St. Mawr arrived safely, a bit bewildered. The Texans eyed him closely, struck silent, as ever, by anything pure-bred and beautiful. He was somehow too beautiful, too perfected, in this great open country. The long-legged Texan horses, with their elaborate saddles, seemed somehow more natural.
Even St. Mawr felt himself strange, as it were naked and singled out, in this rough place. Like a jewel among stones, a pearl before swine, maybe. But the swine were no fools. They knew a pearl from a grain of maize, and a grain of maize from a pearl. And they knew what they wanted. When it was pearls, it was pearls; though chiefly, it was maize. Which shows good sense. They could see St. Mawr’s points. Only he needn’t draw the point too fine or it would just not pierce the tough skin of this country.
The ranch-man mounted him — just threw a soft skin over his back, jumped on, and away down the red trail, raising the dust among the tall, wild, yellow of sunflowers, in the hot, wild sun. Then back again in a fume, and the man slipped off.
“He’s got the stuff in him, he sure has,” said the man.
And the horse seemed pleased with this rough handling. Lewis looked on in wonder, and a little envy.
Lou and her mother stayed a fortnight on the ranch. It was all so queer: so crude, so rough, so easy, so artificially civilised, and so meaningless. Lou could not get over the feeling that it all meant nothing. There were no roots of reality at all. No consciousness below the surface, no meaning in anything save the obvious, the blatantly obvious. It was like life enacted in a mirror. Visually, it was wildly vital. But there was nothing behind it. Or like a cinematograph: flat shapes, exactly like men, but without any substance of reality, rapidly rattling away with talk, emotions, activity, all in the flat, nothing behind it. No deeper consciousness at all. So it seemed to her.
One moved from dream to dream, from phantasm to phantasm.
But at least, this Texan life, if it had no bowels, no vitals, at least it could not prey on one’s own vitals. It was this much better than Europe.
Lewis was silent, and rather piqued. St. Mawr had already made advances to the boss’s long-legged, arched-necked glossy-maned Texan mare. And the boss was pleased.
What a world!
Mrs. Witt eyed it all shrewdly. But she failed to participate. Lou was a bit scared at the emptiness of it all, and the queer, phantasmal self-consciousness. Cowboys just as self-conscious as Rico, far more sentimental, inwardly vague and unreal. Cowboys that went after their cows in black Ford motorcars: and who self-consciously saw Lady Carrington falling to them, as elegant young ladies from the East fall to the noble cowboy of the films, or in Zane Grey. It was all film-psychology.
And at the same time, these boys led a hard, hard life, often dangerous and gruesome. Nevertheless, inwardly they were self-conscious film heroes. The boss himself, a man over forty, long and lean and with a great deal of stringy energy, showed off before her in a strong silent manner, existing for the time being purely in his imagination of the sort of picture he made to her, the sort of impression he made on her.
So they all were, coloured up like a Zane Grey book-jacket, all of them living in the mirror. The kind of picture they made to somebody else.
And at the same time, with energy, courage, and a stoical grit getting their work done, and putting through what they had to put through.
It left Lou blank with wonder. And in the face of this strange, cheerful living in the mirror — a rather cheap mirror at that — England began to seem real to her again.
Then she had to remember herself back in England. And no, oh God, England was not real either, except poisonously. What was real? What under heaven was real?
Her mother had gone dumb and, as it were, out of range. Phoenix was a bit assured and bouncy, back more or less in his own conditions. Lewis was a bit impressed by the emptiness of everything, the lack of concentration. And St. Mawr followed at the heels of the boss’s long-legged black Texan mare, almost slavishly.
What, in heaven’s name, was one to make of it all?
