“A damned curious story!” mused Lord Lathkill. “I’m not so sure I like it. Something’s wrong somewhere. We shall have to go upstairs.”
“Wrong!” said I. “Why, Colonel, don’t you turn round and quarrel with the spirit of your first wife, fatally and finally, and get rid of her?”
The Colonel looked at me, still diminished and afraid, but perking up a bit, as we rose from table.
“How would you go about it?” he said.
“I’d just face her, wherever she seemed to be, and say: ‘Lucy, go to blazes!’“
Lord Lathkill burst into a loud laugh, then was suddenly silent as the door noiselessly opened, and the dowager’s white hair and pointed, uncanny eyes peered in, then entered.
“I think I left my papers in here, Luke,” she murmured.
“Yes, mother. There they are. We’re just coming up.”
“Take your time.”
He held the door, and ducking forward, she went out again, clutching some papers. The Colonel had blenched yellow on his cheek-bones.
We went upstairs to the small drawing-room.
“You were a long time,” said Carlotta, looking in all our faces. “Hope the coffee’s not cold. We’ll have fresh if it is.”
She poured out, and Mrs. Hale carried the cups. The dark young woman thrust out her straight, dusky arm, offering me sugar, and gazing at me with her unchanging, yellow-brown eyes. I looked back at her, and being clairvoyant in this house, was conscious of the curves of her erect body, the sparse black hairs there would be on her strong-skinned dusky thighs. She was a woman of thirty, and she had had a great dread lest she should never marry. Now she was as if mesmerised.
“What do you do usually in the evenings?” I said.
She turned to me as if startled, as she nearly always did when addressed.
“We do nothing,” she replied. “Talk; and sometimes Lady Lathkill reads.”
“What does she read?”
“About spiritualism.”
“Sounds pretty dull.”
She looked at me again, but she did not answer. It was difficult to get anything out of her. She put up no fight, only remained in the same swarthy, passive, negative resistance. For a moment I wondered that no men made love to her: it was obvious they didn’t. But then, modern young men are accustomed to being attracted, flattered, impressed: they expect an effort to please. And Mrs. Hale made none: didn’t know how. Which for me was her mystery. She was passive, static, locked up in a resistant passivity that had fire beneath it.
Lord Lathkill came and sat by us. The Colonel’s confession had had an effect on him.
“I’m afraid,” he said to Mrs. Hale, “you have a thin time here.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Oh, there is so little to amuse you. Do you like to dance?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, then,” he said, “let us go downstairs and dance to the Victrola. There are four of us. You’ll come, of course?” he said to me.
Then he turned to his mother.
“Mother, we shall go down to the morning-room and dance. Will you come? Will you, Colonel?”
The dowager gazed at her son.
“I will come and look on,” she said.
“And I will play the pianola, if you like,” volunteered the Colonel. We went down and pushed aside the chintz chairs and the rugs. Lady Lathkill sat in a chair, the Colonel worked away at the pianola. I danced with Carlotta, Lord Lathkill with Mrs. Hale.
A quiet soothing came over me, dancing with Carlotta. She was very still and remote, and she hardly looked at me. Yet the touch of her was wonderful, like a flower that yields itself to the morning. Her warm, silken shoulder was soft and grateful under my hand, as if it knew me with that second knowledge which is part of one’s childhood, and which so rarely blossoms again in manhood and womanhood. It was as if we had known each other perfectly, as children, and now, as man and woman met in the full, further sympathy. Perhaps, in modern people, only after long suffering and defeat, can the naked intuition break free between woman and man.
She, I knew, let the strain and the tension of all her life depart from her then, leaving her nakedly still, within my arm. And I only wanted to be with her, to have her in my touch.
Yet after the second dance she looked at me, and suggested that she should dance with her husband. So I found myself with the strong, passive shoulder of Mrs. Hale under my hand, and her inert hand in mine, as I looked down at her dusky, dirty-looking neck — she wisely avoided powder. The duskiness of her mesmerised body made me see the faint dark sheen of her thighs, with intermittent black hairs. It was as if they shone through the silk of her mauve dress, like the limbs of a half-wild animal that is locked up in its own helpless dumb winter, a prisoner.
