“Many times and many times he has heard the cock crow, and gone out and wept, he knew not why.
“I was a garden and he ran in me as in the grass.
“I was a stream, and he threw his waste in me.
“I held the rainbow balanced on my outspread hands, and he said: ‘You open your hands and give me nothing.’
“What am I now but a bowl of withered leaves, but a kaleidoscope of broken beauties, but an empty bee-hive, yea, a rich garment rusted that no one has worn, a dumb singer, with the voice of a nightingale yet making discord.
“And it was over with me, and my hour is gone. And soon like a barren sea-shell on the strand, I shall be crushed underfoot to dust.
“But meanwhile I sing to those that listen with their ear against me, of the sea that gave me form and being, the everlasting sea, and in my song is nothing but bitterness, for of the fluid life of the sea I have no more, but I am to be dust, that powdery stuff the sea knows not. I am to be dead, who was born of life, silent who was made a mouth, formless who was all of beauty. Yea, I was a seed that held the heavens lapped up in bud, with a whirl of stars and a steady moon.
“And the seed is crushed that never sprouted, there is a heaven lost, and stars and a moon that never came forth.
“I was a bud that never was discovered, and in my shut chalice, skies and lake water and brooks lie crumbling, and stars and the sun are smeared out, and birds are a little powdery dust, and their singing is dry air, and I am a dark chalice.”
And the girl, hearing the hostess talk, still talk, and yet her voice like the sound of a sea-shell whispering hoarsely of despair, rose and went out into the garden, timidly, beginning to cry. For what should she do for herself?
Renshaw, leaning on the wicket that led to the paddock, called:
“Come on, don’t be alarmed — Pan is dead.”
And then she bit back her tears. For when he said, “Pan is dead,” he meant Pan was dead in his own long, loose Dane’s body. Yet she was a nymph still, and if Pan were dead, she ought to die. So with tears she went up to him.
“It’s all right out here,” he said. “By Jove, when you see a night like this, how can you say that life’s tragedy — or death either, for that matter?”
“What is it then?” she asked.
“Nay, that’s one too many — a joke, eh?”
“I think,” she said, “one has no business to be irreverent.”
“Who?” he asked.
“You,” she said, “and me, and all of us.”
Then he leaned on the wicket, thinking till he laughed.
“Life’s a real good thing,” he said.
“But why protest it?” she answered.
And again he was silent.
“If the moon came nearer and nearer,” she said, “and were a naked woman, what would you do?”
“Fetch a wrap, probably,” he said.
“Yes — you would do that,” she answered.
“And if he were a man, ditto?” he teased.
“If a star came nearer and were a naked man, I should look at him.”
“That is surely very improper,” he mocked, with still a tinge of yearning.
“If he were a star come near — ” she answered.
Again he was silent.
“You are a queer fish of a girl,” he said.
They stood at the gate, facing the silver-grey paddock. Presently their hostess came out, a long shawl hanging from her shoulders.
“So you are here,” she said. “Were you bored?”
“I was,” he replied amiably. “But there, you know I always am.”
“And I forgot,” replied the girl.
“What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
“We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
“Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
“Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
“For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
“Those of us who are nymphs — just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
“Did he die of old age?” mocked the hostess.
“Don’t they say, when Christ was born, a voice was heard in the air saying: ‘Pan is dead.’ I wish Christ needn’t have killed Pan.”
“I wonder how He managed it,” said Renshaw.
“By disapproving of him, I suppose,” replied his wife. And her retort cut herself, and gave her a sort of fakir pleasure.
“The men are all women now,” she said, “since the fauns died in a frost one night.”
“A frost of disapproval,” said the girl.
“A frost of fear,” said Renshaw.
There was a silence.
“Why was Christ afraid of Pan?” said the girl suddenly.
“Why was Pan so much afraid of Christ that he died?” asked Mrs. Renshaw bitterly.