Soon, she could not stand this sort of living in a film-setting, with the mechanical energy of ‘making good’, that is, making money, to keep the show going. The mystic duty to ‘make good’, meaning to make the ranch pay a laudable interest on the ‘owners’’ investment. Lou herself being one of the owners. And the interest that came to her, from her father’s will, being the money she spent to buy St. Mawr and to fit up that house in Westminster. Then also the mystic duty to ‘feel good’. Everybody had to feel good, fine! “How are you this morning, Mr. Latham?” — ”Fine! Eh! Don’t you feel good out here, eh? Lady Carrington?” — ”Fine!” — Lou pronounced it with the same ringing conviction. It was Coué all the time!
“Shall we stay here long, mother?” she asked.
“Not a day longer than you want to, Louise. I stay entirely for your sake.”
“Then let us go, mother.”
They left St. Mawr and Lewis. But Phoenix wanted to come along. So they motored to San Antonio, got into the Pullman, and travelled as far as El Paso. Then they changed to go North. Santa Fe would be at least ‘easy’. And Mrs. Witt had acquaintances there.
They found the fiesta over in Santa Fe: Indians, Mexicans, artists had finished their great effort to amuse and attract the tourists. “Welcome, Mr. Tourist” said a great board on one side of the high-road. And on the other side, a little nearer to town: “Thank You, Mr. Tourist.”
“Plus ça change — ” Lou began.
“Ça ne change jamais — except for the worse!” said Mrs. Witt, like a pistol going off. And Lou held her peace, after she had sighed to herself, and said in her own mind: ‘Welcome Also, Mrs. and Miss Tourist!’
There was no getting a word out of Mrs. Witt these days. Whereas Phoenix was becoming almost loquacious.
They stayed a while in Santa Fé, in the clean, comfortable, ‘homely’ hotel, where ‘every room had its bath’: a spotless white bath, with very hot water night and day. The tourists and commercial travellers sat in the big hall down below, everybody living in the mirror! And of course, they knew Lady Carrington down to her shoe-soles. And they all expected her to know them down to their shoe-soles. For the only object of the mirror is to reflect images.
For two days mother and daughter ate in the mayonnaise intimacy of the dining-room. Then Mrs.. Witt struck, and telephoned down every meal-time for her meal in her room. She got to staying in bed later and later, as on the ship. Lou became uneasy. This was worse than Europe.
Phoenix was still there, as a sort of half-friend, half-servant retainer. He was perfectly happy, roving round among the Mexicans and Indians, talking Spanish all day, and telling about England and his two mistresses, rolling the ball of his own importance.
“I’m afraid we’ve got Phoenix for life,” said Lou.
“Not unless we wish,” said Mrs. Witt indifferently. And she picked up a novel which she didn’t want to read, but which she was going to read.
“What shall we do next, mother?” Lou asked.
“As far as I am concerned, there is no next,” said Mrs. Witt. “Come, mother! Let’s go back to Italy or somewhere, if it’s as bad as that.”
“Never again, Louise, shall I cross that water. I have come home to die.”
“I don’t see much home about it — the Gonsalez Hotel in Santa Fe.”
“Indeed not! But as good as anywhere else to die in.”
“Oh, mother, don’t be silly! Shall we look for somewhere where we can be by ourselves?”
“I leave it to you, Louise. I have made my last decision.”
“What is that, mother?”
“Never, never to make another decision!”
“Not even to decide to die?”
“No, not even that.”
“Or not to die?”
“Not that either.”
Mrs. Witt shut up like a trap. She refused to rise from her bed that day.
Lou went to consult Phoenix. The result was, the two set out to look at a
little ranch that was for sale.
It was autumn, and the loveliest time in the south-west, where there is no spring, snow blowing into the hot lap of summer; and no real summer, hail falling in thick ice from the thunderstorms: and even no very definite winter, hot sun melting the snow and giving an impression of spring at any time. But autumn there is, when the winds of the desert are almost still, and the mountains fume no clouds. But morning comes cold and delicate, upon the wild sunflowers and the puffing, yellow-flowered greasewood. For the desert blooms in autumn. In spring it is grey ash all the time, and only the strong breath of the summer sun, and the heavy splashing of thunder rain succeeds at last, by September, in blowing it into soft puffy yellow fire.
