“What’s she say?” I asked.
“If you will stay in this room? I told her you might like a room on the front. And if you’ll take a bath?” said Carlotta.
“Yes!” said I. And Carlotta repeated to the maidservant.
“And for heaven’s sake speak to me loudly,” said I to that elderly correct female in her starched collar, in the doorway.
“Very good, sir!” she piped up. “And shall I make the bath hot or medium?”
“Hot!” said I, like a cannon-shot.
“Very good, sir!” she piped up again, and her elderly eyes twinkled as she turned and disappeared.
Carlotta laughed, and I sighed.
We were six at table. The pink Colonel with the yellow creases under his blue eyes sat opposite me, like an old boy with a liver. Next him sat Lady Lathkill, watching from her distance. Her pink, soft old face, naked-seeming, with its pin-point blue eyes, was a real modern witch-face.
Next me, on my left, was the dark young woman, whose slim, swarthy arms had an indiscernible down on them. She had a blackish neck, and her expressionless yellow-brown eyes said nothing, under level black brows. She was inaccessible. I made some remarks, without result. Then I said:
“I didn’t hear your name when Lady Lathkill introduced me to you.”
Her yellow-brown eyes stared into mine for some moments before she said:
“Mrs Hale!” Then she glanced across the table. “Colonel Hale is my husband.”
My face must have signalled my surprise. She stared into my eyes very curiously, with a significance I could not grasp, a long, hard stare. I looked at the bald, pink head of the Colonel bent over his soup, and I returned to my own soup.
“Did you have a good time in London?” said Carlotta.
“No,” said I. “It was dismal.”
“Not a good word to say for it?”
“Not one.”
“No nice people?”
“Not my sort of nice.”
“What’s your sort of nice?” she asked, with a little laugh.
The other people were stone. It was like talking into a chasm.
“Ah! If I knew myself, I’d look for them! But not sentimental, with a lot of soppy emotions on top, and nasty ones underneath.”
“Who are you thinking of?” Carlotta looked up at me as the man brought the fish. She had a crushed sort of roguishness. The other diners were images.
“I? Nobody. Just everybody. No, I think I was thinking of the Obelisk Memorial Service.”
“Did you go to it?”
“No, but I fell into it.”
“Wasn’t it moving?”
“Rhubarb, senna, that kind of moving!”
She gave a little laugh, looking up into my face, from the fish.
“What was wrong with it?”
I noticed that the Colonel and Lady Lathkill each had a little dish of rice, no fish, and that they were served second — oh, humility! — and that neither took the white wine. No, they had no wine-glasses. The remoteness gathered about them, like the snows on Everest. The dowager peered across at me occasionally, like a white ermine of the snow, and she had that cold air about her, of being good, and containing a secret of goodness: remotely, ponderously, fixedly knowing better. And I, with my chatter, was one of those fabulous fleas that are said to hop upon glaciers.
“Wrong with it? It was wrong, all wrong. In the rain, a soppy crowd, with soppy bare heads, soppy emotions, soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurustinus! A steam of wet mob-emotions! Ah, no, it shouldn’t be allowed.”
Carlotta’s face had fallen. She again could feel death in her bowels, the kind of death the war signifies.
“Wouldn’t you have us honour the dead?” came Lady Lathkill’s secretive voice across at me, as if a white ermine had barked.
“Honour the dead!” My mind opened in amazement. “Do you think they’d be honoured?”
I put the question in all sincerity.
“They would understand the intention was to honour them,” came her reply.
I felt ashamed.
“If I were dead, would I be honoured if a great, steamy wet crowd came after me with soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurustinus? Ugh! I’d run to the nethermost ends of Hades. Lord, how I’d run from them!”
The manservant gave us roast mutton, and Lady Lathkill and the Colonel chestnuts in sauce. Then he poured the burgundy. It was good wine. The pseudo-conversation was interrupted.
