“I must wash him,” she said.
Then the old mother rose stiffly, and watched Elizabeth as she carefully washed his face, carefully brushing the big blonde moustache from his mouth with the flannel. She was afraid with a bottomless fear, so she ministered to him. The old woman, jealous, said:
“Let me wipe him!”—and she kneeled on the other side drying slowly as Elizabeth washed, her big black bonnet sometimes brushing the dark head of her daughter. They worked thus in silence for a long time. They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.
At last it was finished. He was a man of handsome body, and his face showed no traces of drink. He was blonde, full-fleshed, with fine limbs. But he was dead.
“Bless him,” whispered his mother, looking always at his face, and speaking out of sheer terror. “Dear lad—bless him!” She spoke in a faint, sibilant ecstasy of fear and mother love.
Elizabeth sank down again to the floor, and put her face against his neck, and trembled and shuddered. But she had to draw away again. He was dead, and her living flesh had no place against his. A great dread and weariness held her: she was so unavailing. Her life was gone like this.
“White as milk he is, clear as a twelve-month baby, bless him, the darling!” the old mother murmured to herself. “Not a mark on him, clear and clean and white, beautiful as ever a child was made,” she murmured with pride. Elizabeth kept her face hidden.
“He went peaceful, Lizzie—peaceful as sleep. Isn’t he beautiful, the lamb? Ay—he must ha’ made his peace, Lizzie. ’Appen he made it all right, Lizzie, shut in there. He’d have time. He wouldn’t look like this if he hadn’t made his peace. The lamb, the dear lamb. Eh, but he had a hearty laugh. I loved to hear it. He had the heartiest laugh, Lizzie, as a lad——”
Elizabeth looked up. The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”—And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.
In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known falsely. And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. It seemed awful to her. She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall. For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. She had denied him what he was—she saw it now. She had refused him as himself.—And this had been her life, and his life.— She was grateful to death, which restored the truth. And she knew she was not dead.
And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man! She was rigid with agony. She had not been able to help him. He had been cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make no reparation. There were the children—but the children belonged to life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother—but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. She felt that in the next world he would be a stranger to her. If they met there, in the beyond, they would only be ashamed of what had been before. The children had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them. But the children did not unite them. Now he was dead, she knew how eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died. Yet he had been her husband. But how little!
“Have you got his shirt, ’Lizabeth?”
Elizabeth turned without answering, though she strove to weep and behave as her mother-in-law expected. But she could not, she was silenced. She went into the kitchen and returned with the garment.
“It is aired,” she said, grasping the cotton shirt here and there to try. She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body. It was hard work to clothe him. He was so heavy and inert. A terrible dread gripped her all the while: that he could be so heavy and utterly inert, unresponsive, apart. The horror of the distance between them was almost too much for her—it was so infinite a gap she must look across.
At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little parlour, lest the children should see what was lying there. Then, with peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the kitchen. She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.
ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND
I.
The dream was still stronger than the reality. In the dream he was at home on a hot summer afternoon, working on the edge of the common, across the little stream at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and the bracken, and left the grey, dryish soil bare. He was troubled because he could not get the path straight. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine-trees, but for some unknown reason everything was wrong. He looked again, strained and anxious, through the strong, shadowy pine-trees as through a doorway, at the green garden-path rising from the log bridge between sunlit flowers, tall purple and white columbines, to the butt-end of the old, beautiful cottage. Always, tense with anxiety, he saw the rising flowery garden and the sloping old roof of the cottage, beyond the intervening shadow, as in a mirage.
There was the sound of children’s voices calling and talking: high, childish, girlish voices, plaintive, slightly didactic, and tinged with hard authoritativeness. “If you don’t come soon, Nurse, I shall run out there where there are snakes.”
Always this conflict of authority, echoed even in the children! His heart was hard with disillusion. He worked on in the gnawing irritation and resistance.
Set in resistance, he was all the time clinched upon himself. The sunlight blazed down upon the earth; there was a vividness of flamey vegetation and flowers, of tense seclusion amid the peace of the commons. The green garden-path went up between tall, graceful flowers of purple and white; the cottage with its great sloping roofs slept in the for-ever sunny hollow, hidden, eternal. And here he lived, in this ancient, changeless, eternal hollow of flowers and sunshine and the sloping-roofed house. It was balanced like a nest in a tree, this hollow home, always full of peace, always under h
eaven only. It had no context, no relation with the world; it held its cup under heaven alone, and was filled for ever with peace and sunshine and loveliness.