It was such a delicate morning when Lou drove out with Phoenix towards the mountains, to look at this ranch that a Mexican wanted to sell. For the brief moment the high mountains had lost their snow: it would be back again in a fortnight: and stood dim and delicate with autumn haze. The desert stretched away pale, as pale as the sky, but silvery and sere, with hummock-mounds of shadow, and long wings of shadow, like the reflection of some great bird. The same eagle shadows came like rude paintings of the outstretched bird, upon the mountains, where the aspens were turning yellow. For the moment, the brief moment, the great desert-and-mountain landscape had lost its certain cruelty, and looked tender, dreamy. And many, many birds were flickering around.
Lou and Phoenix bumped and hesitated over a long trail: then wound down into a deep canyon: and then the car began to climb, climb, climb, in steep rushes, and in long, heartbreaking, uneven pulls. The road was bad, and driving was no joke. But it was the sort of road Phoenix was used to. He sat impassive and watchful, and kept on, till his engine boiled. He was himself in this country: impassive, detached, self-satisfied, and silently assertive. Guarding himself at every moment, but, on his guard, sure of himself. Seeing no difference at all between Lou or Mrs. Witt and himself, except that they had money and he had none, while he had a native importance which they lacked. He depended on them for money, they on him for the power to live out here in the West. Intimately, he was as good as they. Money was their only advantage.
As Lou sat beside him in the front seat of the car, where it bumped less than behind, she felt this. She felt a peculiar, tough-necked arrogance in him, as if he were asserting himself to put something over her. He wanted her to allow him to make advances to her, to allow him to suggest that he should be her lover. And then, finally, she would marry him, and he would be on the same footing as she and her mother.
In return, he would look after her, and give her his support and countenance, as a man, and stand between her and the world. In this sense, he would be faithful to her, and loyal. But as far as other women went, Mexican women or Indian women: why, that was none of her business. His marrying her would be a pact between two aliens, on behalf of one another, and he would keep his part of it all right. But himself, as a private man and a predative alien-blooded male, this had nothing to do with her. It didn’t enter into her scope and count. She was one of these nervous white women with lots of money. She was very nice, too. But as a squaw — as a real woman in a shawl whom a man went after for the pleasure of the night — why, she hardly counted. One of these white women who talk clever and know things like a man. She could hardly expect a half-savage male to acknowledge her as his female counterpart — No! She had the bucks! And she had all the paraphernalia of the white man’s civilisation, which a savage can play with and so escape his own hollow boredom. But his own real female counterpart? — Phoenix would just have shrugged his shoulders, and thought the question not worth answering. How could there be any answer in her, to the phallic male in him? Couldn’t! Yet it would flatter his vanity and his self-esteem immensely, to possess her. That would be possessing the very clue to the white man’s overwhelming world. And if she would let him possess her, he would be absolutely loyal to her, as far as affairs and appearances went. Only, the aboriginal phallic male in him simply couldn’t recognise her as a woman at all. In this respect, she didn’t exist. It needed the shawled Indian or Mexican women, with their squeaky, plaintive voices, their shuffling, watery humility, and the dark glances of their big, knowing eyes. When an Indian woman looked at him from under her black fringe, with dark, half-secretive suggestion in her big eyes: and when she stood before him hugged in her shawl, in such apparently complete quiescent humility: and when she spoke to him in her mousey squeak of a high, plaintive voice, as if it were difficult for her female bashfulness even to emit so much sound: and when she shuffled away with her legs wide apart, because of her wide-topped, white, high buckskin boots with tiny white feet, and her dark-knotted hair so full of hard, yet subtle lure: and when he remembered the almost watery softness of the Indian woman’s dark, warm flesh: then he was a male, an old, secretive, rat-like male. But before Lou’s straightforwardness and utter sexual incompetence, he just stood in contempt. And to him, even a French cocotte was utterly devoid of the right sort of sex. She couldn’t really move him. She couldn’t satisfy the furtiveness in him. He needed this plaintive, squeaky, dark-fringed Indian quality, something furtive and soft and rat-like, really to rouse him.
