Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 279
This was one of his mornings of tiresomeness. Gilbert had a faculty of abstraction or of vacancy, whichever you like, which made him the most feasible companion to such a man. He said nothing, but dreamed, or mused, or abstracted, whichever it was, and took his egg in its little silver cup, and helped himself to honey, and handed his cup to the professor without further thought. And if Alfred in his spirit was mortified because Gilbert’s cup came too soon, and took a bigger proportion of the coffee than the little man liked, and if his sense of proprietorship writhed to see his guest make so free in the matter of honey, still, the host with his little imperial under his thickish mouth managed to expend all his exasperation inside himself, which was a relief, really. It was a relief that the small brimstone fires of his irritable meannesses set nobody else’s corn-ricks alight. He begrudged the unearn- ing Englishman his bigger share of coffee, and he almost wanted to snatch the honey dish off the table. Yet all the time he knew so well that such irritability and such small meanness and grudging were beneath him, beneath his intellectual temper if not his housekeeping one, that he only bounced on his chair and spied out the spots or flaws in the fine linen cloth, or the scratches on the silver. So did the poor professor keep the smallness of the flesh in check by the greatness of the restraining mind. He told himself quite plainly that if his guest ate a pot of honey every morning — which he didn’t — what were the odds to a man with an income of two- hundred-thousand marks. No odds at all. And yet, poor Alfred, he twitched on his chair at every spoonful after the third, and the mongrel dogs of the flesh almost jerked the leash out of the controlling hand of the mind.
But not quite. Which was always a great cause of self- satisfaction to poor Alfred. He was pettyfogging in his blood, and he knew it. So he admired Gilbert’s sang froid with the honey more even than he hated it; for in the mind, at least, the little professor was a free soul, even if he had never found a von. In the mind he was superior, and he knew that it behoved him to be superior somewhere, he, with his queasy spirit. If he had given way to his own littlenesses, then he would have condemned himself to the society of natures as little as his own. Which, to a man of his squeamishness and intellectual intelligence, would have been a worse mortification than death itself. So he put up with the pin-pricks of his stingy flesh, for fear of the sword-thrust in his freer spirit. Almost he loved Gilbert for administering the pin-pricks with so cool and unconscious a hand. He loved his own little whippings, for he knew they were good for him. Perhaps if he lived to be a hundred he would be able to sit sunnily in his chair while the guest scraped the dish and licked the honey- spoon. Perhaps he would even tell Julie to put a new pot on the table. Who knows the ductibility of human forbearance.
In one direction, however, poor Alfred’s idealistic forbearance had been drawn out too fine, almost to breaking point. It is curious how much easier it is to be idealistic over big things than over little: how much easier it is to give a hundred pounds for the Home for the One-legged, than to see a guest take ten spoonfuls of honey: how much easier it is to die a heroic death than to get over one’s foibles.
How thin Alfred’s idealism had stretched his human sensibility at one point, and that the most important, the following conversations will show.
“Na!” said the professor suddenly, breaking the spell. “What are you going to do today?”
The day was Sunday, when everybody must do something.
“Nothing in particular,” said Gilbert. He had a few acquaintances with whom he might talk his head off, in the Court Brewery or the Hahn Cafe. Or he could go to Pinak- otheks or Glyptotheks or to music. All remained to be seen.
“I am going to work,” said the professor crossly.
“You don’t want me, do you?” said Gilbert.
“No — no. No — no. I have something prepared in my mind — ” the professor emphasised this word in a fine resonant voice, and put his finger-tip to his fine forehead, as if the something prepared was a rare old cup of tea for the universe. But alas, the professor was only nervously joking. Though he worked and fussed and wrote and theorised and popped up hither and thither like some unexpected rabbit in the warren of learning and theory, it was all artificial to him. He was missing something. He was missing something. What was it? It was life. He was missing life, with his books and his theory and papers. The mental part of him was overstrained and ennuyé, and yet what was he to do. He was damned to theorise.
