Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 268
She mused on, in the brilliantly-lighted, hot room. She seemed very still, like a cat. Yet the dark lines under her eyes were marked. Her skin was of that peculiar transparency often noticed in vegetarians and idealists. Her husband’s was the same: as if the blood were lighter, more limpid, nearer to acid in the veins. All the time, she heard her husband so plainly. He always sounded in her universe: always. And she was tired: just tired. They were an ideal married couple, she and he. But something was getting on her nerves.
He appeared after a time.
“Can’t see any more,” he said. “Beastly rain still. The Unco Guid will want their just umbrellas tonight. I’m afraid there’ll be a fair amount of pew-timber showing beneath the reverend eyes, moreover. There’s nothing parsons hate more than the sight of bare pew-timber. They don’t mind a bare bread-board half as much. — That reminds me, Mrs Goddard, what about tea?”
“What about it?” she answered, screwing up her face at him slightly, in a sort of smile. He looked down at her from under his eyelids.
“Is that intended as a piece of cheek?” he asked.
“Yes, it might be,” she said.
“I won’t stand it.”
“I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. No man ever does,” she quizzed.
“When a woman begins to give her husband cheek — ”
“Go and put the kettle on.”
“I’ve got to go and get the tea, have I?” he asked.
“Yes, if you want it so early, you have. It’s only five o’clock.”
“The wiles and circumventions of a woman’s heart, not to mention her tongue, would cheat ten Esaus out of ten birthrights a day.”
“All right then put the kettle on.”
“You have any more of your impudence, Patty Goddard, and I won’t, so I tell you straight.”
“I’m dumb,” she said.
“My word, then I’ll make haste and clear out, while the victory is yet mine.”
So he retreated to the kitchen, and his brilliant whistling kept her fully informed of his existence down the long length of the passage. Nay, even if he went out of actual earshot, he seemed to be ringing her up all the time on some viewless telephone. The man was marvellous. His voice could speak to her across a hundred miles of space; if he went to America, verily, she would hear him invisibly as if he was in the back kitchen. The connection between a mother and her infant was as nothing compared to the organic or telepathic connection between her and Lewie. It was a connection which simply was never broken. And not a peaceful, quiet unison. But unquiet, as if he was always talking, always slightly forcing her attention, as now by his whistling in the kitchen. When he was right away from her, he still could make some sort of soundless noise which she was forced to hear and attend to. Lewie, Lewie, her soul sounded with the noise of him as a shell with the sea. It excited her, it pleased her, it saved her from ever feeling lonely. She loved it, she felt immensely pleased and flattered. But the dark lines came under her eyes, and she felt sometimes as if she would go mad with irritation.
He was fumbling at the door, and she knew he was balancing the full tray on his knee whilst he turned the doorhandle. She listened. He was very clever at these tricks, but she must listen, for fear.
“Well of all the idle scawd-rags!” he said as he entered with the tray.
“I’m the idlest, I know it,” she said laughing. She had in fact known that she ought to spread the cloth in readiness for his coming. But today a kind of inertia held her.
“How much does that admission cost you?” bantered Lewie, as he flapped the white cloth on to the round table.
“Less than the effort of getting up and laying the cloth,” she laughed.
“Ay, such a lot,” he said. He liked doing the things, really, on these days when the work-woman was absent.
There were buttered eggs in little casseroles; there was a stilton cheese, a salad, a pudding of chestnuts and cream, celery, cakes, pastry, jam, and preserved ginger: there were delicate blue Nankin cups, and berries and leaves in a jar. It had never ceased to be a delightful picnic á deux. It was so this evening still. But there was an underneath strain, unaccountable, that made them both listen for some relief.
They had passed the eggs and cheese and pudding stage, and reached the little cakes and tarts, when they heard the front gate bang.
“Who’s this!” said Lewie, rising quickly and going to light the hall lamp. The bell pinged.
Patty listened with her ears buttoned back.
“I wondered if you’d be at home — ” — a man’s bass voice.
