Then she sprang out of her Pullman. It was somewhere after Trinidad, she didn’t bother where. ‘Put my bags out,’ she said to the negro, and he, looking at those serpent-blazing eyes under those eyebrows like thorn bushes, silently obeyed. Yet with her mouth she smiled a little and was cajoling, and his tip was reckless. Man must needs be mollified. She remembered to be just sufficiently soft and feminine. But she was distracted and heart-broken.
Started her next whirl. She must have an automobile, she would have an automobile, to be driven this hundred or hundred and fifty miles that remained. Yes, she would have an automobile. But she had got out at a station where, at least that afternoon, there was no automobile. Nevertheless, she would have an automobile. So at last was produced an old worn-out Dodge with no springs left, belonging to a boy of sixteen. Yes, she would have that. The boy had never travelled that trail, didn’t know the way. No matter, she would go. She would get to Lamy in front of that hateful train which she had left. And the boy would get twenty-six dollars. Good enough!
She had never been west before, so she reckoned without her host. She had still to learn what trails round the Rockies and across the desert are like. She imagined roads, or forest tracks. She found what actually is a trail in the south west — a blind squirm up sand-banks, a blind rattle along dry river-beds, a breathless scramble in deep cañons over what look like simple landslides and precipices, the car at an angle of forty-five degrees above a green rocky river, banging itself to bits against boulders, surging through the river then back again through the river and once more swooping through the river with the devil’s own scramble up a rocky bank on the other side, and a young boy driving on, driving ahead, without knowing where, or what was happening to him, twenty-six dollars at the end. So out on the lurch and bump of the open white-sage desert once more, to follow the trail by scent rather than by sight, cart-ruts this way, tracks that way, please yourself in the god-forsaken landscape, bolting into a slope of piñon and cedar, dark-green bush-scrub, then dropping down to a wire fence and a gate, a sort of ranch, and a lost village of houses like brown mud boxes plonked down in the grey wilderness, with a bigger mud box, oblong, which the boy told her was the sort of church place where the Penitentes scourge and torture themselves, windowless so that no one shall hear their shrieks and groans.
By nightfall she had had a lot of the nonsense bumped and bruised out of her, knocked about as if she were a penitente herself. Not that she was a penitente: not she. But at least here was a country that hit her with hard knuckles, right through to the bone. It was something of a country.
Luckily, she had telegraphed to Mark, who would be waiting for her at Lamy station. Mark was her husband — her third. One dead, one divorced, and Mark alternately torn to atoms and thrown to the four corners of the universe, then rather sketchily gathered up and put together again by a desirous, if still desperate Isis. She had torn him in two and pitched him piecemeal away into the south-western desert. Now she was after him once more, going to put humpty-dumpty together again with a slam. With a slam that might finally do for him.
Of course he is an artist, a foreigner, a Russian. Of course she is an American woman, several generations of wealth and tradition in various cities of New York state behind her, several generations of visiting Europe and staying in the Meurice and seeing Napoleon III or Gambetta or whoever was figuring on the stage of Paris. She herself had stayed in the old Meurice. She too had had her apartment in a fine old hotel, and if there was no Napoleon III left for her, there had been ex-Princesses of Saxony, d’Annunzio, Duse, Isadora Duncan or Matisse.
These American families do actually tend to cumulate and culminate in one daughter. Not that the family had as yet cumulated in Sybil Mond. She had started as Sybil Hamnett, and had been successively Sybil Thomas and Sybil Danks before she married the Jewish artist from somewhere Poland way, who was, in her family’s eyes, the anti-climax. But she herself admitted no possibility of anticlimax for herself, and kept unpleasant surprises still in store for her family. Her family being her mother and the General, Sybil’s second step-father. For she was as well-off for step-fathers as for husbands.