She knew, with the heavy intuition of her sort, that I glimpsed her crude among the bushes, and felt her attraction. But she kept looking away over my shoulder, with her yellow eyes, towards Lord Lathkill.
Myself or him, it was a question of which got there first. But she preferred him. Only for some things she would rather it were me.
Luke had changed curiously. His body seemed to have come alive, in the dark cloth of his evening suit; his eyes had a devil-may-care light in them, his long cheeks a touch of scarlet, and his black hair fell loose over his forehead. He had again some of that Guardsman’s sense of well-being and claim to the best in life, which I had noticed the first time I saw him. But now it was a little more florid, defiant, with a touch of madness.
He looked down at Carlotta with uncanny kindness and affection. Yet he was glad to hand her over to me. He, too, was afraid of her: as if with her his bad luck had worked. Whereas, in a throb of crude brutality, he felt it would not work with the dark young woman. So, he handed Carlotta over to me with relief, as if, with me, she would be safe from the doom of his bad luck. And he, with the other woman, would be safe from it too. For the other woman was outside the circle.
I was glad to have Carlotta again: to have that inexpressible delicate and complete quiet of the two of us, resting my heart in a balance now at last physical as well as spiritual. Till now, it had always been a fragmentary thing. Now, for this hour at least, it was whole, a soft, complete, physical flow, and a unison deeper even than childhood.
As she danced she shivered slightly, and I seemed to smell frost in the air. The Colonel, too, was not keeping the rhythm.
“Has it turned colder?” I said.
“I wonder,” she answered, looking up at me with a slow beseeching. Why, and for what was she beseeching me? I pressed my hand a little closer, and her small breasts seemed to speak to me. The Colonel recovered the rhythm again.
But at the end of the dance she shivered again, and it seemed to me I too was chilled.
“Has it suddenly turned colder?” I said, going to the radiator. It was quite hot.
“It seems to me it has,” said Lord Lathkill in a queer voice.
The Colonel was sitting abjectly on the music-stool, as if broken.
“Shall we have another? Shall we try a tango?” said Lord Lathkill. “As much of it as we can manage?”
“I — I — ” the Colonel began, turning round on the seat, his face yellow. “I’m not sure — ”
Carlotta shivered. The frost seemed to touch my vitals. Mrs. Hale stood stiff, like a pillar of brown rock-salt, staring at her husband.
“We had better leave off,” murmured Lady Lathkill, rising.
Then she did an extraordinary thing. She lifted her face, staring to the other side, and said suddenly, in a clear, cruel sort of voice:
“Are you here, Lucy?”
She was speaking across to the spirits. Deep inside me leaped a jump of laughter. I wanted to howl with laughter. Then instantly I went inert again. The chill gloom seemed to deepen suddenly in the room, everybody was overcome. On the piano-seat the Colonel sat yellow and huddled, with a terrible hang-dog look of guilt on his face. There was a silence, in which the cold seeme
d to creak. Then came again the peculiar bell-like ringing of Lady Lathkill’s voice:
“Are you here? What do you wish us to do?”
A dead and ghastly silence, in which we all remained transfixed. Then from somewhere came two slow thuds, and a sound of drapery moving. The Colonel, with mad fear in his eyes, looked round at the uncurtained windows, and crouched on his seat.
“We must leave this room,” said Lady Lathkill.
“I’ll tell you what, mother,” said Lord Lathkill curiously; “you and the Colonel go up, and we’ll just turn on the Victrola.”
That was almost uncanny of him. For myself, the cold effluence of these people had paralysed me. Now I began to rally. I felt that Lord Lathkill was sane, it was these other people who were mad.
Again from somewhere indefinite came two slow thuds.
“We must leave this room,” repeated Lady Lathkill in monotony.
“All right, mother. You go. I’ll just turn on the Victrola.”