Lady Lathkill ate in silence, like an ermine in the snow, feeding on his prey. Sometimes she looked round the table, her blue eyes peering fixedly, completely uncommunicative. She was very watchful to see that we were all properly attended to; “The currant jelly for Mr. Morier,” she would murmur, as if it were her table. Lord Lathkill, next her, ate in complete absence. Sometimes she murmured to him, and he murmured back, but I never could hear what they said. The Colonel swallowed the chestnuts in dejection, as if all were weary duty to him now. I put it down to his liver.
It was an awful dinner-party. I never could hear a word anybody said, except Carlotta. They all let their words die in their throats, as if the larynx were the coffin of sound.
Carlotta tried to keep her end up, the cheerful hostess sort of thing. But Lady Lathkill somehow, in silence and apparent humility, had stolen the authority that goes with hostess, and she clung on to it grimly, like a white ermine sucking a rabbit. Carlotta kept glancing miserably at me, to see what I thought. I didn’t think anything. I just felt frozen within the tomb. And I drank the good, good warm burgundy.
“Mr. Morier’s glass!” murmured Lady Lathkill, and her blue eyes with their black pin-points rested on mine a moment.
“Awfully nice to drink good burgundy!” said I pleasantly.
She bowed her head slightly, and murmured something inaudible.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Very glad you like it!” she repeated, with distaste at having to say it again, out loud.
“Yes, I do. It’s good.”
Mrs. Hale, who had sat tall and erect and alert, like a black she-fox, never making a sound, looked round at me to see what sort of specimen I was. She was just a bit intrigued.
“Yes, thanks,” came a musical murmur from Lord Lathkill. “I think I will take some more.”
The man, who had hesitated, filled his glass.
“I’m awfully sorry I can’t drink wine,” said Carlotta absently. “It has the wrong effect on me.”
“I should say it has the wrong effect on everybody,” said the Colonel, with an uneasy attempt to be there. “But some people like the effect, and some don’t.”
I looked at him in wonder. Why was he chipping in? He looked as if he’d liked the effect well enough, in his day.
“Oh no!” retorted Carlotta coldly. “The effect on different people is quite different.”
She closed with finality, and a further frost fell on the table.
“Quite so,” began the Colonel, trying, since he’d gone off the deep end, to keep afloat.
But Carlotta turned abruptly to me.
“Why is it, do you think, that the effect is so different on different people?”
“And on different occasions,” said I, grinning through my burgundy. “Do you know what they say? They say that alcohol, if it has an effect on your psyche, takes you back to old states of consciousness, and old reactions. But some people it doesn’t stimulate at all, there is only a nervous reaction of repulsion.”
“There’s certainly a nervous reaction of repulsion in me,” said Carlotta.
“As there is in all higher natures,” murmured Lady Lathkill.
“Dogs hate whisky,” said I.
“That’s quite right,” said the Colonel. “Scared of it!”
“I’ve often thought,” said I, “about those old states of consciousness. It’s supposed to be an awful retrogression, reverting back to them. Myself, my desire to go onwards takes me back a little.”
“Where to?” said Carlotta.<
br />
“Oh, I don’t know! To where you feel it a bit warm, and like smashing the glasses, don’t you know?
“J’avons bien bu et nous boirons!
Cassons les verres nous les payerons!
Compagnons! Voyez vous bien!
Voyez vous bien!
Voyez! voyez! voyez vous bien
Que les d’moiselles sont belles
Où nous allons!”
I had the effrontery to sing this verse of an old soldier’s song while Lady Lathkill was finishing her celery and nut salad. I sang it quite nicely, in a natty, well-balanced little voice, smiling all over my face meanwhile. The servant, as he went round for Lady Lathkill’s plate, furtively fetched a look at me. Look! thought I. You chicken that’s come untrussed!
The partridges had gone, we had swallowed the flan, and were at dessert. They had accepted my song in complete silence. Even Carlotta! My flan had gone down in one gulp, like an oyster.
“You’re quite right!” said Lord Lathkill, amid the squashing of walnuts. “I mean the state of mind of a Viking, shall we say, or of a Catiline conspirator, might be frightfully good for us, if we could recapture it.”
