Bitter it was to him, when a friend at the high school who took him home to tea, refused to continue the friendship as soon as he heard Lawrence was a miner's son. Then I would tell him about my early life in Lorraine. Mine had been a happy childhood. We had a lovely house and gardens outside Metz. I lived through the flowers, as they came: snowdrops, scyllae and crocuses, the enormous oriental poppies in their vivid green leaves so overwhelmingly near one's small face, the delicate male irises. My father would pick the first asparagus and I would trot behind his bent back. Later in the summer I lived on the fruit trees: cherry, pear, apple, plum, peach trees. I would even go to sleep on them and fall off, sometimes, trying to do my lessons up in them. I did not like school.
First I went to a convent, where I did not learn very much. 'Toujours doucement, ma petite Frieda,' they would say to me as I came dashing into class with my Hessian boots. But it was no use; I was a wild child and they could not tame me, those gentle nuns. I was happiest with the soldiers, who had temporary barracks outside our house for years. They invited my sister Johanna and me to their big Christmas tree hung with sausages, cigars, 'hearts of gingerbread,' packages from home, and little dolls they had carved for us. And they sang for us accompanied by their mournful harmonicas:
'Wenn ich zu meinem Kinde geh.'
Once my father's old regiment acted the occasion on which he had received his iron cross in the Franco-Prussian War. It was on the Kaiser's birthday. After the ceremony the soldiers lifted my father on their shoulders and carried him through the hall. My heart beat to bursting: 'What a hero my father is!'
But a few days after one of my special friends, a corporal, told me how he hated being a soldier, how bullied you were, how unjust and stupid it all was, that military life. He stood there talking to me in the garden path, in his bright blue uniform, while he tied some roses. He had a mark over his bed for each day he had still to serve, he told me. A hundred and nineteen more there were, he said. I looked up at him and understood his suffering. After that the flags of the dragoons and the splendid bands of the regiments had no longer the same glamour as they passed along the end of the garden to the Exerzierplatz. n.i.b.t.y.-c When the regiments were filing past, Johanna and I sat on the garden wall, very grandly. Then we would throw pears and apples into the ranks. Great confusion would arise. An irate major turned toward his men and yelled, we popped quickly out of sight behind the wall, only to reappear and begin anew.
What I loved most of all was playing with my boy friends in the fortifications around Metz, among the huts and trenches the soldiers had built. I always liked being with the boys and men. Only they gave me the kind of interest I wanted. Women and girls frightened me. My adolescence and youth puzzled me. Pleasure and social stuff left me unsatisfied. There was something more I wanted, I wanted so much. Where would I get it, and from whom? With Lawrence I found what I wanted. All the exuberance of my childhood came back to me.
One day I bathed in the Isar and a heel came off one of my shoes on the rough shore; so I took both shoes off and threw them into the Isar. Lawrence looked at me in amazement. 'He's shocked, as I must walk home barefoot, but it's a lonely road, it doesn't matter,' I thought. But it wasn't that; he was shocked at my wastefulness.
He lectured me: 'A pair of shoes takes a long time to make and you should respect the labour somebody's put into those shoes.'
To which I answered: 'Things are there for me and not I for them, so when they are a nuisance I throw them away.'
I was very untidy and careless, so he took great pains to make me more orderly. 'Look, put your woollen things in this drawer, in this one your silk clothes, and here your cotton ones.'
It sounded amusing, so I did it.
When I said: 'But I like to be like the lilies in the field, who do not spin.'
'What! Don't they just work hard, those lilies,' was his reply. 'They have to bring up their sap, produce their leaves, flowers and seeds!' That was that. Later on he aroused my self-respect. 'You can't even make a decent cup of coffee. Any common woman can do lots of things that you can't do.'
'Oh,' I thought, 'I'll show him if I can't.' But that was later on.
One day, in Munich, seeing all the elegant people in the streets I had an aristocratic fit. I bought some handkerchiefs with an F and a little crown on them. When I brought them home he said: 'Now I'll draw my coat-of-arms.' He drew a pickaxe, a school-board, a fountain pen with two lions rampant. 'When they make me a Lord, which they never will,' he said. Then, half jokingly, but I took it seriously: 'Would you like me to become King of England?' I was distressed. 'Isn't he satisfied, the whole universe is ours, does he want to be so dull a thing as a king?' But I never doubted that he might have been a king if he wanted to. Then he would write poems for me, poems I took a little anxiously, seeing he knew me so well.
He would go for walks by himself, and his quick, light feet coming home told me in their footfall how he had enjoyed his adventure.
He would have a large, heroic bunch of flowers, or a tight little posy for me or a bright bird's feather.