“And all his fauns in a frost one night,” mocked Renshaw. Then a light dawned on him. “Christ was woman and Pan was man,” he said. It gave him a real joy to say this bitterly, keenly — a thrust into himself, and into his wife. “But the fauns and satyrs are there — you have only to remove the surplices that all men wear nowadays.”
“Nay,” said Mrs. Renshaw, “it is not true — the surplices have grown into their limbs, like Hercules’s garment.”
“That his wife put on him,” said Renshaw.
“Because she was afraid of him — not because she loved him,” said the girl.
“She imagined that all her lonely wasted hours wove him a robe of love,” said Mrs. Renshaw. “It was to her horror she was mistaken. You can’t weave love out of waste.”
“When I meet a man,” said the girl, “I shall look down the pupil of his eye, for a faun. And after a while it will come, skipping — ”
“Perhaps a satyr,” said Mrs. Renshaw bitterly.
“No,” said the girl, “because satyrs are old, and I have seen some fearfully young men.”
“Will is young even now — quite a boy,” said his wife.
“Oh no!” cried the girl. “He says that neither life nor death is a tragedy. Only somebody very old could say that.”
There was a tension in the night. The man felt something give way inside him.
“Yes, Edith,” he said, with a quiet, bitter joy of cruelty, “I am old.”
The wife was frightened.
“You are always preposterous,” she said quickly, crying inside herself. She knew she herself had been never young.
“I shall look in the eyes of my man for the faun,” the girl continued in a sing-song, “and I shall find him. Then I shall pretend to run away from him. And both our surplices, and all the crucifix, will be outside the wood. Inside nymph and faun, Pan and his satyrs — ah, yes: for Christ and the Cross is only for day-time, and bargaining. Christ came to make us deal honourably.
“But love is no deal, nor merchant’s bargaining, and Christ neither spoke of it nor forbade it. He was afraid of it. If once His faun, the faun of the young Jesus had run free, seen one white nymph’s brief breast, He would not have been content to die on a Cross — and then the men would have gone on cheating the women in life’s business, all the time. Christ made one bargain in mankind’s business — and He made it for the women’s sake — I suppose for His mother’s, since He was fatherless. And Christ made a bargain for me, and I shall avail myself of it. I won’t be cheated by my man. When between my still hands I weave silk out of the air, like a cocoon, He shall not take it to pelt me with. He shall draw it forth and weave it up. For I want to finger the sunshine I have drawn through my body, stroke it, and have joy of the fabric.
“And when I run wild on the hills, with Dionysus, and shall come home like a bee that has rolled in floury crocuses, he must see the wonder on me, and make bread of it.
“And when I say to him, ‘It is harvest in my soul’, he shall look in my eyes and lower his
nets where the shoal moves in a throng in the dark, and lift out the living blue silver for me to see, and know, and taste.
“All this, my faun in commerce, my faun at traffic with me.
“And if he cheat me, he must take his chance.
“But I will not cheat him, in his hour, when he runs like a faun after me. I shall flee, but only to be overtaken. I shall flee, but never out of the wood to the crucifix. For that is to deny I am a nymph; since how can a nymph cling at the crucifix? Nay, the cross is the sign I have on my money, for honesty.
“In the morning, when we come out of the wood, I shall say to him: ‘Touch the cross, and prove you will deal fairly,’ and if he will not, I will set the dogs of anger and judgment on him, and they shall chase him. But if, perchance, some night he contrive to crawl back into the wood, beyond the crucifix, he will be faun and I nymph, and I shall have no knowledge what happened outside, in the realm of the crucifix. But in the morning, I shall say: ‘Touch the cross, and prove you will deal fairly.’ And being renewed, he will touch the cross.
“Many a dead faun I have seen, like dead rabbits poisoned lying about the paths, and many a dead nymph, like swans that could not fly and the dogs destroyed.
“But I am a nymph and a woman, and Pan is for me, and Christ is for me.