“A Viking!” said I, stupefied. And Carlotta gave a wild snirt of laughter.
“Why not a Viking?” he asked in all innocence.
“A Viking!” I repeated, and swallowed my port. Then I looked round at my black-browed neighbour.
“Why do you never say anything?” I asked.
“What should I say?” she replied, frightened at the thought.
I was finished. I gazed into my port as if expecting the ultimate revelation.
Lady Lathkill rustled her finger-tips in the finger-bowl, and laid down her napkin decisively. The Colonel, old buck, rose at once to draw back her chair. Place aux hommes! I bowed to my neighbour, Mrs. Hale, a most disconcerting bow, and she made a circuit to get by me.
“You won’t be awfully long?” said Carlotta, looking at me with her slow, hazel-green eyes, between mischief and wistfulness and utter depression.
Lady Lathkill steered heavily past me as if I didn’t exist, perching rather forward, with her crest of white hair, from her big hips. She seemed abstracted, concentrated on something, as she went.
I closed the door, and turned to the men.
“Dans la première auberge
J’eus b’en bu!”
sang I in a little voice.
“Quite right,” said Lord Lathkill. “You’re quite right.”
And we sent the port round.
“This house,” I said, “needs a sort of spring-cleaning.”
“You’re quite right,” said Lord Lathkill.
“There’s a bit of a dead smell!” said I. “We need Bacchus, and Eros, to sweeten it up, to freshen it.”
“You think Bacchus and Eros?” said Lord Lathkill, with complete seriousness; as if one might have telephoned for them.
“In the best sense,” said I. As if we were going to get them from Fortnum and Mason’s, at least.
“What exactly is the best sense?” asked Lord Lathkill.
“Ah! The flame of life! There’s a dead smell here.”
The Colonel fingered his glass with thick, inert fingers uneasily.
“Do you think so?” he said, looking up at me heavily.
“Don’t you?”
He gazed at me with blank, glazed blue eyes, that had deathly yellow stains underneath. Something was wrong with him, some sort of breakdown. He should have been a fat, healthy, jolly old boy. Not very old either: probably not quite sixty. But with this collapse on him, he seemed, somehow, to smell.
“You know,” he said, staring at me with a sort of gruesome challenge, then looking down at his wine, “there’s more things than we’re aware of happening to us!” He looked up at me again, shutting his full lips under his little grey moustache, and gazing with a glazed defiance.
“Quite!” said I.
He continued to gaze at me with glazed, gruesome defiance.
“Ha!” He made a sudden movement, and seemed to break up, collapse and become brokenly natural. “There, you’ve said it. I married my wife when I was a kid of twenty.”
“Mrs. Hale?” I exclaimed.
“Not this one” — he jerked his head towards the door — ”my first wife.” There was a pause; he looked at me with shamed eyes, then turned his wine-glass round and his head dropped. Staring at his twisting glass, he continued: “I married her when I was twenty, and she was twenty-eight. You might say, she married me. Well, there it was! We had three children — I’ve got three married daughters — and we got on all right. I suppose she mothered me, in a way. And I never thought a thing. I was content enough, wasn’t tied to her apron-strings, and she never asked questions. She was always fond of me, and I took it for granted. I took it for granted. Even when she died — I was away in Salonika — I took it for granted, if you understand me. It was part of the rest of things — war — life — death. I knew I should feel lonely when I got back. Well, then I got buried — shell dropped, and the dug-out caved in — and that queered me. They sent me home. And the minute I saw the Lizard light — it was evening when we got up out of the Bay — I realised that Lucy had been waiting for me. I could feel her there, at my side, more plainly than I feel you now. And do you know, at that moment I woke up to her, and she made an awful impression on me. She seemed, if you get me, tremendously powerful, important; everything else dwindled away. There was the Lizard light blinking a long way off, and that meant home. And all the rest was my wife, Lucy: as if her skirts filled all the darkness. In a way, I was frightened; but that was because I couldn’t quite get myself into line. I felt: Good God! I never knew her! And she was this tremendous thing! I felt like a child, and as weak as a kitten. And, believe me or not, from that day to this she’s never left me. I know quite well she can hear what I’m saying. But she’ll let me tell you. I knew that at dinner-time.”
