But we couldn't believe it... War...
But a politician had only said: 'Bloody peace again.'
And then it was declared. At first it seemed only exciting.... Exciting indeed! Nobody realized at first what hell, what lowest demons, had been let loose.
We were at Charing Cross station and saw trains of soldiers depart. Their women were there so pale and strained looking, saying good-bye, trying to be brave and not cry. It made me weep for those unknown women and their sorrow. What did I care whether these boys, boys so many of them, were English or Russian or French. Nationality was just an accident and here was grief. Lawrence was ashamed of my tears.
He himself was bewildered and lost, became abstract and mental, and couldn't feel any more. I, who had been brought up with all the 'big-drumming' of German militarism, I was scared.
Lawrence was not a pacifist, he fought all his life. But that 'World War' he condemned with all his might. The inhuman, mechanical, sheer destruction of it! Destruction for what end!
Then when Lloyd George came to power Lawrence lost all hope in the spirit of his native country. Lloyd George, who was so un-English, to stand for English prestige! It seemed incredible.
War, more war! 'Dies irae, dies ilia,' a monstrous disaster, the collapse of all human decency. Lawrence felt it so. I could feel only fear - all base instincts let loose, all security gone.
We were in a big crowd on Hampstead Heath one evening going home from a friend's house. In the sky, uncertain and terrible amidst the clouds, hung a Zeppelin. 'In that Zeppelin,' I thought, 'are perhaps men I have danced with when I was a girl, boys I have played with, and here they come to bring destruction and death. And if this dark crowd knew I was a German they would tear me to pieces in their fear.'
Sadly we went home. So helpless we were, at the power of all horrors. We took a small cottage out in Berkshire. Suspicion was ever present. Even when we were gathering blackberries in the nearby hedges a policeman popped up behind a bush and wanted to know who we were. Lawrence, who comes out in the open so courageously in his writings, why, why, do so many people see a sinister figure in him? The darkness wasn't in him but in those others. There is a woman even now who boasts that she turned us out of Cornwall as spies.
Our cottage was near the mill of Gilbert and Mary Cannan. And the Murrys were an hour's walk away in another cottage. We would go over to them in the dark winter nights, through bare woods and fields of dead cabbage stalks, with their smell of rottenness.
Campbell came to spend a week-end with us. He, who in London had been so elegant, with spats and top-hat, now wore an old cap and carried a very heavy stick under his arm. He looked to me like an Irish tramp. He was still weeping over his 'Areland.'
Christmas came. We made the cottage splendid with holly and mistletoe, we cooked and boiled, roasted and baked. Campbell and Koteliansky and the Murrys came, and Gertler and the Cannans. We had a gay feast.
We danced on the shaky floor. Gilbert with uplifted head sang: 'I feel, I feel like an eagle in the sky.' Koteliansky sang soulfully his Hebrew song: 'Ranani Sadekim Badanoi.' Katherine, with a long, ridiculous face, sang this mournful song:
I am an unlucky man,
I fell into a coalhole I broke my leg,
And got three months for stealing coal.
I am an unlucky man,
If it rained soup all day,
I wouldn't have a spoon,
I'd only have a fork.
She also sang:
Ton sirop est doux,
Madeleine,
Ton sirop est doux.
Ne crie pas si fort, Madeleine,
La maison n'est pas à nous.
I liked this tune, but when I sang it Lawrence stopped me; it was too 'fast' for him. This occasion was the last time for years to come that we were really gay.
In the spring we went to stay with the Meynells in Sussex. We were fond of all the sons and daughters. Monica was our neighbour. We lived in the cottage that Violet had lent us. I only remember Alice Meynell as a vision in the distance, being led by Wilfred Meynell across the lawn like Beatrice being led by Dante.
I heard while there of my father's death. I did not tell anybody, I kept it to myself. When I told Lawrence he only said: 'You didn't expect to keep your father all your life?' Bertrand Russell invited Lawrence to Cambridge at that time. Lawrence had expected much of this visit. 'What did you do there? What did they say?' I asked him, when he came back.