“Ay, we’re at home. Come in,” — Lewie’s voice, heartily. He was nothing if not hospitable. Patty could tell he did not know who his visitor was.
“Oh Mr Noon, is it you? Glad to see you. Take your coat off. Ay? Are you wet? Have you walked? — You’ve just come right for a cup of tea. Ay, come in.”
Mr Noon! Patty had risen hastily, hearing the name. She stood in the sitting-room doorway in her soft dress of dark- brown poplin trimmed with silk brocade in orange and brown. She was waiting. The visitor came forward.
“How nice of you to come,” she said. “Where have you been for so long? We haven’t seen you for ages. — You’re sure your feet aren’t wet? Let Lewie give you a pair of slippers.”
“Ay, come on,” said Lewie heartily.
Mr Noon, in a bass voice, said he had come on the motor- bicycle, and that he had left his overalls at The Sun. He was a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, with broad, rather stiff shoulders and a dark head somewhat too small for these shoulders. His face was fresh, his mouth full and pursed, his eye also rather full, dark-blue, and abstracted. His appearance was correct enough, black coat and a dark blue tie tied in a bow. He did not look like a socialist.
The whole character of the room was now changed. It was evident the Goddards were pleased, rather flattered to entertain their visitor. Yet his hands were red, and his voice rather uncouth. But there was a considerable force in him. He ate the food they gave him as if he liked it.
“Now tell us,” said Patty, “what brings you to Woodhouse on a night like this.”
“Not any desire to sit at the feet of one of our famous administers of the gospel, I’ll warrant,” said Lewie.
“No,” said Noon. “I’d got an appointment and was here a bit too soon, so I wondered if you’d mind if I called.”
“Ah — !” exclaimed Patty. His answer was hardly flattering. “Of course! Of course! You may just as well wait here as at a street corner, or in a public-house.”
“The public-houses, my dear Patty, don’t open till half- past six, so that they shan’t get an unfair start of the House of the Lord,” said Lewie.
“No, of course,” said Patty. “But you won’t have to hurry away at once I hope,” she added, to Gilbert Noon.
“I can stop till about half-past seven,” said that gentleman.
“Till chapel comes out,” said Lewie drily.
“Ha-a-a!” laughed Patty, half-scornfully, half-bitterly, as if she had found him out.
“That’s it,” said Mr Noon, going rather red.
“Which of the tabernacles is it then?” asked Lewie. “We’d better know, to start you off in good time. Pentecost is half an hour earlier than the others, and Church is about ten minutes before the Congregational. Wesleyan is the last, because the Reverend Mr Flewitt is newly arrived on the circuit, and wants to sweep the chapel very clean of sin, being a new broom.”
“Congregational,” said Mr Noon.
“Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” said Patty teasingly. She was really rather chagrined. “You’re quite sure the fair flame will have come out on such a night?”
“No, I’m not sure,” said Mr Noon, rather awkwardly.
“Many waters cannot quench love, Patty Goddard,” said Lewie.
“They can put a considerable damper on it,” replied Patty.
Gilbert Noon laughed.
“They can that,” he replied.
“You speak as if you knew,” laughed Patty, knitting her brow.
But Gilbert only shook his head.
“Ah well,” said Patty, looking at the clock. “We can just clear away and settle down for an hour’s talk, anyhow. I’ve lots of things to ask you. Do smoke if you’d care to.”
Lewie, a non-smoker, hurried up with a box of cigarettes. But the young man preferred a pipe. They were soon all seated round the fire.
The reason the Goddards made so much of Gilbert Noon was because he was so clever. His father owned a woodyard in Whetstone, six miles away, and was comfortably well off, but stingy. Gilbert, the only son, had started his career as an elementary school-teacher, but had proved so sharp at mathematics, music, and science that he had won several scholarships, had gone up to Cambridge, and might have had a Fellowship if only he had stayed and worked. But he would neither work nor stay at the university, although he was accounted one of the most brilliant of the young mathematicians. He came back to Whetstone with his degree, and started the old round of Whetstone life, carousing in common public-houses, playing his violin for vulgar dances, “hops” as they were called, and altogether demeaning himself. He had a post as Science Master in Haysfall Technical School, another five miles from Whetstone, and so far, Haysfall shut its ears to Whetstone misdemeanours. Gilbert’s native town, a raw industrial place, was notorious for its roughs.