Then the story of his adventure, a deer peeping at him inquisitively from the underbrush, a handsome Bavarian peasant he had spoken to, how raspberries were just coming out, soldiers marching along the road.
Then again we would be thrown out of our paradisial state. Letters would come. The harm we had done; my grief for my children would return red hot.
But Lawrence would console me and say: 'Don't be sad, I'll make a new heaven and earth for them, don't cry, you see if I don't.' I would be consoled yet he was furious when I went on. 'You don't care a damn about those brats really, and they don't care about you.' I cried and we quarrelled.
'What kind of an unnatural woman would I be if I could forget my children?' Yet my agony over them was my worst crime in his eyes. He seemed to make that agony more acute in me than it need have been. Perhaps he, who had loved his mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children. But I was so sure: 'This bond is for ever, nothing in heaven or earth can break it. I must wait, I must wait!'
My father had written: 'You travel about the world like a barmaid.' It was a grief to him, who loved me, that I was so poor, and socially impossible.
I only felt wonderfully free, 'vogelfrei' indeed. To Lawrence fell the brunt of the fight, and he protected me. 'You don't know how I stand between you and the world,' he said, later on. If I supported him with all my might, the wings of his sure spirit made a shelter for me always.
Now I lie writing by the stream, where it makes a little pool. The bushes all around form an enclosed shelter for bathing, while in front stretches the alfalfa field, then the trees, then the desert, so vast and changing with sun and shadow. Curtains of rain, floating clouds, grey, delicate, thin but to the west today white, large, round, billowing.
It is the end ofjune. I wonder if the strawberries are ripe, in the hollow by the aqueduct, or if the wild roses are out, the very pink ones, along the stream by the Gallina. Shall I see a wild turkey, if I walk along the path Lawrence took so often, I running behind, to the mouth of the Gallina?
He and Mr Murry laid the big pipes on pillars of wood to bring the water along. Where tall aspens stand and the Gallina waters come tearing down. Often the pipes had to be fixed, after a cloudburst had broken the whole thing down.
Here at the ranch we are alive and busy, but Lawrence will see it no more.
Last night the coyotes have torn to pieces a young sheep, on the ranch. Poor thing, that looked at me with scared sheep's eyes, when I drew near. How hateful coyotes are. Mr Murry tells me they even play with lambs, whisking their tails among them, to get them away more easily. Nature sweet and pure!
This is one of the perfect moments here. The days are swinging their serene hours across the immense skies, the sun sets splendidly, then a star comes, and the young moon in the old moon's arms. The water sings louder than in the daytime. More and more stars come as the light fades out o
f the western sky.
But then, in the silence of the beautiful night, the coyotes, a few yards from the house, tore the lamb to pieces. How I wish someone would shoot them all, but they are hard to shoot.
Here I am in the present again, when I want to write of the past. I will go back to Icking, our village in the Isartal, and that young Lawrence who was beginning to spread his wings.
I think of my going into a chapel, in a village near Beuerberg. I looked at the Madonna on the altar; she wasn't a mater dolorosa, nor of the spiritual sort, she was of the placid peasant type, and I said to her: 'Yes, you have a halo round your head, but I feel as if I had a halo around the whole of me, that's how he makes me feel. You have nothing but a dead son. It doesn't seem good enough for me. Give me a live man.'
Sitting on a little landing pier, once, by the Kochelsee, dangling our feet in the clear water of the lake, Lawrence was putting the rings of my fingers on my toes to see how they looked in the clear water. Suddenly a shower overtook us. There was a bunch of trees behind, and a road going in both directions. We ran for shelter and must have run in opposite ways. I looked all around but Lawrence was not there. A great fear came over me, I had lost him, perhaps he was drowned, slipped into the lake. I called, I went to look, somehow he had dissolved into the air, I should never see him again. There was always this 'not of the earth' quality about him.
By the time I saw him coming down the road, an hour later, I was almost in hysterics. 'Brother Moonshine' I called him, as in the German fairytale. He didn't like that.
Then he would sit in a corner, so quietly and absorbedly, to write. The words seemed to pour out of his hand onto the paper, unconsciously, naturally and without effort, as flowers bloom and birds fly past.
His was a strange concentration, he seemed transferred into another world, the world of creation.
He'd have quick changes of mood and thought. This puzzled me. 'But Lawrence, last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.'
'And why shouldn't I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn't I?'
We talked about style in writing, about the new style Americans had evolved - cinematographic, he called it.
All this idea of style and form puzzled Lawrence.
For my part, I felt certain that a genuine creation would take its own form inevitably, the way every living thing does.
All those phrases 'Art for art's sake,”Le style c'est l'homme,' are all very well but they aren't creation. But Lawrence had to be quite sure in everything.
On some evenings he would be so gay and act a whole revival meeting for me, as in the chapel of his home town.