He answered: 'Well, in the evening they drank port and they walked up and down the room and talked about the Balkan situation and things like that, and they know nothing about it.'
We had met Lady Ottoline Morrell. She was a great influence in Lawrence's life. Her profound culture, her beautiful home, 'Garsington,' her social power, all meant much to Lawrence.
I felt in those days: 'Perhaps I ought to leave Lawrence to her influence; what might they not do together for England? I am powerless, and a Hun, and a nobody.' Garsington was a refuge during the war for many people and stood as a stronghold for freedom in those unfree days.
Later we took a small flat in the Vale of Heath. 'The Rainbow' appeared and was suppressed. When it happened I felt as though a murder had been done, murder of a new, free utterance on the face of the earth. I thought the book would be hailed as a joyous relief from the ordinary dull stuff, as a way out into new and unknown regions. With his whole struggling soul Lawrence had written it. Then to have it condemned, nobody standing for it — the bitterness of it! He was sex-mad, they said. Little even now do people realize what men like Lawrence do for the body of life, what he did to rescue the fallen angel of sex. Sex had fallen in the gutter, it had to be pulled out. What agony it was to know the flame in him and see it quenched by his fellowmen! 'I'll never write another word I mean,' he said in his bitterness; 'they aren't fit for it,' and for a time the flame in him was quenched.
It could not be for long; I remember with joy Frere's words: 'Lawrence is like a man so far ahead on the road, that for them he seems small.' When I think of his critics the words of Heraclitus come into my mind:
'The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads, for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: "We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.'"
The best were treated so during the war. And in those dark days I had a bad time. Naturally, I came in for all Lawrence's tortured, irritable moods. His sweetness had disappeared and he turned against me as well as the rest for the time being. It all made him ill. There was not even a little hope or gaiety anywhere. We had a little flat in the Vale of Heath in Hampstead. He didn't like the Vale of Heath and he didn't like the little flat and he didn't like me or anybody else... And the war was everywhere... We were saturated with war.
Cornwall At Cornwall, near Zennor, we found Tregerthen cottage. As usual we made it out of a granite hole into a livable place. It cost five pounds a year rent. We had made it very charming. We washed the walls very pale pink and the cupboards were painted a bright blue. This was the entrance room; all very small but well proportioned.
There was a charming fireplace on which lived two Staffordshire figures riding to market, 'Jasper and Bridget.' On the wall a beautiful embroidery Lady Ottoline Morrell had embroidered after a drawing by Duncan Grant, a tree with big bright flowers and birds and beasts. Behind the sitting room was a darkish rough scullery, and upstairs was one big room overlooking the sea, like the big cabin on the upper deck of a ship. And how the winds from that untamed Cornish sea rocked the solid little cottage, and howled at it, and how the rain slashed it, sometimes forcing the door open and pouring into the room.
I see Katherine Mansfield and Murry arriving sitting on a cart, high up on all the goods and chattels, coming down the lane to Tregerthen. Like an emigrant Katherine looked. I loved her little jackets, chiefly the one that was black and gold like bees.
&
nbsp; It was great fun buying very nicely made furniture for a few shillings in St. Ives, with the Murrys. The fishermen were selling their nice old belongings to buy modern stuff. Our purchases would arrive tied on a shaky cart with bits of rope, the cart trundling down the uneven road. I think our best buy was a well-proportioned bedstead we got for a shilling. Then in both the Murrys' neighbouring cottage and our own such a frenzy broke out of painting chairs and polishing brass and mending old clocks, putting plates on the dressers, arranging all the treasures we had bought. After they had settled in their cottage I loved walking with Katherine to Zennor. A high wind she hated and stamped her foot at it. Later we'd sit in the sun under the foxgloves and talk, like two Indian braves, as she said. We enjoyed doing things together. I can see her round eyes when Murry painted all the chairs black with Ripolin and she said: 'Look at the funeral procession of chairs.' She told me many things from her life, but she told me them in confidence and trust.
