3rd Man. I don’t think! The Old One and his demi-god sons, what are they? They are taller than the sons of men, but they are slower. They are stronger, but it seems to me they are duller. Ask women what they think of the sons of Noah, the demi-gods! Ah, the sons of God! They follow at the heels of the daughters of men, and the daughters of men laugh beneath the black beards, as they laugh when the bull snorts, and they are on the safe side of the wall. Big is the bull by the river, but a boy leads him by the nose. So, if you ask me, do we lead these big ones, these demigods, old Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japhet.
1st Man. If we had the secret of the red flutterer.
3rd Man. Ha! I have the name of that Bird. Ham told a woman that the name is Fire.
1st Man. Fire! It is a poor name. What is its father, and who its mother?
3rd Man. Nay, that Ham did not tell. It is a secret of these demigods. But I tell you. It comes out of an egg. And the Old One knows where the eggs of that bird called Fire are laid. So he gathers them up, for his house.
2nd Man. He shall tell us.
3rd Man. No, he will never tell us. But his sons may. Because if we knew the secret of the red bird they call Fire, and could find the eggs and have the young ones flutter in our houses, then we should be greater than Noah and his sons. The sons of men already are wittier than the sons of God. If we had the scarlet chicken they call Fire, between our hands, we could do away with the sons of God, and have the world for our own.
1st Man. So it should be. The sons of men are numberless, but these sons of God are few and slow. The sons of men know the secret of all things, save that of the red flutterer. The sons of men are the makers of everything. The sons of God command and chide, but what can they make, with their slow hands? Why are they lords, save that they guard the red bird which should now be ours. What name do they give it, again?
3rd Man. Fire.
1st Man. Fire! Fire! And that is all their secret and their power: merely Fire! Already we know their secret.
3rd Man. Ham told it to a woman, and even as she lay with him she laughed beneath his beard, and mocked him.
1st Man. Yet this red bird hatches the pale dough into bread, into good dark bread. Let us swear to catch the red bird, and take it to our houses. And when it has laid its eggs, we will kill the demigods, and have the earth to ourselves. For the sons of men must be free.
2nd Man. Yes, indeed! Free! Free! Is it not a greater word than Fire? We will kill the demi-gods and be free. But first we must catch the red bird, take him alive, in a snare.
1st Man. Ah, if we could! For Ham has told us that the feathers shine like feathers of the sun, with warmth, even hotter than the sun at noon.
2nd Man. Then it were very good if we had him, seeing the sun in heaven has lost his best feathers, and limps dustily across the heavens like a moulting hen. Ah men, have you learnt what it is to shiver?
3rd Man. Have we not! Even in the day-time shivers seize us, since the sun has moulted his rays. And shivering in the day-time is like dying before one’s hour. The death-shiver is on us. We must capture the red bird, so that he flutters his wings in our houses and brightens our flesh, as the moulting sun used to do, till he fell poor and mean. 2nd Man. You know what Shem says? He says there are three birds: the little red bird in the houses of the demi-gods —
3rd Man. The one Ham calls Fire. We must lay hold of that one.
2nd Man. Then the bigger bird of the sun, that beats his yellow wings and makes us warm, and makes the ferns unroll, and the fern-seed fall brown, for bread.
3rd Man. Ay, the bird of the sun! But he is moulting, and has lost his ray-feathers and limps through grey dust across the sky. He is not to be depended on. Let us once get hold of the red chick Ham calls Fire, and we will forget the sick sun of heaven. We need our sun in our grasp. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
2nd Man. Yet you know what Shem says. Far, far away beyond the yellow sun that flies across the sky every day, taking the red berries to his nest, there lives the Great White Bird, that no man has ever seen.
3rd Man. Nor no demi-god either.
2nd Man. In the middle of the tree of darkness is a nest, and in the nest sits the Great White Bird. And when he rises on his nest and beats his wings, a glow of strength goes through the world. And the stars are the small white birds that have their nests among the outer leaves. And our yellow sun is a young one that does but fly across from the eastern bough to the western, near us, each day. and in his flight stirs with his feathers the blue dust of space, so we see him in the blue of heaven, flashing his sun-pinions. But beyond the blue fume of the sky, all the time, beyond our seeing, the Great White Bird roosts at the centre of the tree.