“For Christ I cover myself in my robe, and weep, and vow my vow of honesty.
“For Pan I throw my coverings down and run headlong through the leaves, because of the joy of running.
“And Pan will give me my children and joy, and Christ will give me my pride.
“And Pan will give me my man, and Christ my husband.
“To Pan I am nymph, to Christ I am woman.
“And Pan is in the darkness, and Christ in the pale light.
“And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.
“But side by side they shall go, day and night, night and day, for ever apart, for ever together.
“Pan and Christ, Christ and Pan.
“Both moving over me, so when in the sunshine I go in my robes among my neighbours, I am a Christian. But when I run robeless through the dark-scented woods alone, I am Pan’s nymph.
“Now I must go, for I want to run away. Not run away from myself, but to myself.
“For neither am I a lamp that stands in the way in the sunshine.
“Now am I a sundial foolish at night.
“I am myself, running through light and shadow for ever, a nymph and a Christian; I, not two things, but an apple with a gold side and a red, a freckled deer, a stream that tinkles and a pool where light is drowned; I, no fragment, no half-thing like the day, but a blackbird with a white breast and underwings, a peewit, a wild thing, beyond understanding.”
“I wonder if we shall hear the nightingale to-night,” said Mrs. Renshaw.
“He’s a gurgling fowl — I’d rather hear a linnet,” said Renshaw. “Come a drive with me to-morrow, Miss Laskell.”
And the three went walking back to the house. And Elsa Laskell was glad to get away from them.
THE BORDER LINE
Katherine Farquhar was a handsome woman of forty, no longer slim, but attractive in her soft, full, feminine way. The French porters ran round her, getting a voluptuous pleasure from merely carrying her bags. And she gave them ridiculously high tips, because, in the first place, she had never really known the value of money, and secondly, she had a morbid fear of underpaying anyone, but particularly a man who was eager to serve her.
It was really a joke to her, how eagerly these Frenchmen — all sorts of Frenchmen — ran round her and Madamed her. Their voluptuous obsequiousness. Because, after all, she was Boche. Fifteen years of marriage to an Englishman — or rather to two Englishmen — had not altered her racially. Daughter of a German Baron she was, and remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion and her strong, full figure. But like most people in the world, she was a mixture, with Russian blood and French blood also in her veins. And she had lived in one country and another, till she was somewhat indifferent to her surroundings. So that perhaps the Parisian men might be excused for running round her so eagerly, and getting a voluptuous pleasure from calling a taxi for her, or giving up a place in the omnibus to her, or carrying her bags, or holding the menu card before her. Nevertheless, it amused her. And she had to confess she liked them, these Parisians. They had their own kind of manliness, even if it wasn’t an English sort; and if a woman looked pleasant and soft-fleshed, and a wee bit helpless, they were ardent and generous. Katherine understood so well that Frenchmen were rude to the dry, hard-seeming, competent Englishwoman or American. She sympathized with the Frenchman’s point of view: too much obvious capacity to help herself is a disagreeable trait in a woman.
At the Gare de l’Est, of course, everybody was expected to be Boche, and it was almost a convention, with the porters, to assume a certain small-boyish superciliousness. Nevertheless, there was the same voluptuous scramble to escort Katherine Farquhar to her seat in the first-class carriage. Madame was travelling alone.
She was going to Germany via Strasburg, meeting her sister in Baden-Baden. Philip, her husband, was in Germany collecting some sort of evidence for his newspaper. Katherine felt a little weary of newspapers, and of the sort of “evidence” that is extracted out of nowhere to feed them. However, Philip was quite clever, he was a little somebody in the world.
Her world, she had realized, consisted almost entirely of little somebodies. She was outside the sphere of the nobodies, always had been. And the Somebodies with a capital S, were all safely dead. She knew enough of the world to-day to know that it is not going to put up with any great Somebody: but many little nobodies and a sufficient number of little somebodies. Which, after all, is as it should be, she felt.