Katherine and Lawrence and Murry had invented a place, a wonderful place where we were all going to live in complete bliss; Rananim it was called.
Lawrence thought of the new spirit of the life we would try to live there. Murry thought of the ship, and its equipment, that would take us to our island of Rananim. Katherine saw all the coloured bundles that we would have to take. By the hour we could talk Rananim.
There in Cornwall I can remember days of complete harmony between the Murrys and us, Katherine coming to our cottage so thrilled at my foxgloves, tall in the small window seat. Since then whenever I see foxgloves I must think of Katherine.
One day we went out on the sea in bright sunshine in a boat, and sang the canon:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
I don't know why even then this canon moved me so. They were so strangely significant, those words. And I was so bad at keeping my part of the song going, to Lawrence's rage.
So much, so much was still ahead for us all. And all so wonderful. At that time we were so poor, and such nobodies, and yet so rich in dreams and gaiety! But then Lawrence would have his reactions against all this, feel that his dreams were like petty vapourings, that the only real facts were war, and a war of all the lower elements come uppermost, carrying all before them. Grimly his soul would try to understand, but in the end it could only hang on to its faith, to its own, own, unknown God.
He had to go through with it, that I knew; also I knew — however miserable I was, and he made me so — that there was a man who suffered because of his vision.
He wanted people to be as they came out of the hands of the Lord, not to violate them but gently adjust them to life in their own capacity. He didn't expect me to type. I hated it. Poor as we were he never expected me to do it. 'People should do what they enjoy, then they'll do it well,' he said.
In the first year of the war Cornwall was still not quite engulfed by it; but slowly, like an octopus, with slow but deadsure tentacles, the war spirit crept up and all around us. Suspicion and fear surrounded us. It was like breathing bad air and walking on a bog.
I remember once sitting on the rocks with Lawrence, by the sea, near our cottage at Tregerthen. I was intoxicated by the air and sun. I had to jump and run, and my white scarf blew in the wind. 'Stop it, stop it, you fool, you fool!' Lawrence cried. 'Can't you see they'll think that you're signalling to the enemy!'
I had forgotten the war for a moment.
There was an unfortunate policeman from St Ives. He had to trot up so many times to our cottage to look over and over again Lawrence's papers, to see if he were really an Englishman and his father without a doubt an Englishman, and if his mother was English. This policeman once said to me: 'Oh, ma'am, if I dare only speak my thoughts, but I mustn't.' But he took the peas and beans I offered him from our field that Lawrence had ploughed with the help of William Henry from the farm, and sown with vegetables. They came up splendidly and lots of people had vegetables from this field during the war.
Our standby and friend was Katie Berryman. Her saffron cake and baked stuffed rabbit were our modest luxuries.
We had so little money, Lawrence not being wanted, nor his work, in those days when profiteers and such men were flourishing and triumphant. I remember his writing to Arnold Bennett and saying: 'I hear you think highly of me and my genius, give me some work.'
Arnold Bennett wrote back: 'Yes, I do think highly of your genius, but that is no reason why I should give you Work.'
The war seemed to drive Lawrence to utter despair. He was called up for inspection and told me about it afterwards. 'You have no idea what a pathetic sight all the men were in nothing but their shirts.' How glad he was to come back to his cottage and me!
Lawrence was fond of the people at Tregerthen Farm nearby. Their Celtic natures fascinated him. He could talk by the hour with William Henry, the farmer's elder son, ruddy and handsome.
In those days Lawrence seemed to turn against me, perhaps on account of the bit of German in me. I felt utterly alone there, on that wild Cornish moor, in the little granite cottage. Often Lawrence would leave me in the evenings, and go over to the farm, where he'd spend his time talking to William Henry and giving French lessons to Stanley, the younger son.