There was the revivalist parson. He would work his ngregation up to a frenzy; then, licking his finger to turn the imaginary pages of the book of Judgment and suddenly darting a finger at some sinner in the congregation: 'Isyour name written in the book?' he would shout.
A collier's wife in a little sailor straw hat, in a frenzy of repentance, would clatter down the aisle, throw herself on her knees in front of the altar, and pray: 'Oh Lord, our Henry, he would 'ave come too, only he dursn't, O Lord, so I come as well for him, O Lord!' It was a marvellous scene! First as the parson then as the collier's wife Lawrence made me shake with laughter. He told me how desperately ill he had been at sixteen, with inflammation of the lungs, how he was almost dead but fought his way back to life with the fierce courage and vitality that was his. It made me long to make him strong and healthy.
Healthy in soul he always was. He may have been cross and irritable sometimes but he was never sorry for himself and all he suffered.
This poem was written in the Isartal:
SONG OF A MAN WHO IS LOVED
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests,
Warm in a city of strength, between her breasts.
All day long I am busy and happy at my work
I need not glance over my shoulder in fear of the terrors that lurk
Behind. I am fortified, I am glad at my work.
I need not look after my soul; beguile my fear
With prayer, I need only come home each night to find the dear
Door on the latch, and shut myself in, shut out fear.
I need only come home each night and lay
My face between her breasts;
And what of good I have given the day, my peace attests.
And what I have failed in, what I have wronged
Comes up unnamed from her body and surely
Silent tongued I am ashamed.
And I hope to spend eternity
With my face down-buried between her breasts
And my still heart full of security
And my still hands full of her breasts.
Walking to Italy
It is five o'clock in the morning. The air is fresh after last night's heavy rain. There is a slight mist, but the sun from the desert is driving it away.
Suddenly it comes over me so strongly that Lawrence is dead, really dead. The grief for his loss will be my steady companion for the rest of my life. Sometimes it will be a friend, consoling me, putting everything in proper proportion. And sometimes this grief will follow me, dogging my footsteps like a hyena, not wanting me to live. Never will anything matter so desperately any more.
I remember Lawrence saying to me: 'You always identify yourself with life, why do you?'
I answered: 'Because I feel like it.'
I know now how completely he trusted his life to me, he in whom death was always so near.
I hated that death and I fought against it like a demon, unconsciously on my own. I did not know he was consumptive till years later when the doctor in Mexico told me. All my life with him there was this secret fear that I could not share with him. I had to bear it alone. Then in the end I knew, and it was an awful knowledge, that I could do no more. Death was stronger than I. His life hung by a thread and one day that thread would break. He would die before his time.
This true mountain morning takes me back to our journey across the Alps.
It was in the middle of August that we set out gaily. Neither of us knew Italy at the time, it was a great adventure for both. We packed up our few possessions, three trunks went ahead of us to the Lago di Garda. We set off on foot, with a rucksack each and a Burberry. In the rucksack was a little spirit lamp, we were going to cook our food by the roadside for cheapness.
We started on a misty morning very thrilled. The trees were dripping along the road, but we were happy in our adventure, free, going to unknown parts. We walked along the solid green of the valley of the Isar, we climbed up hills and went down again. One of my desires, to sleep in haylofts, was fulfilled. But sleeping in haylofts is uncomfortable, really. It rained so much and we were soaked. And the wind blows through haylofts and if you cover yourself with a ton of hay you still can't get warm. Lawrence has described the crucifixes we passed, the lovely chapel he found high up in the mountains. He lit the candles on the altar, for it was evening, read all the ex-votos and forgot how tired and hungry he was.
Here are some poems he wrote about this time:
ALL OF ROSES
I
By the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing:
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman's ladder and sat swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes;
While river met river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier-water filled the evening.
By the Isar, in the twilight
We found our warm wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was scent of roses, and glimmering
In the twilight, our kisses across the roses
Met, and her face, and my face, were roses.
II
When she
rises in the morning
I linger to watch her.
She stands in silhouette against the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders:
While down her sides, the mellow
Golden shadow glows, and her breasts
Swing like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water
And her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and shaken roses, and I listen
For the rustling of their white, unfolding petals.
In the window full of sunlight
She stirs her golden shadow
And flashes all herself as sunbright
As if roses fought with roses.
III
Just a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar
Are fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the cloth
Float like boats on a river, waiting
For a fairy-wind to wake them from their sloth.
She laughs at me across the table, saying
She loves me, and I blow a little boat
Rocking down the shoals between the tea-cups
And so kiss-beladen that it scarce can float.
IV
Slow like a rose comes tip-toe out of bud I see the woman's soul steal in her eyes,
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1098