“But what made you marry again?” I said.
“She made me!” He went a trifle yellow on his cheek-bones. “I could feel her telling me: ‘Marry! Marry!’ Lady Lathkill had messages from her too; she was her great friend in life. I didn’t think of marrying. But Lady Lathkill had the same message, that I must marry. Then a medium described the girl in detail: my present wife. I knew her at once, friend of my daughters. After that the messages became more insistent, waking me three and four times in the night. Lady Lathkill urged me to propose, and I did it, and was accepted. My present wife was just twenty-eight, the age Lucy had been — ”
“How long ago did you marry the present Mrs. Hale?”
“A little over a year ago. Well, I thought I had done what was required of me. But directly after the wedding, such a state of terror came over me — perfectly unreasonable — I became almost unconscious. My present wife asked me if I was ill, and I said I was. We got to Paris. I felt I was dying. But I said I was going out to see a doctor, and I found myself kneeling in a church. Then I found peace — and Lucy. She had her arms round me, and I was like a child at peace. I must have knelt there for a couple of hours in Lucy’s arms. I never felt like that when she was alive: why, I couldn’t stand that sort of thing! It’s all come on after — after — And now, I daren’t offend Lucy’s spirit. If I do, I suffer tortures till I’ve made peace again, till she folds me in her arms. Then I can live. But she won’t let me go near the present Mrs. Hale. I — I — I daren’t go near her.”
He looked up at me with fear, and shame, and shameful secrecy, and a sort of gloating showing in his unmanned blue eyes. He had been talking as if in his sleep.
“Why did your dead wife urge you to marry again?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know. She was older than I was, and all the cleverness was on her side. She was a very clever woman, and I was never much in the intellectual line myself. I just took it for granted she liked me. She never showed jealousy, but I think now, perhaps she was jealous all the time, and kept it under.
I don’t know. I think she never felt quite straight about having married me. It seems like that. As if she had something on her mind. Do you know, while she was alive, I never gave it a thought. And now I’m aware of nothing else but her. It’s as if her spirit wanted to live in my body, or at any rate — I don’t know — ”
His blue eyes were glazed, almost fishy, with fear and gloating shame. He had a short nose, and full, self-indulgent lips, and a once-comedy chin. Eternally a careless boy of thirteen. But now, care had got him in decay.
“And what does your present wife say?” I asked.
He poured himself some more wine.
“Why,” he replied, “except for her, I shouldn’t mind so much. She says nothing. Lady Lathkill has explained everything to her, and she agrees that — that — a spirit from the other side is more important than mere pleasure — you know what I mean. Lady Lathkill says that this is a preparation for my next incarnation, when I am going to serve Woman, and help Her to take Her place.”
He looked up again, trying to be proud in his shame.
“Well, what a damned curious story!” exclaimed Lord Lathkill. “Mother’s idea for herself — she had it in a message too — is that she is coming on earth the next time to save the animals from the cruelty of man. That’s why she hates meat at table, or anything that has to be killed.”
“And does Lady Lathkill encourage you in this business with your dead wife?” said I.
“Yes. She helps me. When I get as you might say at cross-purposes with Lucy — with Lucy’s spirit, that is — Lady Lathkill helps to put it right between us. Then I’m all right, when I know I’m loved.”
He looked at me stealthily, cunningly.
“Then you’re all wrong,” said I, “surely.”
“And do you mean to say,” put in Lord Lathkill, “that you don’t live with the present Mrs. Hale at all? Do you mean to say you never have lived with her?”
“I’ve got a higher claim on me,” said the unhappy Colonel.
“My God!” said Lord Lathkill.
I looked in amazement: the sort of chap who picks up a woman and has a good time with her for a week, then goes home as nice as pie, and now look at him! It was obvious that he had a terror of his black-browed new wife, as well as of Lucy’s spirit. A devil and a deep blue sea with a vengenace!
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 669