For sure he had a drop too much of Jewish blood in his veins, and so we must not take him as typical of the sound and all-too-serious German professors for whom the word is God, though the Word is not with God, but with them, the professors thereof.
Alfred — we can’t help saying poor Alfred — boomed out the Word with the best of them. And since he was a very shrewd little person, with generation after generation of Rabbinical training behind him, he could lick the usual German professor with his left hand, at intellectualising. And he knew it. Hence the boom of his voice:
“I’m going to work.”
But Gilbert belonged to his private life, and so he did not mind letting Gilbert hear the half-jocular frisky boom, he did not mind revealing to his young acquaintance that he was going to let himself off in a whoop of self-importance, and that he knew it.
So off he trotted to his study, after having informed Julie that he was working, and that niemand and nichts, nothing and nobody should disturb him. For the Word was with him that morning.
Once in his study the frisky jocularity and importance fell from him. Out of his depression he had worked it all up, for Gilbert’s sake. The whoop would not come off. Alas, he felt dry and anxious. Books, books, books! Blotting paper, and paper, and gold pen. The neat and spotless and roomy writing desk, the date calendar, the nibs, the reference books, the god-knows-what of a rich learned man in his study. Ach Gott, there it all was, and he was missing something.
Alfred looked at it all, and the little tense pleat came childishly between his forehead. He sighed, and said: “Ach!
Ach jeh! Wo ist ?” And he fiddled among the pens and among the papers, though he had lost nothing and was looking for nothing. His nervous anticipation of authorship was all a fraud. Now he was in the study he seemed to have shrunk, to have gone littler: for he was little to start with. A great nervous weight was upon him. Books, paper, pens, ink. Books! walls and bastions, buttresses and gables of books!
Imagine it, for a white-haired little man of fifty-three, who has booked it all his life, and who has moreover twenty-three Rabbinical ancestors in a straight line behind him! For a little man who suddenly imagines Life to be something and the Word a mere bauble in the hands of buffoons like himself. Finds himself strangely anxious, books showering down on his head like the ruins of Carthage, while all the time he wants life, life, whatever life may be. Finds himself anxious — to be with young people, to share their existence, their youth.
He sighed again and dipped his pen, seated himself like a little boy in his chair, and drew his paper to him. He arranged it, he squared it, he settled it in the centre of his blotting paper with the nicest precision, touching it along the edges with his nervous, fussy fingertips. That was life. To take a sheet of paper, to arrange it, to settle it, to open the ink-pot, to put the sealing-wax in its right place — all that was life. But to write, to put down words! Alas, to the poor professor this was anti-life itself, the most foolish of papery illusions. That Life with a big L was also an illusion of his, he had not yet realised.
So he fidgetted and sighed and scribbled a dozen words in his bad handwriting and reached for a reference book and it wasn’t there because it never was there but on the fourth shelf of the B block and so he frowned and felt he might get in a temper with Julie and he got up and hunted for the book and found it where he knew it was and busily rattled the leaves over looking for his reference: found it, and hastily scribbled it down on his paper. And that was the only bit of his morning’s work which he enjoyed.
He was scribbling a few more irritable words when he heard a step in the hall. Yes! And the clink of a walking-stick being taken from the hall-stand. Ach! — the unbearable — there was Gilbert going out: going out to the morning, and to life.
“Gilbert! Gil — bert!” he sang, in his resonant, musical voice. And he listened, his blue eyes round and childish and vaguely desperate. We must mention that he was the youngest child of elderly parents.
He was just starting out of his chair when he heard Gilbert’s step on the polished parquet floor, so he settled himself and poised his pen, like a man torn between two desires. The serious thought-line was adjusted in his brows.
“Ach Gilbert, weiss’ du — ?” he began in his breathless, anxious German. Then he changed to English. He liked flourishing his English. “Ach, I can’t find the second volume of Ammermeister’s Theorie des Unbewussten. It ought to be on the second shelf. Do you know where it is?”
Gilbert was dressed for out-doors, overcoat and stick and hat on his head. Life — life!