The family had actually culminated in Sybil: all the force of the Hamnetts, on her father’s side, and the push of the Wilcoxes, on her mother’s, focused into this one highly-explosive daughter. No question of dribbling out. Sybil at forty was heavy with energy like a small bison, and strong and young-looking as if she were thirty, often giving the impression of soft crudeness as if she were sixteen. The old colonial vigour had, we repeat, collected in her as in some final dam, like the buffalo’s force in his forehead. But the old colonial riches had not yet descended upon her. She had her own sufficient income, but the mass of the family wealth rested on her mother, who, aided by the General, exemplified it in the correct and magnificent Italian Mansion on Lake Erie.
The rackety machine in which she rode had of course no headlights, and the November night fell. The boy hadn’t thought to put the lamps on. No headlights! Frustration, always frustration. Sybil annihilated the boy in her soul, and sat still. Or rather, with her body lashed and bruised, her soul sat crying and ominous. There was nothing to be done but to scramble for the nearest station again.
On then, under the many sharp, small stars of the desert. The air was cold in her nostrils, the desert seemed weird and uncanny. But — it was terra nova. It was a new world, the desert at the foot of the mountains, the high desert above the gorges of the canons, the world of three altitudes. Strange! — doomful!
Yes, destiny had made her get out of the train and into this rackety machine. Destiny even had made the boy bring no headlights. Her ponderous storm began to evaporate. She looked round the night as they emerged from a dark cañon out onto a high flat bit of vague desert, with mountains guarding the flatness beyond, shadows beyond the shadows.
It impressed her, although she must get to her journey end, she must arrive. No, it was not like desert. Rather like wilderness, the wilderness of the temptation, for example. Shadowy scrub of pale grey sage, knee-high, waist-high, on the flat of the table land; and on the slopes of the mountains that rose still further, starting off the flat table, scrub of gnarled pine and cedar, still hardly more than bushes, but like those Japanese dwarf-trees, full of age, torture and power. Strange country — weird — frightening too. It would need a battle to gain hold over such a land. It would need a battle. She snuffed the curiously-scented air of the desert. With her tongue almost jerked out of her mouth by the jumping of the car, she sat inwardly motionless, facing destiny again. It was her destiny she should come to this land. It was her destiny she should see it for the first time thus, alone, lost, without light. That was destiny, that threw her naked like the black queen onto this unknown chess-board. She hugged her furs and her fate round her, in the cold, rare air, and was somewhat relieved. Her battle! Her hope!
And thus by eight o’clock the frozen, disappointed, but dogged boy brought her to the railway again, as she bade him. It was impossible for him to get her to Lamy without lights or anything. He must forfeit some of the twenty-six dollars. He was disappointed, but he admitted the truth of her contention.
Wagon-Mound, or some such name. She remembered a sort of dome of a hill in the night. After which nothing to be done but to go to the ‘hotel’, to wait three hours for the slow train which followed the one she had abandoned way back at Trinidad.
THE HORSE DEALER’S DAUGHTER
‘Well, Mabel, and what are you going to do with yourself?’ asked Joe, with foolish flippancy. He felt quite safe himself. Without listening for an answer, he turned aside, worked a grain of tobacco to the tip of his tongue, and spat it out. He did not care about anything, since he felt safe himself.
The three brothers and the sister sat round the desolate breakfast table, attempting some sort of desultory consultation. The morning’s post had given the final tap to the family fortunes, and all was over. The dreary dining-room itself, with its heavy mahogany furn
iture, looked as if it were waiting to be done away with.
But the consultation amounted to nothing. There was a strange air of ineffectuality about the three men, as they sprawled at table, smoking and reflecting vaguely on their own condition. The girl was alone, a rather short, sullen-looking young woman of twenty-seven. She did not share the same life as her brothers. She would have been good-looking, save for the impassive fixity of her face, ‘bull-dog’, as her brothers called it.
There was a confused tramping of horses’ feet outside. The three men all sprawled round in their chairs to watch. Beyond the dark holly-bushes that separated the strip of lawn from the highroad, they could see a cavalcade of shire horses swinging out of their own yard, being taken for exercise. This was the last time. These were the last horses that would go through their hands. The young men watched with critical, callous look. They were all frightened at the collapse of their lives, and the sense of disaster in which they were involved left them no inner freedom.