Sometimes she had vague misgivings.
Paris, for example, with its Louvre and its Luxembourg and its cathedral, seemed intended for Somebody. In a ghostly way it called for some supreme Somebody. But all its little men, nobodies and somebodies, were as sparrows twittering for crumbs, and dropping their little droppings on the palace cornices.
To Katherine, Paris brought back again her first husband, Alan Anstruther, that red-haired fighting Celt, father of her two grown-up children. Alan had had a weird innate conviction that he was beyond ordinary judgment. Katherine could never quite see where it came in. Son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland regiment did not seem to her stupendous. As for Alan himself, he was handsome in uniform, with his kilt swinging and his blue eye glaring. Even stark naked and without any trimmings, he had a bony, dauntless, overbearing manliness of his own. The one thing Katherine could not quite appreciate was his silent, indomitable assumption that he was actually firstborn, a born lord. He was a clever man too, ready to assume that General This or Colonel That might really be his superior. Until he actually came into contact with General This or Colonel That. Whereupon his overweening blue eye arched in his bony face, and a faint tinge of contempt infused itself into his homage.
Lordly or not, he wasn’t much of a success in the worldly sense. Katherine had loved him, and he had loved her: that was indisputable. But when it came to innate conviction of lordliness, it was a question which of them was worse. For she, in her amiable, queen-bee self thought that ultimately hers was the right to the last homage.
Alan had been too unyielding and haughty to say much. But sometimes he would stand and look at her in silent rage, wonder, and indignation. The wondering indignation had been almost too much for her. What did the man think he was?
He was one of the hard, clever Scotsmen, with a philosophic tendency, but without sentimentality. His contempt of Nietzsche, whom she adored, was intolerable. Alan just asserted himself like a pillar of rock, and expected the tides of the modern world to recede around him. They didn’t.
So he concerned himself with astronomy, gazing through a telescope and watching the worlds beyo
nd worlds. Which seemed to give him relief.
After ten years, they had ceased to live together, passionate as they both were. They were too proud and unforgiving to yield to one another, and much too haughty to yield to any outsider.
Alan had a friend, Philip, also a Scotsman, and a university friend. Philip, trained for the bar, had gone into journalism, and had made himself a name. He was a little black Highlander, of the insidious sort, clever, and knowing. This look of knowing in his dark eyes, and the feeling of secrecy that went with his dark little body, made him interesting to women. Another thing he could do was to give off a great sense of warmth and offering, like a dog when it loves you. He seemed to be able to do this at will. And Katherine, after feeling cool about him and rather despising him for years, at last fell under the spell of the dark, insidious fellow.
“You!” she said to Alan, whose overweening masterfulness drove her wild. “You don’t even know that a woman exists. And that’s where Philip Farquhar is more than you are. He does know something of what a woman is.”
“Bah! the little — — ” said Alan, using an obscene word of contempt.
Nevertheless, the friendship endured, kept up by Philip, who had an almost uncanny love for Alan. Alan was mostly indifferent. But he was used to Philip, and habit meant a great deal to him.
“Alan really is an amazing man!” Philip would say to Katherine. “He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever met.”
“But why is he the only real man?” she asked. “Don’t you call yourself a real man?”
“Oh, I — I’m different! My strength lies in giving in — and then recovering myself. I do let myself be swept away. But so far, I’ve always managed to get myself back again. Alan — ” and Philip even had a half-reverential, half-envious way of uttering the word — ”Alan never lets himself be swept away. And he’s the only man I know who doesn’t.”
“Yah!” she said. “He is fooled by plenty of things. You can fool him through his vanity.”
“No,” said Philip. “Never altogether. You can’t deceive him right through. When a thing really touches Alan, it is tested once and for all. You know if it’s false or not. He’s the only man I ever met who can’t help being real.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 645