and Phoenix hung on the rail and watched everything. Or they went down to see St. Mawr. Or they stood talking in the doorway of the wireless operator’s cabin. Lou begged the captain to give them jobs to do.
The queer, transitory, unreal feeling, as the ship crossed the great, heavy Atlantic. It was rather bad weather. And Lou felt, as she had felt before, that this grey, wolf-like, cold-blooded ocean hated men and their ships and their smoky passage. Heavy grey waves, a low-sagging sky: rain: yellow, weird evenings with snatches of sun: so it went on. Till they got way south, into the westward-running stream. Then they began to get blue weather and blue water.
To go south! Always to go south, away from the Arctic horror as far as possible! That was Lou’s instinct. To go out of the clutch of greyness and low skies, of sweeping rain, and of slow, blanketing snow. Never again to see the mud and rain and snow of a northern winter, nor to feel the idealistic, Christianised tension of the now irreligious North.
As they neared Havana, and the water sparkled at night with phosphorus, and the flying-fishes came like drops of bright water, sailing out of the massive-slippery waves, Mrs. Witt emerged once more. She still had that shut-up, deathly look on her face. But she prowled round the deck, and manifested at least a little interest in affairs not her own. Here at sea she hardly remembered the existence of St. Mawr or Lewis or Phoenix. She was not very deeply aware even of Lou’s existence. — But, of course, it would all come back, once they were on land.
They sailed in hot sunshine out of a blue, blue sea, past the castle into the harbour of Havana. There was a lot of shipping: and this was already America. Mrs. Witt had herself and Lou put ashore immediately. They took a motor-car and drove at once to the great boulevard that is the centre of Havana. Here they saw a long rank of motor-cars, all drawn up ready to take a couple of hundred American tourists for one more tour. There were the tourists, all with badges in their coats, lest they should get lost.
“They get so drunk by night,” said the driver in Spanish, “that the policemen find them lying in the road — turn them over, see the badge — and, hup! — carry them to their hotel.” He grinned sardonically.
Lou and her mother lunched at the Hotel d’Angleterre, and Mrs. Witt watched transfixed while a couple of her countrymen, a stout successful man and his wife, lunched abroad. They had cocktails — then lobster — and a bottle of hock — then a bottle of champagne — then a half-bottle of port. — And Mrs. Witt rose in haste as the liqueurs came. For that successful man and his wife had gone on imbibing with a sort of fixed and deliberate will, apparently tasting nothing, but saying to themselves: Now we’re drinking Rhine wine! Now we’re drinking 1912 champagne. Yah, Prohibition! Thou canst not put it over me. — Their complexions became more and more lurid. Mrs. Witt fled, fearing a Havana débâcle. But she said nothing.
In the afternoon, they motored into the country to see the great brewery gardens, the new villa suburb, and through the lanes past the old, decaying plantations with palm trees. In one lane they met the fifty motor-cars with the two hundred tourists all with badges on their chests and self-satisfaction on their faces. Mrs. Witt watched in grim silence.
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” said Lou, with a wicked little smile. “On n’est pas mieux ici, mother.”
“I know it,” said Mrs. Witt.
The hotels by the sea were all shut up: it was not yet the ‘y ‘season’. Not till November. And then I — Why, then Havana would be an American city, in full leaf of green dollar The green leaf of American prosperity shedding itself recklessly, from every roaming sprig of
a tourist, over this city of sunshine and alcohol. Green leaves unfolded in Pittsburg and Chicago, showering in winter downfall in Havana.
Mother and daughter drank tea in a corner of the Mel d’Angleterre once more, and returned to the ferry.
The Gulf of Mexico was blue and rippling, with the phantom of islands on the south. Great porpoises rolled and leaped, running in front of the ship in the clear water, diving, travelling in perfect motion, straight, with the tip of the ship touching the tip of their tails, then rolling over, corkscrewing, and showing their bellies as they went. Marvellous! The marvellous beauty and fascination of natural wild things! The horror of man’s unnatural life, his heaped-up civilisation! The flying fishes burst out of the sea in clouds of silvery, transparent motion. Blue above and below, the Gulf seemed a silent, empty, timeless place where man did not really reach. And Lou was again fascinated by the glamour of the universe. But bump! She and her mother were in a first-class hotel again, calling down the telephone for the bell-boy and iced water. And soon they were in a Pullman, off towards San Antonio.
It was America, it was Texas. They were at their ranch, on the great level of yellow autumn, with the vast sky above. And after all, from the hot, wide sky, and the hot, wide, red earth, there did come something new, something not used up. Lou did feel exhilarated.
The Texans were there, tall, blond people, ingenuously cheerful, ingenuously, childishly intimate, as if the fact that you had never seen them before was as nothing compared to the fact that you’d all been living in one room together all your lives, so that nothing was hidden from either of you. The one room being the mere shanty of the world in which we all live. Strange, uninspired cheerfulness, filling, as it were, the blank of complete incomprehension.
And off they set in their motor-cars, chiefly high-legged Fords, rattling away down the red trails between yellow sunflowers or sere grass or dry cotton, away, away into great distances, cheerfully raising the dust of haste. It left Lou in a sort of blank amazement. But it left her amused, not depressed. The old screws of emotion and intimacy that had been screwed down so tightly upon her fell out of their holes here. The Texan intimacy weighed no more on her than a postage stamp, even if, for the moment, it stuck as close. And there was a certain underneath recklessness, even a stoicism In all the apparently childish people, which left one free. They might appear childish: but they stoically depended on themselves alone, in reality. Not as in England, where every man waited to pour the burden of himself upon you.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 551