Murry, not long after Lawrence's arrival, had considered giving up the Adelphi and going back to New Mexico with him. But he appears to have been undecided.
It had come to this, that Lawrence's only purpose for staying a day longer in England was to discover if all of us, or some of us, or even one of us, would feel the compulsion to go with him and Frieda to a freer and richer air, where things 'could happen' as they could not happen in England. The Adelphi was a proof to Lawrence of just how things happened in England. But with Murry in a new atmosphere and away from the cloying influences of his past, Lawrence still felt that something might be done. As for the rest of us, we were his friends of whose support he would be glad in a less crucial way. It would neither be out of personal affection, nor to 'live to ourselves' in a pleasant spot, as Murry has suggested, 'rejecting the world, washing our hands of it altogether', though something of both these things would naturally be included. It would be to leave the associations of the old ideals that we might live and work freshly in the belief that of such a departure something good was sure to come. Katherine could not come now, hiding her fun behind a solemn face, to prove by timetables and guidebooks that Rananim was impossible. Lawrence had gone on and had found the very place for us.
There was nothing wrong with Taos except the Americans. The Indian mode had sunk so far into forgetfulness, so far beyond the confident prying of the intellect, that it was almost one with nature and therefore ready to renourish human life. We must get away from the white benevolence that spouted of 'life' and resulted in Adelphis, and learn instead something of the dark malignity that revealed the realm of death. Our mode had come to an end. The new mode must be from a different source.
Who shall say that Lawrence was wrong? To him it was as clear as in old time it was to Noah or to Lot. It may yet be found that before a new spirit can grow up in the world some men and women will have to get together and leave their homes in a special kind of faith. However this may be, only one person in London went with the Lawrences back to New Mexico, and of all Lawrence's friends today she is perhaps the happiest.
For a day or two Lawrence had to stay in bed with cold and a mild attack of malaria. He sent a message by Frieda that he wanted to speak to me. 'I assure you that it is a great Kompliment!' she said, opening her smiling eyes at me.
What she said was true, and I was flattered. I went upstairs at once. Still I did not really want to talk alone with Lawrence just then, a disinclination I tried to attribute to the fact that Frieda had come in upon me at a busy moment of some domestic sort.
A single bed had been moved into the living-room, and there was Lawrence sitting up all neat and trim and looking every bit as alert as if he were well. I sat down, feeling distrait and uttering platitudes.
He asked me about things. Without, so far as I can remember, putting the question directly, he asked if there was any chance of my coming then or later to New Mexico. I said I was afraid it must be later. 'You see, Lawrence, unless a woman is going to leave her husband and child, she can't go off without them, and I don't think Donald feels like going, anyhow not just now. I'd come, but I can't go without them. It would be no good.' A terrible sadness descended on me and I should like to have left the room. Lawrence quietly admitted the difficulty. 'No, a woman can't choose if she's really married,' he said. And although he had told me more than once that Donald was only a lover, not a husband, he let this pass today. And I knew he was only sounding me. He spoke of how free Dorothy Brett was - 'a real odd man out', he called her with approval. Then he asked if I was writing anything special. 'I could beat you that you don't write,' he said. And why was I pottering about with rubbishy articles for women's papers when I ought to be doing a book either of notes like my Duse note in the Adelphi - a book to be called A Woman Looks at the World -or stories and sketches about the queer lot of people who were sheltering under the roof that covered us? There were at that moment five separate lots of us living in the old rambling house, and to amuse him I had sometimes retailed the gossip concerning them. I could see that he was casting about for the best way to help me, feeling somehow that I needed help.
Partly to fend off anything like a silence, which I could not have borne, I told him of a novel I had in mind to write. The theme had been suggested to me by reading of some savages who took a baby girl, and that they might rear her into a goddess for themselves, brought her up on a covered river boat, tending her in all respects, but never letting her mix with her kind, and leading her to believe that she was herself no mortal, but a goddess.
