Bennett, I have no doubt, saw through the whole thing more clearly than would appear on the surface, and made a like surmise. Of all the outstanding writers of the rime, he, one fancies, had the most lively appreciation of Lawrence both as man and as writer. Lawrence himself, never mistaken in such things, had an inkling of it, and more than once through Pinker he suggested that a personal meeting might be brought about. Yet Bennett, for some deeply felt reason, shrank from this. Evidently he could not believe that good would come of it. What he does not tell in his brief narrative is that he himself sent twenty-five pounds to Pinker for Lawrence. It would seem that he sent it in such a way as to have it conveyed merely as a business advance by Pinker for work in hand. We must give Bennett the credit for perceiving that, in sharp contrast to the typical beggar or borrower, the author of The Rainbow would find it far harder to accept than to demand money; that indeed the demand was for Lawrence a proud and permissible gesture, but the acceptance, should occasion arise, very difficult.
Though Lawrence remained in ignorance of this twenty-five pounds, he seems throughout the summer of 1918 to have felt friendly towards Bennett, while he was frankly scornful of the other literary leaders. Something truly human, as well as sweetly reasonable, emanated from Bennett. And to this, Lawrence responded. But he would push the affair to the utmost. Bennett should not so easily escape. That autumn, in yet more desperate need, he asked Bennett to find him a suitable London job. 'Bennett has publicly said that I have genius,' was the substance of his message. 'Then let me tell him that though men of talent are flourishing, this particular possessor of genius is forced to contemplate the fact that in a fortnight's time he will not have enough money to buy "bread and marge" - and this in spite of a pile of manuscript that will certainly be saleable at a day not far distant. Till that day comes, will Bennett use his influence to supply the said man of genius with a suitable means of livelihood other than the risky one of literature?'
Bennett, as is well known, was at the time in control of an important department created by the War. But he refused point-blank to find Lawrence a place in it. The fact that Lawrence had genius, he replied only too truly, was no recommendation that he would be useful in any job he might have at his disposal. Rather the reverse!
Though it is easy to guess the anger with which Lawrence, and more especially Lawrence's wife, would receive such a message, Lawrence must have realised its truth. It is even presumable that in it he had obtained the answer he sought, and that Bennett understood this quite as clearly as he did. Because, though Lawrence might ask for, and might even see himself in some imaginary job, what discoverable job in England at this time would he have taken, or having taken would he have kept? The most suitable post for him, as being unconnected with War propaganda yet having the benefit of his experience, was indubitably schoolmastering. And what school would open its doors to a man whose book had suffered public prosecution for obscenity? Not Bennett himself could have got Lawrence installed as a teacher, nor do I see Lawrence returning to the dominie's desk. Lawrence has illumined for me many dark Biblical sayings and incidents. This was a case of 'it must needs be that offences come'. But, now as always, there is 'woe to him by whom the offence cometh'. Little more need be said. Lawrence, in asking for money or for work, fulfilled his destiny by acting as a touchstone. The condemnation for his failure falls on the world he was there to indict. Also, I think, in the painful necessary task of cutting himself loose from that world, he needed all the outside drive he could come by. The utmost he was to get from official England was a second grant from the Royal Literary Fund. This was applied for and granted during that summer.
The months between February and the Armistice in November were spent by the Lawrences chiefly between the cottage in Berkshire and Mountain Cottage at Middleton-by-Wirksworth in Derbyshire, which his sisters, in great anxiety, took for him at Easter. The Radfords needed their own small retreat for the Easter and summer holidays.
In Derbyshire he much enjoyed a longish visit from his sisters' children - a nephew aged three and a niece aged seven - and he enjoyed the flowers which were unusually rich that spring. But he was 'sick and surfeited', he suffered from the recurrent horror of the Midlands, and laboured under 'poverty and incertitude'.
'I know exactly how it feels,' he wrote to me, sympathising with my different state of waiting.
I feel as if I had a child of black fury curled up inside my bowels. I am sure I can feel exactly what it is to be pregnant, because of the weary burden of a kind of contained murder which I can't bring forth. We will both pray to be safely delivered.
When, so far as I was concerned, his prayer was answered - in London just a week after the last of the air raids - he sent me the very exquisite present of a shoe-box containing perhaps twenty different kinds of wild flowers, carefully packed in damp moss, many of them having their roots attached. Here were yellow rock-roses - 'pure flowers of light', milkworts, wood-avens, mountain violets, aconites, woodruff and forget-me-nots. Lawrence knew all about wild flowers and could name most of them. His friend Millicent Beveridge, whom he met later in Sicily, has told me how she went walking with him once in the hills near Florence at the height of the Tuscan spring, and how as they went he named and discoursed upon at least thirty varieties. It was out of that walk that he wrote the three fragrant, categorical and joyous essays on 'Flowers in Tuscany' which appeared in the Criterion.
With my box of Derbyshire flowers there was a small floral guide, tinily written by Lawrence, describing each plant and making me see how they had been before he picked them for me, in what sorts of places and manner and profusion they had grown, and even how they varied in the different countrysides.