Occasionally Mr Noon, being somewhat of a celebrity in the countryside, would give popular lectures on scientific subjects. Lewie Goddard was secretary for the Woodhouse Literary Society, and as such had had much pride in securing Gilbert on several occasions. Gilbert’s lectures to the people were really excellent: so simple, and so entertaining. His account of Mars, with lantern slides, thrilled Woodhouse to the marrow. And particularly it thrilled Patty. Mars, its canals and its inhabitants and its what-not: ah, how wonderful it was! And how wonderful was Mr Noon, with his rough bass voice, roughly and laconically and yet with such magic and power landing her on another planet. Mephistopheles himself, in a good-natured mood, could not have been more fascinating than the rough young man who stood on the rostrum and pointed at the lantern sheet with a long wand, or whose ruddy face was lit up at his dark-lantern, as he glanced at his notes.
So had started the Noon-Goddard acquaintance, which had not as yet ripened into a friendship. The Goddards warmly invited Gilbert, but he rarely came. And his social uncouthness, though acceptable in the Midlands as a sign of manliness, was rather annoying sometimes to a woman.
He sat now with a big pipe in his fist, smoking clouds of smoke and staring abstractedly into the fire. He wore a ring with a big red stone on one finger. Patty wondered at him, really. He made no effort to be pleasant, so his hostess fluttered her two neat little feet on her footstool, settled herself deep in her chair, and lifted her sewing from under a cushion. She perched her spectacles away on the slope of her nose, then looked up at Gilbert from under her dark eyebrows.
“You won’t be shocked if I stitch on the Sabbath, and sew clothes for the devil?” she asked.
“Me?” said Gilbert. “Better the day, better the deed.”
“So they say,” retorted Patty sarcastically. But it was lost on him.
“I’d rather clothe the devil than those up-aloft,” said Lewie. “He stands more need. Why he’s never a rag to his back. Not even a pair of bathing drawers, much less an immortal mantle. Funny thing that.”
“Beauty is best unadorned,” said Patty. “Then the angels and the Lord must be pretty unbeautiful, under all their robes and spangles,” said Lewie.
But Mr Noon was not attentive. Patty called a sort of hush. From the midst of it, she inquired in a small, searching voice: “And what are you doing with yourself these days, Mr Noon?”
“Me? Making stinks at Haysfall.”
“Chemical, I hope, not moral,” said Lewie.
“And what are you doing at Whetstone?” asked Patty.
Gilbert took his pipe from his mouth and looked at her.
“Pretty much as usual,” he said.
She laughed quickly.
“And what is that?” she said. “Are you working at anything?”
He reached forward and knocked his pipe on the fire-bar. “I’m doing a bit,” he said. “Of what?” she asked.
“Oh — thesis for my M.A. — maths. — And composing a bit as well.”
“Composing music? But how splendid! What is it?”
“A violin concerto.”
“Mayn’t we hear it?”
“It wouldn’t mean anything to you — too abstract.”
“But mayn’t we hear it?”
“Ay — you might some time — when I can arrange it.”
“Do arrange it. Do!”
“Yes, do,” put in Lewie.
“It’s not finished,” said Gilbert.
“But when it is,” said Patty. “You will finish it, won’t you?”
“I hope so, some day.”
She stuck her needle in her sewing, and looked up, and mused.
“I think of all the wonderful things to create,” she said, “music is the most difficult. I can never understand how you begin. And do you prefer music to your mathematics?”
“They run into one another — they’re nearly the same thing,” he said. “Besides it isn’t any good. It’s too abstract and dry for anybody but me, what I write.”
“Can’t you make it less abstract?” she said.