3rd Man. Hast thou seen thy Great White Bird, fool?
2nd Man. I? No!
3rd Man. When dost thou expect to see him?
2nd Man. I? Never!
3rd Man. Then why dost thou talk of him?
2nd Man. Because Shem told me.
3rd Man. Shem! He is fooling thee. Did he tell thee the secret of the little red bird?
2nd Man. That, no!
3rd Man. That, no! Rather will he tell thee of a Great White Duck that no man ever did see or ever will see. Art thou not a fool?
2nd Man. Nay, for listen! Shem says that even the yellow sun cannot fly across from the eastern bough to the western, save on the wind of the wings of the Great White Bird. On the dead air he cannot make heading. Likewise, Shem says, the air men breathe is dead air, dead in the breast, save it is stirred fresh from the wings of the Great White Bird.
3rd Man. The air in my breast is not dead.
2nd Man. And so it is, the sun struggles in grey dust across the heavy sky, because the wings of the Great White Bird send us no stir, there is no freshness for us. And so we shiver, and feel our death upon us beforehand, because the Great White Bird has sunk down, and will no more wave his wings gladly towards us.
1st Man. And pray, why should he be moping?
2nd Man. Because the sons of men never breathe his name in answer. Even as the ferns breathe fern-seed, which is the fume of their answer to the sun, and the little green flowers that are invisible make a perfume like the sky speaking with a voice, answering deep into heaven, so the hearts of men beat the warmth and wildness of an answer to the Great White Bird, who sips it in and is rejoiced, lifting his wings. But now the hearts of men are answer- less, like slack drums gone toneless. They say: We ourselves are the Great White Birds of the Universe. It is we who keep the wheel going! — So they cry in impertinence, and the Great White Bird lifts his wings no more, to send the wind of newness and morning into us. So we are stale, and inclining towards dead- ness. We capture the yellow metal and the white, and we think we have captured the answerer. For the yellow gold and the white silver are pure voices of answer calling still from under the oldest dawn, to the Great White Bird, as the cock crows at sunrise. So we capture the first bright answerers, and say: Lo! we are lords of the answer. — But the answer is not to us, though we hold the gold in our fist. And the wings of the Bird are slack.
1st Man. What is all this talk? Is the humming-bird less blue, less brilliant?
2nd Man. It is Shem’s word, not mine. But he says, the Great White Bird will waft his wings even to the beast, for the beast is an answerer. But he will withhold his draught of freshness from the new beast called man, for man is impertinent and answerless. And the small white birds, the stars, are happy still in the outer boughs, hopping among the furthest leaves of the tree, and twittering their bright answer. But men are answerless, and dust settles on them; they shiver, and are woe begone in spite of their laughter.
1st Man. Nay, thou art a mighty talker! But thy Great White Bird is only a decoy-duck to drag thee into obedience to these demigods, who cannot stoop to sweep the fern-seed for themselves, but must bid the children of men. — And thou art a fool duck decoyed into their net. Did Japhet ever talk of a Great White Bird? And Japhet is shrewd. Japhet says: Ah, you
sons of men, your life is a predicament. You live between warm and cold; take care. If you fall into great heat, you are lost, if you slip down the crevices of cold, you are gone for ever. If the waters forsake you, you are vanished, and if the waters come down on you, you are swept away. You cannot ride on the heat nor live beneath the waters. The place you walk on is narrow as a plank across a torrent. You must live on the banks of the stream, for if the stream dries up, you die, but if the stream flows over its banks, likewise you die. Yet of the stream you ask not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. It travels for ever past you, it is always going, so you say. The stream is there, I tell you, watch lest it be not there. Watch lest the banks be gone beneath the flood. For the waters run past you like wolves which are on the scent. And waters come down on you like flocks of grasshoppers from the sky, alighting from the invisible. But what are the wolves running for, and what hatched the flying waters in mid-heaven? You know not. You ask not. Yet your life is a travelling thread of water for ever passing. Ask then, and it shall be answered you. Know the whither and the whence, and not a wolf shall slip silently by in the night, without your consent. Ask and it shall be answered unto you. Ask! Ask! and all things shall be answered unto you, as the cock answers the sun. Oh, wonderful race of Askers, there shall be no answer ye shall not wing out of the depths. And who answers, serves. — So says Japhet, and says well. And if we had the red flutterer, it should answer to us, and all things after should answer to us for their existence. And we should be the invincible, the Askers, those that set the questions.