Nevertheless, he was ready to trade his sex, which, in his opinion, every white woman was secretly pining for, for the white woman’s money and social privileges. In the day-time, all the thrill and excitement of the white man’s motor-cars and moving pictures and ice-cream sodas, and so forth. In the night, the soft, watery-soft warmth of an Indian or half-Indian woman. This was Phoenix’s idea of life for himself.
Meanwhile, if a white woman gave him the privileges of the white man’s world, he would do his duty by her as far as all that went.
Lou, sitting very, very still beside him as he drove the car — he was not a very good driver, not quick and marvellous as some white men are, particularly some French chauffeurs she had known, but usually a little behindhand in his movements — she knew more or less all that he felt. More or less she divined as a woman does. Even from a certain rather assured stupidity of his shoulders, and a certain rather stupid assertiveness of his knees, she knew him.
But she did not judge him too harshly. Somewhere deep, deep in herself she knew she too was at fault. And this made her sometimes inclined to humble herself, as a woman, before the furtive assertiveness of this underground, ‘knowing’ savage. He was so different from Rico.
Yet, after all, was he? In his rootlessness, his drifting, his real meaninglessness, was he different from Rico? And his childish, spellbound absorption in the motor-car, or in the moving pictures, or in an ice-cream soda — was it very different from Rico? Anyhow, was it really any better? Pleasanter, perhaps, to a woman, because of the childishness of it.
The same with his opinion of himself as a sexual male! So childish, really, it was almost thrilling to a woman. But then, so stupid also, with that furtive lurking in holes and imagining it could not be detected He imagined he kept himself dark, in his sexual rat-holes. He imagined he was not detected.
No, no, Lou was not such a fool as she looked, in his eyes, anyhow. She knew what she wanted. She wanted relief from the nervous tension and irritation of her life, she wanted to escape from the friction which is the whole stimulus in modern social life. She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul.
When Phoenix presumed she was looking for some secretly sexual male such as himself, he was ridiculously mistaken. Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone. And Phoenix, roaming round like a sexual rat in promiscuous back yards! — Merci, mon cher! For that was all he was: a sexual rat in the great barn-yard of man’s habitat, looking for female rats!
Merci, mon cher! You are had.
Nevertheless, in his very mistakenness, he was a relief to her. His mistake was amusing rather than impressive. And the fact that one half of his intelligence was a complete dark blank, that too was a relief.
Strictly, and perhaps in the best sense, he wa
s a servant. His very unconsciousness and his very limitation served as a shelter, as one shelters within the limitations of four walls. The very decided limits to his intelligence were a shelter to her. They made her feel safe.
But that feeling of safety did not deceive her. It was the feeling one derived from having a true servant attached to one, a man whose psychic limitations left him incapable of anything but service, and whose strong flow of natural life, at the same time, made him need to serve.
And Lou, sitting there so very still and frail, yet self-contained, had not lived for nothing. She no longer wanted to fool herself. She had no desire at all to fool herself into thinking that a Phoenix might be a husband and a mate. No desire that way at all. His obtuseness was a servant’s obtuseness. She was grateful to him for serving, and she paid him a wage. Moreover, she provided him with something to do, to occupy his life. In a sense, she gave him his life, and rescued him from his own boredom. It was a balance.
He did not know what she was thinking. There was a certain physical sympathy between them. His obtuseness made him think it was also a sexual sympathy.
“It’s a nice trip, you and me,” he said suddenly, turning and looking her in the eyes with an excited look, and ending on a foolish little laugh.
She realised that she should have sat in the back seat.
“But it’s a bad road,” she said. “Hadn’t you better stop and put the sides of the hood up? Your engine is boiling.”
He looked away with a quick switch of interest to the red thermometer in front of his machine.
“She’s boiling,” he said, stopping, and getting out with a quick alacrity to go to look at the engine.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 552