Yet they were three fine, well-set fellows enough. Joe, the eldest, was a man of thirty-three, broad and handsome in a hot, flushed way. His face was red, he twisted his black moustache over a thick finger, his eyes were shallow and restless. He had a sensual way of uncovering his teeth when he laughed, and his bearing was stupid. Now he watched the horses with a glazed look of helplessness in his eyes, a certain stupor of downfall.
The great draught-horses swung past. They were tied head to tail, four of them, and they heaved along to where a lane branched off from the highroad, planting their great hoofs floutingly in the fine black mud, swinging their great rounded haunches sumptuously, and trotting a few sudden steps as they were led into the lane, round the corner. Every movement showed a massive, slumbrous strength, and a stupidity which held them in subjection. The groom at the head looked back, jerking the leading rope. And the calvalcade moved out of sight up the lane, the tail of the last horse, bobbed up tight and stiff, held out taut from the swinging great haunches as they rocked behind the hedges in a motionlike sleep.
Joe watched with glazed hopeless eyes. The horses were almost like his own body to him. He felt he was done for now. Luckily he was engaged to a woman as old as himself, and therefore her father, who was steward of a neighbouring estate, would provide him with a job. He would marry and go into harness. His life was over, he would be a subject animal now.
He turned uneasily aside, the retreating steps of the horses echoing in his ears. Then, with foolish restlessness, he reached for the scraps of bacon-rind from the plates, and making a faint whistling sound, flung them to the terrier that lay against the fender. He watched the dog swallow them, and waited till the creature looked into his eyes. Then a faint grin came on his face, and in a high, foolish voice he said:
‘You won’t get much more bacon, shall you, you little b — — ?’
The dog faintly and dismally wagged its tail, then lowered his haunches, circled round, and lay down again.
There was another helpless silence at the table. Joe sprawled uneasily in his seat, not willing to go till the family conclave was dissolved. Fred Henry, the second brother, was erect, clean-limbed, alert. He had watched the passing of the horses with more sang-froid. If he was an animal, like Joe, he was an animal which controls, not one which is controlled. He was master of any horse, and he carried himself with a well-tempered air of mastery. But he was not master of the situations of life. He pushed his coarse brown moustache upwards, off his lip, and glanced irritably at his sister, who sat impassive and inscrutable.
‘You’ll go and stop with Lucy for a bit, shan’t you?’ he asked. The girl did not answer.
‘I don’t see what else you can do,’ persisted Fred Henry.
‘Go as a skivvy,’ Joe interpolated laconically.
The girl did not move a muscle.
‘If I was her, I should go in for training for a nurse,’ said Malcolm, the youngest of them all. He was the baby of the family, a young man of twenty-two, with a fresh, jaunty museau.
But Mabel did not take any notice of him. They had talked at her and round her for so many years, that she hardly heard them at all.
The marble clock on the mantel-piece softly chimed the half-hour, the dog rose uneasily from the hearthrug and looked at the party at the breakfast table. But still they sat on in ineffectual conclave.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Joe suddenly, à propos of nothing. ‘I’ll get a move on.’
He pushed back his chair, straddled his knees with a downward jerk, to get them free, in horsy fashion, and went to the fire. Still he did not go out of the room; he was curious to know what the others would do or say. He began to charge his pipe, looking down at the dog and saying, in a high, affected voice:
‘Going wi’ me? Going wi’ me are ter? Tha’rt goin’ further than tha counts on just now, dost hear?’
The dog faintly wagged its tail, the man stuck out his jaw and covered his pipe with his hands, and puffed intently, losing himself in the tobacco, looking down all the while at the dog with an absent brown eye. The dog looked up at him in mournful distrust. Joe stood with his knees stuck out, in real horsy fashion.