We were all three invited to come immediately to Mountain Cottage, but instead we asked them to visit us later in the summer when we were to have, of all unlikely things, a whole vicarage to ourselves in the Forest of Dean. My monthly nurse, a splendid woman of the old English type, was sister to the vicar who wanted to have his house inhabited for a nominal rent during the latter part of August. So it was arranged. By August Lawrence would have his grant from the Royal Literary Fund. At the moment he was counting chiefly on fifty pounds from the Oxford University Press so soon as his Movements in European History should be finished. He was also getting ten pounds from a small publisher for the little book of poems called Bay (selling it outright for this amount) and there was hope of placing Look! We Have Come Through! in America. Things were hard, and money continually threatened to 'come to a dead end', but Lawrence would never let himself run absolutely dry. His might be a bourgeois boast (as Norman Douglas has said) when he announced his determination always to keep a few pounds between himself and the world. It was at least never an idle boast. It was one of Lawrence's austerities that luck, and therefore anything founded on luck, was a vulgarity. Spiritually he would take all risks adventuring into the unknown. But to leave material things to chance was culpable folly. In all practical matters he looked and planned ahead. And he never became either penniless or gravely in debt.
To celebrate the birth of our boy, he not only wrote 'War Baby', but embroidered a little cotton frock in red and black cross-stitch, while Frieda crocheted a cot cover of the gayest rainbow-coloured stripes in wool. It became known as 'Frieda's Rainbow', and went everywhere with us, until with rough outdoor usage it fell to pieces.
Shortly before they came to us Lawrence was re-examined for the second time that year on account of the new Military Service Act. He was then definitely put in 'Grade 3'. There can be no doubt that his horror at the mere possibility of being called up for some kind of distasteful work under military orders was the chief cause of his last appeal to Arnold Bennett. Yet I do not believe he seriously thought he would be called up. It was rather that he would take no more chances than he could possibly help. Immediately after the examination he wrote me the following letter. Though it is easily subject to misconstruction, it voices something which needs to be understood in Lawrence
, something upon which Murry's misunderstanding in Son of Woman is largely based. I therefore quote the relevant passages here:
MY DEAR CATHERINE, I have been examined - am put in Grade 3 - and from this day I take a new line. I've done with society and humanity - Labour and Military can alike go to hell. Henceforth it is for myself, my own life, I live: a good jolly personal life, with a few people who are friends, and the rest can do what they like. I am going to try to get a job: quick, before the military attempt to paw me again - for they shall never touch me again. I shall go to London next week. We shall meet again soon. Then we can talk.
About the essays, I crossed out the 'Children' passages. Who am I to dictate when hope lies or doesn't lie? Let it lie when it likes.
Tell Don I shall see him again soon. No more of the social passion and social insistence from me. I can understand I've been a nuisance and a fool.
Love from both to you all.
He was coming to London alone, he said, with Frieda following in a week or so.
11
We were happy in the Forest of Dean, though it was a strange, frightening place. Lawrence told me afterwards that it scared him so that at first he felt like running away. The dark and ancient steepness of those woods, with the mines inconspicuously burrowing everywhere, is unlike anything else in England. But we had fine weather, and peaches were ripening on the walls of the old south-sloping garden, and we had the roomy stone house to ourselves.
Lawrence had looked forward to the visit with 'peculiar anticipation', and when we met him on the platform of Upper Lydbrook station we were struck by his high spirits. Frieda was beaming and ejaculatory as usual - perhaps even more than usual - but Lawrence was like a schoolboy home for the holidays. His festive array - a green-and-red striped blazer and grey flannel trousers - and the fact that both garments were so shrunken as to show stretches of wrist and ankle, added to this impression. One felt the boy had grown since we last saw him. In a gay aside he informed me that these were now his only trousers - and that he had to wash them himself of a night-time after undressing so that they might be ready for wear again by the morning. Owing to the fact that he wore espadrilles and no socks, his thin ankles were especially in evidence. I rather think his toilet was completed by an old panama hat. With this strange attire and his beard he attracted some local notice.
The holiday dwells in my memory, for, although he had his variations, his prevailing mood was of extraordinary gaiety, serenity and youthfulness, such as we never saw again in him.
Having heard beforehand of the impossible forest roads, we had brought no sort of baby carriage, and, as I was nursing the child, we had to carry him about with us, which meant taking turn and turn about. Frieda that summer vied with her husband in the inexpensive gaiety of her dress. She wore the largest and brightest of cotton checks, and when out together we attracted, to Lawrence's displeased surprise, something of the attention that might have been accorded to a travelling circus. Sometimes we took with us a home-made carrier for the baby, consisting of string bags strung upon two broomsticks to form a sort of hammock, which was decked with Frieda's rainbow. But though this was a real convenience Lawrence preferred to travel without it.
When Lawrence said he found the place 'scaring', this must be understood, like so much else, according to his own idiom. In the ordinary way of speaking he certainly found it interesting, even fascinating. It was a coal-mining district - the oldest in these islands - and therefore he felt at home in it. But it was different from any mining district he had known, and therefore it engaged his attention. Although he avoided contact with the natives he cast a professional eye over them and their place, and commented with brisk amusement on the tininess of the workings - e.g., the cages so small that only two or three men could be wound down at a time. Once in a walk through the forest he stopped suddenly to examine a half-derelict working that was not a perpendicular shaft but a low tunnel driven into a hillside, from which the coal was drawn up on a trolley worked by a hand-winch and cable. That was a 'gin-pit', he said - an old sort of thing that was becoming a rarity.