I was almost taken aback by Lawrence's interest. He was never effusive, and seldom enough really engaged by what one said, but when he was engaged one knew it. I was not to guess, of course, at that time anything about the contents of The Plumed Serpent, or I should have understood his special interest in an allied theme. He would have gone on talking now, but I excused myself and went back to my paltry duty below stairs. As I went, I know that in some essential I had turned away from what I most wanted in life.
It seemed quite a short time after my return downstairs that Lawrence sent Frieda again to fetch me. 'I like that story of yours so much, Catherine,' he said, 'that I've written out a little sketch of how I think it might go. Then, if you like the idea, we might collaborate in the novel. You do the beginning and get the woman character going, and let me have it, and I'll go on and fill in the man. Of course,' he added, 'you may not see it the same way, but I think this would be the easiest way to do it, easier than the way you thought of. Our only trouble will be the end. I'm afraid it can't be a happy ending. But have a look and we'll see.'
Here is what he had written out for me in these few minutes. I began to work upon the beginning in quite the wrong way. Then I saw I was not up to it and lost heart. So it remains as it was:
A woman of about thirty-five, beautiful, a little overwrought, goes into a shipping office in Glasgow to ask about a ship to Canada. She gives her name Olivia Maclure. The clerk asks her if she is not going to accept the Maclure invitation to the feast in the ancestral castle. She laughs - but the days of loneliness in the Glasgow hotel before the ship can sail are too much for her, and she sets off for the Maclure island.
The Maclure, who claims to be chief of the clan and has bought the ancestral castle on his native isle, is a man about forty-five, rather small, dark-eyed, full of energy, but has been a good deal knocked about. He has spent ten years in the USA and twenty years in the silver mines of Mexico, is somewhat grizzled, has a scar on the right temple which tilts up his right eye a little. Chief characteristic his quick, alert brown eyes which seem to sense danger, and the tense energy in his slightly work-twisted body. He has lived entirely apart from civilised women, merely frequented an occasional Indian woman in the hills. Is a bit cranky about his chieftainship.
Olivia arrives a day too soon for the festival, at the patched-up castle. Maclure, in a shapeless worksuit, is running round attending to his house and preparations. He looks like a Cornish miner, always goes at a run, sees everything, has a certain almost womanly quickness of perception, and frequently takes a whisky. He eyes Olivia with the quick Mexican suspicion. She, so distraught, is hardly embarrassed at all. Something weighs on her so much, she doesn't realise she is a day too soon, and when she realises, she doesn't care.
As soon as he has sensed her, he is cordial, generous, but watchful: always on the watch for danger. Soon he is fascinated by her. She, made indifferent to everything by an inward distress, talks to him charmingly, but vaguely: doesn't realise him. He, a man of forty-five, falls for the first time insanely in love. But she is always only half conscious of him.
She spends the night in the mended castle - he most scrupulously sleeps in the cottage below. The next day, she is mistress of the absurd feast. And at evening he begs her not to go away. His frantic, slightly absurd passion penetrates her consciousness. She consents to stay.
After two days of anguished fear lest she should go away, he proposes to her.
She looks at him very strangely - he is just strange to her. But she consents. Something in her is always remote, far off-the weight of some previous distress. He feels the distance, but cannot understand. After being in an agony of love with her for six months, he comes home to find her dead, leaving a little baby girl.
Then it seems to him the mother was not mortal. She was a mysterious woman from the faery, and the child, he secretly believes, is one of the Tuatha De Danaan. This idea he gradually inculcates into the people round him, and into the child herself. It steals over them all gradually, almost unawares.
The girl accepts from the start a difference between herself and the rest of people. She does not feel quite mortal. Men are only men to her: she is of another race, the Tuatha De Danaan. She doesn't talk about it: nobody talks about it. But there it is, tacit, accepted.
Her father hires a poor scholar to be her tutor, and she has an ordinary education. But she has no real friends. There is no one of her race. Sometimes she goes to Glasgow, to Edinburgh, to London with her father. The world interests her, but she doesn't belong to it. She is a little afraid of it. It is not of her race.