3rd Man. It is so. If we had the red bird in our hand, we could force the sun to give himself up in answer; yea, even the Great White Bird would answer in obedience. So we could unleash the waters from the ice, and shake the drops from the sky, in answer to our demand. The demi-gods are dumb askers, they get half- answers from us all. What we want is the red bird.
1st Man. It is true. That is all we need.
2nd Man. Then let us take it. Let us steal it from their house, and be free.
3rd Man. It is the great word: let us be free. Let us yield our answer no more, neither to gods nor demi-gods, sun nor inner sun.
1st Man. Men, masters of fire, and free on the face of the earth. Free from the need to answer, masters of the question. Lo, when we are lords of the question, how humbly the rest shall answer. Even the stars shall bow humbly, and yield us their reply, and the sun shall no more have a will of his own.
2nd Man. Can we do it?
1st Man. Can we not! We are the sons of men, heirs and successors of the sons of God. Japhet said to me: The sons of men cannot capture the gift of fire: for it is a gift. Till it is given to them, by the sons of God, they cannot have it. — I said to him: Give us the gift. — He said: Nay! for ye know not how to ask. When ye know how to ask, it shall be given you.
3rd Man. So! What they will not give, we will take.
2nd Man. Yes, we will take it, in spite of them. We are heirs of the gods and the sons of God. We are heirs of all. Let us take the flutterer and be free. We have the right to everything; so let us take.
1st Man. Japhet said: it is a gift!
(Enter Noah) [Unfinished]
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
Nothing depresses me more than to come home to the place where I was born, and where I lived my first twenty years, here, at Newthorpe, this coal-mining village on the Nottingham-Derby border. The place has grown, but not very much, the pits are poor. Only it has changed. There is a tram-line from Nottingham through the one street, and buses to Nottingham and Derby. The shops are bigger, more plate-glassy: there are two picture-palaces, and one Palais de Danse.
But nothing can save the place from the poor, grimy, mean effect of the Midlands, the little grimy brick houses with slate roofs, the general effect of paltriness, smallness, meanness, fathomless ugliness, combined with a sort of chapel-going respectability. It is the same as when I was a boy, only more so.
Now, it is all tame. It was bad enough, thirty years ago, when it was still on the upward grade, economically. But then the old race of miners were not immensely respectable. They filled the pubs with smoke and bad language, and they went with dogs at their heels. There was a sense of latent wildness and unbrokenness, a weird sense of thrill and adventure in the pitch-dark Midland nights, and roaring footballing Saturday afternoons. The country in between the collier)’ regions had a lonely sort of fierceness and beauty, half- abandoned, and threaded with poaching colliers and whippet dogs. Only thirty years ago!
Now it seems so different. The colliers of today are the men of my generation, lads I went to school with. I find it hard to believe. They were rough, wild lads. They are not rough, wild men. The board-school, the Sunday-school, the Band of Hope, and, above all, their mothers got them under. Got them under, made them tame. Made them sober, conscientious, and decent. Made them good husbands. When I was a boy, a collier who was a good husband was an exception to the rule, and while the women with bad husbands pointed him out as a shining example, they also despised him a little, as a petticoat man.