Lydbrook lies in a pleasant fold in the hills, but it is a grey, squalid village - just one long shabby street of a mile or more. Lawrence expressed himself as puzzled why mining villages should be so needlessly ugly. He suggested the reason might be that miners through having to work underground had become blind to form values. They craved for 'a bit of colour', and so loved and cultivated flowers with passion. But, though sensitive to natural beauty, they had a merely utilitarian regard for man-made surroundings.
Often we went far afield. One day we went by train to Monmouth and bought lard cakes there and picnicked by the river. Lawrence wrote of this to Donald when he had gone back to Mountain Cottage, saying how he had enjoyed it:
... the bright sunny town, and the tears in one's inside because there isn't real peace; and - very nice, the meal in the green riding: also our evenings. They are good memories - worth a lot really. And it pleases me that we carried the child about. One has the future in one's arms so to speak: and one is the present... I imagine you in that vicarage room this evening - no more 'What are the Wild Waves Saying?' for a bit.
Not liking the vicarage drawing-room with its china cabinets, we always sat in the pleasant kitchen, which had an outlook on the walled fruit garden; and of a night we used to sing. Hence the reference to 'What are the Wild Waves Saying?' which was a great success given as a duet by Lawrence and Donald, with Lawrence in the male part.
Lawrence had brought with him a little manual of French songs which he carried about everywhere like a Bible, and even the hated china cabinets did not keep him away from the drawing-room piano at which he was often to be found seated, picking out melodies from his manual with one finger. His expression at such times was one of intense and concentrated earnestness, as he hummed the tune over and over and learned every verse of the longest ballad by heart. Though he had an odd sort of singing voice he knew supremely well how to sing any kind of folksong. But I liked best of all to hear him in English ones, like 'A Cottage Well Thatched with Straw' or 'Twanky-dillo', which he wrote out for me, music and all, and he rendered deliriously the prim, absurd charm of Offenbach in English:
Evoë! Wonderful ways
Have the goddesses now and then
For beguiling the hearts of men!
One evening we tried charades, in which Lawrence excelled, having invented a special kind of his own. But I am the worst of performers, and Donald is not much better, so that we failed in playing up, while we could not be spared to act as audience.
It was here that Lawrence first thought of his story called The Blind Man. We had an old and lovable, but almost half-witted servant, a woman like a squirrel, with squirrel-coloured hair piled high over a pad on top of her head in a fashion so elaborate that she used to rise at five in the morning to complete her toilet by seven. I can still see her face of bewilderment as Lawrence, seated one day at the kitchen table, tried to include her with me in his outline of the story. Stupid as Letty was, and far as this was from any tale she was accustomed to, she seemed, as well as myself, to breathe the dark air of the stable, to see the blind man delicately groping about it, and to feel the sad, enclosed, yet natural atmosphere in which these people moved.
That September we were to have gone to Mountain Cottage, but could not. Lawrence wrote on his thirty-third birthday to say that he had received papers calling him up for medical re-examination, but that he was determined not to go. I never heard what happened. Possibly the authorities accepted a doctor's certificate.
That autumn and winter - the winter of the Armistice - things were as hard as ever for Lawrence, and more upsetting as he had no place of his own. The money situation would have been desperate but for hopeful news from America, where there seemed to be a growing market for his stories and Huebsch was negotiating for Look! We Have Come Through! Still almost nothing was coming in, and in England he could not command more than five pounds for one of
his Studies in Classic American Literature, while the indigent English Review seemed the only magazine that would print his short stories. The four little essays on 'The Education of the People' ('Good,' wrote Lawrence, 'but most revolutionary') did not meet with the approval of The Times Educational Supplement, and were returned with the request for something 'more suitable'.
We had been obliged to go to Scotland. It was the winter of the great influenza epidemic, and Donald went down with it badly in Edinburgh. The next we heard - at the turn of the year - was that Lawrence, in the Midlands for the holiday, had been at death's door with the same epidemic, 'with complications'.
During an alarmingly slow recovery he went on as well as he could with his plans for leaving England at the first opportunity, which would not be, he was told, till peace was ratified. The idea of going with the Eders to the eastern slopes of the Andes had since been modified into a visit to Palestine. But both had fallen through. Lawrence had a great longing at this time for the sea. This too turned out to be impracticable, and there was nothing for it but to reoccupy the cottage at Hermitage so long as the Radfords were not there. It was less cold and bleak than Derbyshire, and further from the deathly reminders of home. Also it was nearer to London. On the revival of the Athenaeum under the editorship of Middleton Murry, the suggestion had been made that Lawrence should become a regular contributor. 'I am to contribute,' he wrote me of this piece of news - 'good thing if I could earn a little weekly money. But,' he added, 'I don't trust Murry.'
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1125