When she is seventeen her father is suddenly killed, and she is alone, save for her tutor. She has an income of about three hundred a year. She decides to go to London. The war has broken out - she becomes a nurse. She nurses men, and knows their wounds and their necessities. But she tends them as if they were lambs or other delicate and lovable animals. Their blood is not her blood, their needs are not the needs of her race.
Men fall in love with her, and that is terrible to her. She is waiting for one of her own race. Her tutor supports her in the myth. Wait, he says, wait for the Tuatha De Danaan to send you your mate. You can't mate with a man. Wait till you see a demon between his brows.
At last she saw him in the street. She knew him at once, knew the demon between his brows. And she was afraid. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of her own nature, the mystery of herself. Because it seemed to her that her race, the Tuatha, had come back to destroy the race of men. She had come back to destroy the race of men. She was terrified of her own destiny. She wanted never again to see the man with the demon between his brows.
So for a long time she did not see him again. And then her fear that she would never see him any more was deeper than anything else. Whatever she wanted, she wanted her own destiny with him, let happen what might.
5
If I could help it, I would never intrude upon Lawrence when Murry was there - and Murry frequently was there - because I could not bear the underlying sense of strain and dissatisfaction. Frieda was torn between her recent friendliness with Murry and Lawrence's belief that England held nothing for him any more in spite of all the Adelphis that were or ever could be. Lawrence, waiting in vain week after week for some reply to the letters and cables which he was sending to his New York publisher, had begun to be anxious about money. Where was the use of his books going well in the States if he received nothing for them? 'It was a painful time,' says Murry. So it was.
Of the 'painftil things that happened in it' I was certainly witness to one. But on that occasion the special painfulness was created by Murry. Possibly from a conscious desire that Lawrence should be spared, he has not told the story in his Reminiscences. It has since been given, however, from hearsay and with the most circumstantial inaccuracy by Mrs Luhan. As the incident concerned neither Lawrence nor Murry alone, but inclusively nine of us, it seems imperative that it should be given here correctly to the best of my remembrance.
During this visit of Lawrence to London he was determined to make at least one attempt at friendly gaiety - a sort of 'Well, well, now that we are here don't let's be too gloomy even if we have made a mistake' gesture on his part. He went with Koteliansky to the Café Royal, engaged a private room there and ordered a supper. (For which, to Lawrence's annoyance, the manager insisted upon having a deposit, and refused to take a cheque.) When Frieda first told me that they were giving a party in a restaurant, I took it merely as an announcement, not as an invitation. I knew that Lawrence had a considerable acquaintance in London, and it struck me as natural that we, living in the same house and seeing each other constantly, were not to be among the guests. But when I said I hoped they would have a good evening, Frieda shouted in amazement: 'But you and Don are coming! You are invited It is a dinner for Lawrence's friends!'
Only then did I recognise my half-unconscious withdrawal on the first reception of the news, as a too willing abnegation. From the first I had felt a slight sinking of the heart at the notion of this supper, so far as I might have any part in it. And it was this that made me utter a feeble and ill-mannered protest even thus late. 'Are you quite sure that you want us?' I asked. 'There are so many people you must want to see and we can eat together any night.' 'No, no,' sang Frieda, quite shocked and hurt, I could see. This is for Lawrence's real friends. Are you not his real friends?' So it was settled. It was just the presence of some of those other 'real friends' that was saddening to me in the prospect. But we had to enter into the spirit of the thing, and attend with goodwill this, the one and only formal gathering I have ever known Lawrence to initiate.