The shaggy, ancient heath that rose on either side, the downs that were pale against the sky in the distance, these were the extreme rims of the cup. It was held up only to heaven; the world entered in not at all.
And yet the world entered in and goaded the heart. His wife, whom he loved, who loved him—she goaded the heart of him. She was young and beautiful and strong with life like a flame in the sunshine; she moved with a slow grace of energy like a blossoming, red-flowered tree in motion. She, too, loved their hollow with all her heart. And yet she was like a weapon against him, fierce with talons of iron, to push him out of the nest-place he had made. Her soul was hard as iron against him, thrusting him away, always away. And his heart was hard as iron against her in resistance.
They never put down their weapons for a day now. For a few hours, perhaps, they ceased to be in opposition; they let the love come forth that was in them. Then the love blazed and filled the old, silent hollow where the cottage stood, with flowers and magnificence of the whole universe.
But the love passed in a few hours; only the cottage with its beauty remained like a mirage. He would abide by the mirage. The reality was the tension of the silent fight between him and his wife. He and she, as if fated, they were armed and exerting all their force to destroy each other.
There was no apparent reason for it. He was a tall, thin, fair, self-contained man of the middle class, who, never very definite or positive in his action, had now set in rigid silence of negation. He kept rigid within himself, never altering nor yielding, however much torture of repression he suffered.
Her ostensible grievance against him was that he made no money to keep his family; that, because he had an income of a hundred and fifty a year, he made no effort to do anything at all—he merely lived from day to day. Not that she accused him of being lazy; it was not that; he was always at work in the garden; he had made the place beautiful. But was this all it amounted to? They had three children; she had said to him, savagely, she would have no more. Already her father was paying for the children’s nurse, and helping the family at every turn. What would they do without her father? Could they manage on a hundred and fifty a year, with a family of three children, when they had both been brought up in plenty, and could not consider pennies? Living simply as they did, they spent two hundred and fifty a year; and now the children were tiny; what would it be when they had to go to school? Yet Evelyn would not stir to obtain any more.
Winifred, beautiful and obstinate, had all her passion driven into her conscience. Her father was of an impoverished Quaker family. He had come down from Newcastle to London when he was a young man, and there, after a hard struggle, had built up a moderate fortune again. He had ceased to be a Quaker, but the spirit persisted in him. A strong, sensual nature in himself, he had lived according to the ideas of duty inculcated upon him, though his active life had been inspired by a very worship of poetry and of poetic literature. He was a business man by tradition, but by nature he was sensual, and he was on his knees before a piece of poetry that really gratified him. Consequently, whilst he was establishing a prosperous business, a printing house and a small publishing house, at home he diffused the old Quaker righteousness with a new, æsthetic sensuousness, and his children were brought up in this sensuous heat, which was always, at the same time, kept in the iron grate of conventional ethics.
Winifred had loved her husband passionately. He came of an old south-of-England family, refined and tending towards dilettantism. He had a curious beauty of old breeding, slender and concentrated, coupled with a strange inertia, a calm, almost stoic indifference which her strong, crude, passionate, ethical nature could not understand. She could not bear it that their marriage, after all the tremendous physical passion that had convulsed them both, should resolve gradually into this nullity. Her passion gradually hardened into ethical desire. She wanted some result, some production, some new vigorous output into the world of man, not only the hot physical welter, and children.
Gradually she began to get dissatisfied with her husband. What did he stand for? She had started with a strange reverence for him. But gradually she fell away. A sense of meaninglessness came up strong in her. He was so strangely inconclusive. Her robust, undeveloped ethical nature was negated by him.
Then came the tragedy. They had three children, three fair-haired flitting creatures, all girls. The youngest was still a baby. The eldest, their love-child, was the favourite. They had wanted a boy in place of the others.
Then one day this eldest child fell on a sharp old iron in the garden and cut her knee. Because they were so remote in the country she did not have the very best attention. Blood-poisoning set in. She was driven in a motor-car to London, and she lay, in dreadful suffering, in the hospital, at the edge of death. They thought she must die. And yet in the end she pulled through.