‘Have you had a letter from Lucy?’ Fred Henry asked of his sister.
‘Last week,’ came the neutral reply.
‘And what does she say?’
There was no answer.
‘Does she ask you to go and stop there?’ persisted Fred Henry.
‘She says I can if I like.’
‘Well, then, you’d better. Tell her you’ll come on Monday.’
This was received in silence.
‘That’s what you’ll do then, is it?’ said Fred Henry, in some exasperation.
But she made no answer. There was a silence of futility and irritation in the room. Malcolm grinned fatuously.
‘You’ll have to make up your mind between now and next Wednesday,’ said Joe loudly, ‘or else find yourself lodgings on the kerbstone.’
The face of the young woman darkened, but she sat on immutable.
‘Here’s Jack Fergusson!’ exclaimed Malcolm, who was looking aimlessly out of the window.
‘Where?’ exclaimed Joe, loudly.
‘Just gone past.’
‘Coming in?’
Malcolm craned his neck to see the gate.
‘Yes,’ he said.
There was a silence. Mabel sat on like one condemned, at the head of the table. Then a whistle was heard from the kitchen. The dog got up and barked sharply. Joe opened the door and shouted:
‘Come on.’
After a moment a young man entered. He was muffled up in overcoat and a purple woollen scarf, and his tweed cap, which he did not remove, was pulled down on his head. He was of medium height, his face was rather long and pale, his eyes looked tired.
‘Hello, Jack! Well, Jack!’ exclaimed Malcolm and Joe. Fred Henry merely said, ‘Jack.’
‘What’s doing?’ asked the newcomer, evidently addressing Fred Henry.
‘Same. We’ve got to be out by Wednesday. — Got a cold?’
‘I have — got it bad, too.’
‘Why don’t you stop in?’
‘Me stop in? When I can’t stand on my legs, perhaps I shall have a chance.’ The young man spoke huskily. He had a slight Scotch accent.
‘It’s a knock-out, isn’t it,’ said Joe, boisterously, ‘if a doctor goes round croaking with a cold. Looks bad for the patients, doesn’t it?’
The young doctor looked at him slowly.
‘Anything the matter with you, then?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘Not as I know of. Damn your eyes, I hope not. Why?’
‘I thought you were very concerned about the patients, wondered if you might be one yourself.’
‘Damn it, no, I’ve never been patient to no flaming doctor, and hope I never shall be,’ returned Joe.
At this point Mabel rose from the table, and they all seemed to become aware of her existence. She began putting the dishes together. The young doctor loo
ked at her, but did not address her. He had not greeted her. She went out of the room with the tray, her face impassive and unchanged.
‘When are you off then, all of you?’ asked the doctor.
‘I’m catching the eleven-forty,’ replied Malcolm. ‘Are you goin’ down wi’ th’ trap, Joe?’
‘Yes, I’ve told you I’m going down wi’ th’ trap, haven’t I?’
‘We’d better be getting her in then. — So long, Jack, if I don’t see you before I go,’ said Malcolm, shaking hands.
He went out, followed by Joe, who seemed to have his tail between his legs.
‘Well, this is the devil’s own,’ exclaimed the doctor, when he was left alone with Fred Henry. ‘Going before Wednesday, are you?’
‘That’s the orders,’ replied the other.
‘Where, to Northampton?’
‘That’s it.’
‘The devil!’ exclaimed Fergusson, with quiet chagrin.
And there was silence between the two.
‘All settled up, are you?’ asked Fergusson.
‘About.’
There was another pause.
‘Well, I shall miss yer, Freddy, boy,’ said the young doctor.
‘And I shall miss thee, Jack,’ returned the other.
‘Miss you like hell,’ mused the doctor.
Fred Henry turned aside. There was nothing to say. Mabel came in again, to finish clearing the table.
‘What are you going to do, then, Miss Pervin?’ asked Fergusson. ‘Going to your sister’s, are you?’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 640