Soon enough we knew who the others were to be - Koteliansky, Murry and Mark Gerder for the men; Mary Cannan and Dorothy Brett for the women. The round table was attractively laid and the room intimate. Lawrence made a charming host - easy, simple and warm. There was something at once piquant and touching in seeing him receiving us, his friends, thus in surroundings so unlike those in which we had been accustomed to forgather with him these ten years past. It emphasised the lack of sophistication in him which, combined with his subtlety, was so moving a charm. 'Schoolboyish' is perhaps the last adjective that could justly be applied to this mature and refined, this disciplined and impassioned artist, that was D. H. Lawrence at the age of thirty-nine. But at any moment, surroundings like the Café Royal, or the rooms of some fine old house not in the cottage style, would bring out in Lawrence a boyishness that was as comic as it was lovable. 'You'll see I'm quite up to this,' he seemed to be saying. 'Mind you play up to me, so that nobody will have the slightest idea that we don't dine in marble halls all the year round.' It is never a thing to underline, but it is a thing to be remembered, that Lawrence was the son of a miner and spent his youth in a miners' row - no matter with how superior a mother or how sensitive a group of brothers and sisters. For him, for instance, to visit at a house like Garsington Manor, was a genuine experience. He coped with it admirably and he knew just what estimation to put upon it, both as an experience and as a phenomenon. He could add up the life behind it and 'see through' the persons belonging to it, without being in any way dazzled or shaken. Even the utmost of kindly patronage could not keep him from the eventual expression of his summing up. More even than Robert Burns in his adventures with the rich and the famous, Lawrence was the 'chiel amang them takin' notes'. Yet he never became sophisticated enough not to be superficially over-impressed at the first impact with personages like the Meynell family or Bertrand Russell or Lady Ottoline Morrell. With them this most un-schoolboyish man betrayed a kind of quiet schoolboy knowingness that is not unrelated to nervousness. And the reaction from his impressibility (as in the case of Robert Burns) was apt to be violent. People gave themselves away to Lawrence in an extraordinary degree. And as often as not, their 'giving away' was a subtle form of patronage, a fact that was by no means lost on the observer and writer of fiction who lurked with cool eyes behind the poet in Lawrence. It was naturally a shock when, out of what had seemed a pleasant friendship, there should spring such prodigies, at once fantastic and recognisable, as figure in certain of his novels and tales. True, he did this with any or all of us. But one cannot escape from the touch of malice in certain instances, nor from the belief that it is there as a make-weight for the special sensibility of a man whose genius has lifted him out of his class.
To return to the Café Royal. Frieda, as our hostess, purred loudly and p
leasantly. Cafés Royal or Tudor houses were not even child's play to her! She wore, greatly to Lawrence's approval, something that was both gleaming and flower-like - anyhow petal-like, as she delightedly pointed out. I forget how Dorothy Brett was dressed, except that what she wore seemed tame beside Frieda's gaiety. Mary in décolletée black, with a large picture hat, à la Mrs Siddons, looked like the heroine from a forgotten novel by John Oliver Hobbes. I, too, was in black - velvet to Mary's silk. The men wore their everyday clothes. Kot, in his dark clothes as ever, looked both the most conventional and the strangest.
The food was excellent, but somehow the feast did not go well. Gerder was silent and looked watchful, even contemptuous. Kot conceived a murderous dislike for Donald, next to whom he was placed.
Mary had nothing to say. I too was stricken with dumbness. Lawrence did his best to enliven us all with wine, bidding us to drink our fill and rejoice in a festive occasion. He set us a good example and drank level. There was no champagne. We drank claret. And never before, nor since, have I swallowed so many glasses and remained so heavily sober. With the coming of the dessert a mistake was made. What was the wine to be? asked Lawrence. Murry and Donald both said port. They had forgotten, or had not known, that port was a drink Lawrence could not well tolerate. He immediately hinted very gently that port was not his drink, but his remark was either missed or good-naturedly overruled. 'Port is a man's drink,' I remember either Murry or Donald announcing in solemn tones. So port it was. And Lawrence drank it with the rest of us.
It had the effect of loosening at least some of the mute tongues about the table, though none of us women was perceptibly elevated. Lawrence began to talk in Spanish (which he had learned in Mexico). Donald, who prided himself on knowing a bit of Spanish (enough to read Don Quixote and to reply to simple questions), endeavoured to engage in Spanish conversation with Lawrence. This, for some reason, infuriated Kot to such a degree that he looked like taking the unwary Donald's life had not Murry tactfully placed somebody between them. Kot's idea seemed to be that the Spanish language was Lawrence's special perquisite. Gertler drank, or refrained from drinking, in silence, looking on, always looking on from a cold afar. Both he and Mary Cannan left early.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1134