And Lord Lathkill strode across the room. In another moment the monstrous barking howl of the opening of a jazz tune, an event far more extraordinary than thuds, poured from the unmoving bit of furniture called a Victrola.
Lady Lathkill silently departed. The Colonel got to his feet.
“I wouldn’t go if I were you, Colonel,” said I. “Why not dance? I’ll look on this time.”
I felt as if I were resisting a rushing, cold, dark current.
Lord Lathkill was already dancing with Mrs. Hale, skating delicately along, with a certain smile of obstinacy, secrecy, and excitement kindled on his face. Carlotta went up quietly to the Colonel, and put her hand on his broad shoulder. He let himself be moved into the dance, but he had no heart in it.
There came a heavy crash, out of the distance. The Colonel stopped as if shot: in another moment he would go down on his knees. And his face was terrible. It was obvious he really felt another presence, other than ours, blotting us out. The room seemed dree and cold. It was heavy work, bearing up.
The Colonel’s lips were moving, but no sound came forth. Then, absolutely oblivious of us, he went out of the room.
The Victrola had run down. Lord Lathkill went to wind it up again, saying:
“I suppose mother knocked over a piece of furniture.”
But we were all of us depressed, in abject depression.
“Isn’t it awful!” Carlotta said to me, looking up beseechingly.
“Abominable!” said I.
“What do you think there is in it?”
“God knows. The only thing is to stop it, as one does hysteria. It’s on a par with hysteria.”
“Quite,” she said.
Lord Lathkill was dancing, and smiling very curiously down into his partner’s face. The Victrola was at its loudest.
Carlotta and I looked at one another, with hardly the heart to start again. The house felt hollow and gruesome. One wanted to get out, to get away from the cold, uncanny blight which filled the air.
“Oh, I say, keep the ball rolling,” called Lord Lathkill.
“Come,” I said to Carlotta.
Even then she hung back a little. If she had not suffered, and lost so much, she would have gone upstairs at once to struggle in the silent wrestling of wills with her mother-in-law. Even now, that particular fight drew her, almost the strongest. But I took her hand.
“Come,” I said. “Let us dance it down. We’ll roll the ball the opposite way.”
She danced with me, but she was absent, unwilling. The empty gloom of the house, the sense of cold, and of deadening opposition, pressed us down. I was looking back over my life, and thinking how the cold weight of an unliving spirit was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything. Even Carlotta herself had gone numb again, cold and resistant even to me. The thing seemed to happen wholesale in her.
“One has to choose to live,” I said, dancing on. But I was powerless. With a woman, when her spirit goes inert in opposition, a man can do nothing. I felt my life-flow sinking in my body.
“This house is awfully depressing,” I said to her, as we mechanically danced. “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you get out of this tangle? Why don’t you break it?”
“How?” she said.
I looked down at her, wondering why she was suddenly hostile.
“You needn’t fight,” I said. “You needn’t fight it. Don’t get tangled up in it. Just side-step, on to another ground.”
She made a pause of impatience before she replied:
“I don’t see where I am to side-step to, precisely.”
“You do,” said I. “A little while ago, you were warm and unfolded and good. Now you are shut up and prickly, in the cold. You needn’t be. Why not stay warm?”
“It’s nothing I do,” she said coldly.
“It is. Stay warm to me. I am here. Why clutch in a tug-of-war with Lady Lathkill?”
“Do I clutch in a tug-of-war with my mother-in-law?”
“You know you do.”
She looked up at me, with a faint little shadow of guilt and beseeching, but with a moue of cold obstinacy dominant.
“Let’s have done,” said I.
And in cold silence we sat side by side on the lounge.
The other two danced on. They at any rate were in unison. One could see from the swing of their limbs. Mrs. Hale’s yellow-brown eyes looked at me every time she came round.
“Why does she look at me?” I said.
“I can’t imagine,” said Carlotta, with a cold grimace.
“I’d better go upstairs and see what’s happening,” she said, suddenly rising and disappearing in a breath.