He looked at her.
“Somehow I can’t,” he said; and she saw a flutter of trouble in him.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I’m sure. I know it hasn’t got the right touch. It’s more a musical exercise than a new piece of work. — I only do it for a bit of pastime. It’ll never amount to anything.”
“Oh, surely not. You who have such talents — ”
“Who?” said Gilbert scoffingly.
“You. You have wonderful talents.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Where are they?” asked Gilbert.
“In your head, I suppose.”
“Ay, and there they can stop, for all they’re worth — ”
“Nay now — ” began Lewie.
“But why? But why?” rushed in Patty. “Don’t you want to make anything of your life? Don’t you want to produce something that will help us poor mortals out of the slough?”
“Slough?” said Gilbert. “What I should do would only make the slough deeper.”
“Oh come! Come! Think of the joy I got out of your lecture.”
He looked at her, smiling faintly.
“A pack of lies,” he said.
“What?” she cried. “Didn’t I get joy out of it?”
He had got his pipe between his pouting lips again, and had closed his brow.
“What is lies?” she persisted.
“Mars,” he said. “A nice little fairy-tale. You only like it better than Arabian Nights.”
“Oh come — !” she cried in distress.
“Ay, we like it better than Arabian Nights,” said Lewie.
“I know you do,” said Gilbert. “I’ll tell you another some time.”
“Oh but come! — come!” said Patty. “Is nothing real? Or nothing true?”
“Not that I know of,” said Gilbert. “In that line.”
“Why, dear me, how surprising,” said Patty, puzzled. “Surely you believe in your own work?”
“Yes, I believe in mathematics.”
“Well then — ” she said.
He took his pipe from his mouth, and looked at her.
“There isn’t any well then” he said.
“Why not?”
“Mathematics is mathematics, the plane of abstraction and perfection. Life is life, and is neither abstraction nor perfection.”
“But it has to do with both,” she protested.
“Art has. Life hasn’t.”
“Life doesn’t matter to you, then?”
“No, why should it?”
The answer staggered her.
“How can anything matter, if life doesn’t matter?” she said.
“How could anything matter, if life mattered?” he replied. “Life is incompatible with perfection, or with infinity, or with eternity. You’ve got to turn to mathematics, or to art.”
She was completely bewildered.
“I don’t believe it,” she cried.
“Ay well,” he retorted, knocking out his pipe.
“You’re young yet. You’ll find that life matters before you’ve done,” she said.
“I’m quite willing,” he said.
“No,” she said, “you’re not.” Suddenly her ivory face flushed red. “Indeed you’re not willing. When do you ever give life a chance?”
“Me?” he said. “Always.”
“No, you don’t. Excuse my contradicting you. You never give life a chance. Look how you treat women!”
He looked round at her in wonder.
“How do I?” he said. “What women?”
“Yes, how do you — !” She stumbled, and hesitated. “Confess it’s a girl you’re going to meet tonight,” she continued, plunging. “I’m old enough to be able to speak. You’ve never really had a mother. You don’t know how you treat women. Confess you’re going to meet a girl.”
“Yes — what by that?”
“And confess she’s not your equal.”
“Nay, I don’t see it.”
“Yes you do. Yes you do. How do you look on her? Do you look on her as you do on your mathematics? Ha — you know what a difference there is.”
“Bound to be,” he said. “Bound to be a difference.”
“Yes, bound to be. And the girl bound to be an inferior — a mere plaything — not as serious as your chemical apparatus, even.”
“Different,” protested Gilbert. “All the difference in the world.”
“Of course,” said Patty. “And who sinks down in the scale of the difference. Who does? The girl. — I won’t ask you who the girl is — I know nothing about her. But what is she to you? A trivial Sunday-night bit of fun: isn’t she? — isn’t she now?”
“Ay, she’s good fun, if I must say it.”
“She is! Exactly! She’s good fun,” cried Patty bitterly.
“Good fun, and nothing else. What a humiliation for her, poor thing!”