In this dreadful time, when Winifred thought that if only they had had a better doctor at the first all this might have been averted, when she was suffering an agony every day, her husband only seemed to get more distant and more absent and exempt. He stood always in the background, like an exempt, untouched presence. It nearly drove her mad. She had to go to her father for all advice and for all comfort. Her father brought the specialist to the child; her father came to Winifred and held his arm round her, and called her his darling, his child, holding her safe, whilst all the time her husband stood aloof, silent, neutral. For this horrible neutrality, because of the horrible paralysis that seemed to come over him in these crises, when he could do nothing, she hated him. Her soul shrank from him in a revulsion. He seemed to introduce the element of horror, to make the whole thing cold and unnatural and frightful. She could not forgive him that he made the suffering so cold and rare. He seemed to her almost like a pale creature of negation, detached and cold and reserved, with his abstracted face and mouth that seemed shut in eternity.
The child recovered, but was lame. Her leg was stiff and atrophied. It was an agony to both the parents, they who lived wholly by the physical life. But to the mother it was an open, active grief; to him it was silent and incommutable, nihilistic. He would not speak of the child if he could help it, and then only in an off-hand, negligent fashion. So the distance was finally unsheathed between the parents, and it never really went away. They were separate, hostile. She hated his passivity as if it were something evil.
She taunted him that her father was having to pay the heavy bills for the child, whilst he, Evelyn, was idle, earning nothing. She asked him, did he not intend to keep his own children; did he intend her father to support them all their lives? She told him, her six brothers and sisters were not very pleased to see all the patrimony going on her children.
He asked her what could he do? She had talked all this out with her father, who could easily find a suitable post for Evelyn; Evelyn ought to work, everybody said. He was not idle; why, then, would he not do some regular work? Winifred spoke of another offer— would he accept that? He would not. But why? Because he did not think it was suitable, and he did not want it. Then Winifred was very angry. They were living in London, at double expense; the child was being massaged by an expensive doctor; her father was plainly dissatisfied; and still Evelyn would not accept the offers that were made him. He just negated everything, and went down to the cottage.
Something crystallised in Winifred’s soul. She alienated herself from him. She would go on alone with her family, doing everything, not counting her negative husband.
This was the state of affairs for almost a year. The family continued chiefly in London; the child was still being massaged, in the hope of getting some use back into the leg. But she was a cripple; it was horrible to see her swing and fling herself along, a young, swift, flame-like child working her shoulders like a deformed thing. Yet the mother could bear it. The child would have other compensation. She was alive and
strong; she would have her own life. Her mind and soul should be fulfilled. That which was lost to the body should be replaced in the soul. And the mother watched over, endlessly and relentlessly brought up the child when she used the side of her foot, or when she hopped, things which the doctor had forbidden. But the father could not bear it; he was nullified in the midst of life. The beautiful physical life was all life to him. When he looked at his distorted child, the crippledness seemed malignant, a triumph of evil and of nothingness. Henceforward he was a cipher. Yet he lived. A curious corrosive smile came on his face.
II.
It was at this point in their history that the war broke out. A shiver went over his soul. He had been living for weeks fixed without the slightest sentience. For weeks he had held himself fixed, so that he was impervious. His wife was set fast against him. She treated him with ignoring contempt; she ignored his existence. She would not mend his clothes, so that he went about with his shirt-shoulders slit into rags. She would not order his meals. He went to the kitchen and got his own. There was a state of intense hard hatred between them. The children were tentative and uncertain, or else defiant and ugly. The house was hard and sterile with negation. Only the mother gave herself up in a passion of ethical submission to her duty, and to a religion of physical self-sacrifice: which even yet she hardly believed in.
Yet the husband and wife were in love with each other. Or, rather, each held all the other’s love dammed up.
The family was down at the cottage when war was declared. He took the news in his indifferent, neutral way. “What difference does it make to me?” seemed to be his attitude. Yet it soaked in to him. It absorbed the tension of his own life, this tension of a state of war. A flicker had come into his voice, a thin, corrosive flame, almost like a thin triumph. As he worked in the garden he felt the seethe of the war was with him. His consciousness had now a field of activity. The reaction in his soul could cease from being neutral; it had a positive form to take. There, in the absolute peace of his sloping garden, hidden deep in trees between the rolling of the heath, he was aware of the positive activity of destruction, the seethe of friction, the waves of destruction seething to meet, the armies moving forward to fight. And this carried his soul along with it.
D H Lawrence- The Dover Reader Page 56