Sometimes at night, in the dark, the door would fly open, and it seemed as if the ancient spirits and ghosts of the place blew into my cottage. In the loneliness I seemed to hear the voices of young men crying out to me from the battlefields: 'Help us, help us, we are dying, we are dying.' Despair had blown in on the night. I thought how in the past women like Catherine of Siena had influenced events. But now what could any woman do to stem or divert this avalanche?
And then Lawrence would come home and want to quarrel with me, as if he were angry with me because I too felt sad and hopeless and helpless.
It was only at the very last, and out of one's final despair, that there arose a hope and a belief. But the outer world was viler every day.
I remember coming home from Zennor with a loaf of Katie Berryman's bread in Lawrence's rucksack. Coastguards suddenly pounced on us from behind a hedge and said: 'Let us look at your rucksack, you have a camera in there.'
I could feel Lawrence swooning with rage. I opened the rucksack and held the loaf of bread under their noses. I had to show my contempt, if they hanged me for it the next moment. I believe they would have liked to.
It was no wonder Lawrence went almost mad at times at the creeping foulness around us; he who came out so completely in the open. And I knew that he felt so helpless, as if all that he believed in was utterly lost, he who by his genius felt responsible for the spirit of his England, he whose destiny it was to give England a new direction.
If only the war could end! But it went on, was present wherever you went, there was no escaping it. One evening at Cecil Grey's place, Bosigran Castle, we were sitting after dinner, when there came a knock at the door and four coast-watchers stood there ominously.
'You are showing a light.'
To Grey's dismay it was true. He had a new housekeeper from London and the light from her bedroom could be seen at sea.
As we stood there I shivered with alarm. I had before this been under suspicion of giving supplies to the German submarine crews. As for the suspicion, we were so poor at the time — a biscuit a day we might have spared for the submarines, but no more.
I took a secret pleasure in the fact that our coast-watchers were all covered with mud. They had fallen into a ditch listening under the windows.
Fortunately Grey had an uncle who was an admiral. That saved him, and us. As for Lawrence, he just looked at those men. What a manly job theirs was, listening under other people's windows!
A few days later I came home from Bosigran Castle to the cottage. Lawrence was away, had driven to Penzance. In the dusk I entered the cottage alone. Immediately I was inside I knew by instinct something had happened, I felt overwhelming fear. Wit
h shaking knees I went to the farm Yes, I was told, two men had asked for us.
I was full of foreboding, even though Lawrence, coming home later, didn't share my fear.
But then early next morning there appeared a captain two detectives, and my friend the policeman. The captain read us a paper that we must leave the county of Cornwall in three days. Lawrence, who lost his temper so easily, was quite calm.
'And what is the reason?' he asked.
'You know better than I do,' answered the captain.
'I don't know,' said Lawrence.
Then the two awful detectives went through all our cupboards, clothes, beds, etc., while I, like a fool, burst into a rage:
'This is your English liberty, here we live and don't do anybody any harm, and these creatures have the right to come here and touch our private things.'
'Be quiet,' said Lawrence.
He was so terribly quiet, but the iron of his England had stabbed his soul once more, and I knew he suffered more than I.
In the background stood my friend the policeman, full of sympathy. How sad I was, and desperate. But nothing could be done, so we left Cornwall, like two criminals. When we were turned out of Cornwall something changed in Lawrence for ever.
We went to London where H. D. lent us her flat in Mecklenburg Square. It had a very large room. Richard Aldington was home on leave at the time and in the evening we met and were very gay.
Where did we get the courage to be gay? I don't know.
Lawrence invented wonderful charades. Once we played the Garden of Eden. Lawrence was the Lord, H. D. was the tree, Richard Aldington waving a large chrysanthemum was Adam, and I was the serpent, and a little scared at my part.
A few days later Cynthia Asquith invited us to the royal box that Lady Cunard had lent her at Covent Garden.
Lawrence trimmed his beard, we made ourselves very fine, and went to listen to 'Aida.'
Very few people wanted to be friendly to us in those days. I was a Hun and Lawrence not wanted.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1101