Why should she go? Why should she rush off to the battle of wills with her mother-in-law? In such a battle, while one has any life to lose, one can only lose it. There is nothing positively to be done, but to withdraw out of the hateful tension.
The music ran down. Lord Lathkill stopped the Victrola.
“Carlotta gone?” he said.
“Apparently.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
“Wild horses wouldn’t stop her.”
He lifted his hand with a mocking gesture of helplessness.
“The lady loves her will,” he said. “Would you like to dance?”
I looked at Mrs. Hale.
“No,” I said. “I won’t butt in. I’ll play the pianola. The Victrola’s a brute.”
I hardly noticed the passage of time. Whether the others danced or not, I played, and was unconscious of almost everything. In the midst of one rattling piece, Lord Lathkill touched my arm.
“Listen to Carlotta. She says closing time,” he said, in his old musical voice, but with the sardonic ring of war in it now.
Carlotta stood with her arms dangling, looking like a penitent schoolgirl.
“The Colonel has gone to bed. He hasn’t been able to manage a reconciliation with Lucy,” she said. “My mother-in-law thinks we ought to let him try to sleep.”
Carlotta’s slow eyes rested on mine, questioning, penitent — or so I imagined — and somewhat sphinx-like.
“Why, of course,” said Lord Lathkill. “I wish him all the sleep in the world.”
Mrs. Hale said never a word.
“Is mother retiring too?” asked Luke.
“I think so.”
“Ah! then supposing we up and look at the supper-tray.”
We found Lady Lathkill mixing herself some nightcap brew over a spirit-lamp: something milky and excessively harmless. She stood at the sideboard stirring her potations, and hardly noticed us. When she had finished she sat down with her steaming cup.
“Colonel Hale all right, mother?” said Luke, looking across at her.
The dowager, under her uplift of white hair, stared back at her son. There was an eye-battle for some moments, during which he maintained his arch, debonair ease, just a bit crazy.
“No,” said Lady Lathkill, “he is in great trouble.”
“Ah!” replied her son
. “Awful pity we can’t do anything for him. But if flesh and blood can’t help him, I’m afraid I’m a dud. Suppose he didn’t mind our dancing? Frightfully good for us! We’ve been forgetting that we’re flesh and blood, mother.”
He took another whisky and soda, and gave me one. And in a paralysing silence Lady Lathkill sipped her hot brew, Luke and I sipped our whiskies, the young woman ate a little sandwich. We all preserved an extraordinary aplomb, and an obstinate silence.
It was Lady Lathkill who broke it. She seemed to be sinking downwards, crouching into herself like a skulking animal.
“I suppose,” she said, “we shall all go to bed?”
“You go mother. We’ll come along in a moment.”
She went, and for some time we four sat silent. The room seemed to become pleasanter, the air was more grateful.
“Look here,” said Lord Lathkill at last. “What do you think of this ghost business?”
“I?” said I. “I don’t like the atmosphere it produces. There may be ghosts, and spirits, and all that. The dead must be somewhere; there’s no such place as nowhere. But they don’t affect me particularly. Do they you?”
“Well,” he said, “no, not directly. Indirectly I suppose it does.”
“I think it makes a horribly depressing atmosphere, spiritualism,” said I. “I want to kick.”
“Exactly! And ought one?” he asked in his terribly sane-seeming way.
This made me laugh. I knew what he was up to.
“I don’t know what you mean by ought,” said I. “If I really want to kick, if I know I can’t stand a thing, I kick. Who’s going to authorise me, if my own genuine feeling doesn’t?”
“Quite,” he said, staring at me like an owl, with a fixed, meditative stare.
“Do you know,” he said, “I suddenly thought at dinner-time, what corpses we all were, sitting eating our dinners. I thought it when I saw you look at those little Jerusalem artichoke things in a white sauce. Suddenly it struck me, you were alive and twinkling, and we were all bodily dead. Bodily dead, if you understand. Quite alive in other directions, but bodily dead. And whether we ate vegetarian or meat made no difference. We were bodily dead.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 670