But nearly all the men of my generation are good husbands. There they stand, at the street corners, pale, shrunken, well-dressed, decent, and under. The drunken colliers of my father’s generation were not got under. The decent colliers of my generation are go* under entirely. They are so patient, so forbearing, so willing to listen to reason, so ready to put themselves aside. And there they stand, at the street corners and the entry-ends, the rough lads I went to school with, men now, with smart daughters and bossy wives and cigarette-smoking lads of their own. There they stand, then, and white as cheap wax candles, spectral, as if they had no selves any more: decent, patient, self-effacing sort of men, who have seen the war and the high-water-mark wages, and now are down again, under, completely under, with not a tuppence to rattle in their pockets. There they are, poor as their fathers before them, but poor with a hopeless outlook and a new and expensive world around them.
When I was a boy, the men still used to sing: “There’s a good time coming, boys, there’s a good time coming!” Well, it has come, and gone. If anybody sang now, they’d sing: “It’s a bad time now, and a worse time coming.” But the men of my generation are dumb: they have been got under and made good.
As for the next generation, that is something different. As soon as mothers become self-conscious, sons become what their mothers make them. My mother’s generation was the first generation of working-class mothers to become really self-conscious. Our grandmothers were still too much under our grandfathers’ thumb, and there was still too much masculine kick against petticoat rule. But with the next generation, the woman freed herself at least mentally and spiritually from the husband’s domination, and then she became that great institution, that character-forming power, the mother of my generation. I am sure the character of nine-tenths of the men of my generation was formed by the mother: the character of the daughters too.
And what sort of characters? Well, the woman of my mother’s generation was in reaction against the ordinary high-handed, obstinate husband who went off to the pub to enjoy himself and to waste the bit of money that was so precious to the family. The woman felt herself the higher moral being: and justly, as far as economic morality goes. She therefore assumed the major responsibility for the family, and the husband let her. So she proceeded to mould a generation.
Mould it to the shape of her own unfulfilled desire, of course. What had she wanted, all her life? — a “good” husband, gentle and understanding and moral, one who did not go to pubs and drink and waste the bit of wages, but who lived for his wife and his children.
Millions of mothers in Great Britain, in the latter half of Victoria’s reign, unconsciously proceeded to produce sons to pattern. And they produced them, by the million: good sons, who would make good, steady husbands who would live for their wives and families. And there they are! we’ve got ‘em now! the men of my generation, men between forty and fifty, men who almost all had Mothers w
ith a big m.
And then the daughters! Because the mothers who produced so many “good sons” and future “good husbands” were at the same time producing daughters, perhaps without taking so much thought or exercising so much will-power over it, but producing them iust as inevitably.
What sort of daughters came from these morally responsible mothers? As we should expect, daughters morally confident. The mothers had known some little hesitancy in their moral supremacy. But the daughters were quite assured. The daughters were always right. They were born with a sense of self-rightness that sometimes was hoity-toity, and sometimes was seemingly wistful: but there it was, the inevitable sense that I-am-right. This the women of my generation drew in with their mothers’ milk, this feeling that they were “right” and must be “right” and nobody must gainsay them. It is like being born with one eye; you can’t help it.
We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams are made on. This terrible truth should never be forgotten. Our grandmothers dreamed of wonderful “free” womanhood in a “pure” world, surrounded by “adoring, humble, high-minded” men. Our mothers started to put the dream into practice. And we are the fulfilment. We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams were made on.
For I think it cannot be denied that ours is the generation of “free” womanhood, and a helplessly “pure” world, and of pathetic “adoring, humble, high-minded” men.
We are, more or less, such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams are made on. But the dream changes with every new generation of grandmothers. Already my mother, while having a definite ideal for her sons, of “humble, adoring, high-minded” men, began to have secret dreams of her own: dreams of some Don Juan sort of person whose influence would make the vine of Dionysus grow and coil over the pulpit of our Congregational Chapel. I myself, her son, could see the dream peeping out, thrusting little tendrils through her paved intention of having “good sons.” It was my turn to be the “good son.” It would be my son’s turn to fulfil the other dream, or dreams: the secret ones.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1075