He strolled to the second shelf of the D block and produced the book.
“Oh yes! How silly of me. Thank you. Thank you!” — and then the anxious-theoretic-author voice changed to one more flippant: “Where are you going?”
“A walk.”
“Where will you go?”
“Just a stroll.”
“In the country — or in Munich?”
“Oh, I shan’t go out into the country. Isn’t there too much snow?”
“We-ell!” the professor pursed his lips. “For young and adventurous persons like me — ” he boomed jocularly — ”there is not too much. I tell you, I like it. I like these days when the snow is melting, and you have patches, patches of the world coming through. I like it. I like the sun, even when it makes me feel my rheumatism. Ah, when we get old, we like even our Schmerzen — Well? Don’t we? You are young still. Only wait — only wait. — But seriously, I like these days among the best of the year. The snow is going, going, the sun is come, come, and gentian and the pink flowers are on the patches. Ah — ” — and here he looked through the double windows at the trees of the Ludwigshohe as they stood bare-twigged in the sunshine — ”I am tempted. I am tempted. What do you say? What do you say to my lazy and unworthy suggestion? My lazy and unworthy suggestion! What?”
“I’ve not heard it,” said Gilbert.
“No, you haven’t,” said the professor. “But you shall. What do you say if we go into the country and look at my little piece of land where I am going to build my little wooden house, my dog-kennel I shall call it. I shall call it the dog-kennel. I shall call it Vow-Wow. Vow-wow-wow!” and the professor rubbed his hands and imitated a dog barking. Then he glanced again brighdy at Gilbert.
“What? What do you say? Shall we run away from work — ” boom that word as he did — “and go and look at my house? Yes? Shall we?”
“I should like to,” said Gilbert decidedly.
“Yes, you would! Then we will go. We will go and look at the land for my little Vow-Wow — ” He fell into a sort of students’ chant as he jumped from his chair and pressed the bell for Julie.
“But now then, when is there a train?”
He darted his nose into a time-table.
“Sonntag — Sonntag — Sonntag — Isartalbahn — Isartalbahn — Ommerhausen — Ommerhausen — Yes, we have it — halb- neun — a quarter to eleven — a quarter to eleven — Sundays — yes. Will that do? Yes? Will it?” he looked up excitedly at Gilbert.
“Just right,” said Gilbert.
“Yes.”
Enter Julie. The professor countermanded dinner, and ordered boots and wraps.
“We will run away from work like two bad boys — ” boom the word boys — ”and we will look at the seat for my little Vow-Wow. Seat you say? — or site? Site of course. And we’ll be Off to Philadelphia in the mo-orning.” Chant the last words all out of tune.
They set off, the professor in knee-breeches and cloak, Gilbert in mountain-boots and English leather gaiters. Alfred was as happy as a school-boy. He rattled away in English as they sat in the little train running down the Isar valley. They travelled third class, in those wooden carriages where one can see the heads of one’s fellow-travellers in the other compartments. Students were there with guitars and little accordions, there were snatches of song. Soldiers in Bavarian blue leaned out of the carriage windows in spite of the cold air, and with frost-reddened faces watched the landscape and shouted in Bavarian dialect the length of the carriage.
The train ran comfortably beside the high-road, whose snow was melted, or lay in mounds at the road-side. Students in groups were strolling down the road, between the high, wind-tired pear trees and apple trees. Men from the mountains, in short leathern trousers and bare knees, like footballers, short little embroidered jackets, and a chamois-tail in their green hats, jumped on the train at the station. There was a sparkle and crackle of energy everywhere on the sunny Sunday morning after the winter.
And Gilbert loved it: he loved the snow-ruddy men from the Alp foot-hills, so hardy-seeming, with their hard, handsome knees like Highlanders, and their large blue eyes, and their curiously handsome plastique, form and mould. He loved the peasant women trudging along the road from church, in their full blue dresses and dark silk aprons and funny cup- and-saucer black hats. They all stood to look at the little train, which rattled along beside the road, unfenced and unhampered, as tram-cars run in England, and everybody made jokes to them or about them.
Alfred and Gilbert got down at Ommerhausen and quickly left the muddy village. The peasants, pious catholics, were coming from mass, from the church which reared high its white neck, capped by a small, black, Byzantine-looking cupola. The churches are so characteristic that the sight of one will send the whole violent nostalgia of the Bavarian highlands into the heart even of a stranger. So Gilbert, in the midst of Bavaria, was seized with the strange passion for the place. He went with Alfred across the levels, where the snow lay only in pieces here and there: over the rushing little streams, towards the nestling village of Genbach, whose white farms with their great roofs and low balconies clustered round the toy-looking church. It was a tiny village — not more than a dozen houses on the slope of a hill, near the edge of the forest.
The sun was hot. Alfred had taken off his cloak and slung it through his little knapsack. Gilbert did the same with his overcoat — and took off his cap and stuffed it in his pocket. Then the two men turned round to survey the world.
The great Isar valley lay beneath them in the spring morning, the pale, icy green river winding its way from the far Alps, coming as it were down the long stairs of the far foothills, between shoals of pinkish sand, a wide, pale river-bed coming from far off, with the river twisting from side to side between the dark pine-woods. The mountains, a long rank, were bright in heaven, glittering their snow under the horizon. Villages with the white-and-black churches lay in the valley and on the opposite hill-slope. It was a lovely, ringing, morning-bright world, for the Englishman vast and glamorous. The sense of space was an intoxication for him. He felt he could walk without stopping on to the far north-eastern magic of Russia, or south to Italy. All the big, spreading glamour of mediaeval Europe seemed to envelop him.
“Na! Isn’t it beautiful?” said the professor.
“Beautiful,” said Gilbert.
The bigness: that was what he loved so much. The bigness, and the sense of an infinite multiplicity of connections. There seemed to run gleams and shadows from the vast spaces of Russia, a yellow light seemed to struggle through the great Alp-knot from Italy, magical Italy, while from the north, from the massive lands of Germany, and from far-off Scandinavia one could feel a whiteness, a northern, sub-arctic whiteness. Many magical lands, many magical peoples, all magnetic and strange, uniting to form the vast patchwork of Europe. The glamorous vast multiplicity, all made up of differences, mediaeval, romantic differences, this seemed to break his soul like a chrysalis into a new life.
For the first time he saw England from the outside: tiny she seemed, and tight, and so partial. Such a little bit among all the vast rest. Whereas till now she had seemed all-in-all in herself. Now he knew it was not so. Her all-in-allness was a delusion of her natives. Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal. They were just a piece of local pattern, in what was really a vast, complicated, far-reaching design.
So he watched the glitter of the range of Alps towards the Tyrol: he saw the pale-green Isar climbing down her curved levels, coming towards him, making for Munich and then Austria, the Danube, the enormous meanderings of the Danube. He saw the white road, which seemed to him to lead to Russia. And he became unEnglished. His tight and exclusive nationality seemed to break down in his heart. He loved the world in its multiplicity, not in its horrible oneness, uniformity, homogeneity. He loved the rich and free variegation of Europe, the manyness. His old obtuseness, which saw everything alike, in one term, fell from his eyes and from his soul, and he felt rich. There were so many, many lands and peoples besides himself and his own land. And all were magically different, and it was so nice to be one among many, to feel the horrible imprisoning oneness and insularity collapsed, a real delusion broken, and to know that the universal ideals and morals were after all only local and temporal.
Gilbert smoked his pipe, and pondered. He seemed to feel a new salt running vital in his veins, a new, free vibration in all his nerves, like a bird that has got out of a cage, and even out of the room wherein the cage hung.
He trudged with the professor up a slope to a brow of the hill. And there, in an angle of the forest, was Alfred’s new bit of land. It faced the south-west, looked right across the wide valley to the hills and the high peaks in heaven. Behind, on two sides, was forest of fir and great beech-trees. A snug place with a great scoop of the world in front.
