Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 290
But he was really happy. So he wrote Johanna rather lofty and sweet letters, saying he would wait till she was ready, and have faith in her. And that when she sent for him he would come. And that he would abide by her decision, and trust her through eternity. And that his life was only a waiting, only a waiting for her. But he would leave her free to bid him stay or come. — And similar things he wrote in answer to the managing Louise, and to the troubled Baroness: very lofty sounding and nice.
Which was all very well for him, while he was having a jolly good time with Joseph and Ulma far away from the scene of battles, in the Rhineland. He managed moreover to get twelve pounds from England.
Meanwhile Johanna was having no such rosy time in Detsch. Her father worried her — though what was the good! The first cris de coeur, and the first volleys of abuse began to arrive from America. There was no light and no clear counsel anywhere, none.
Till Johanna declared she would go mad. And the whole household in Detsch began to go off its head. And so Johanna escaped to Louise in Munich. Where she took to her bed and would not stir for two days.
After which she wired to Gilbert that he should come to Munich. And he wired he would come next week. Next week!
However, till next week he would not come. So Johanna devoured her incertainty. Then next week came. He set his teeth, packed his traps, bade a lingering farewell to the Rhineland, and set off on the twenty-hour journey down to Munich.
He arrived at Munich late at night — there was Johanna shining in the crowd in the darkness.
“You’ve come!” was all she said.
And in the background little Alfred, Johanna’s escort.
“Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” he said, shaking hands with his friend and pupil. “The return of the truant! The return of the Bad Boy! Well I never! Well I nevahl”
And, accompanied by a porter with the luggage, they turned out of the station.
“Goodnight, you two! See you soo-oon!” sang Alfred, suddenly waving his walking-stick and disappearing.
Gilbert looked in surprise, but the little figure was already disappearing under the lamps.
“We’ll stay in an hotel tonight,” said Johanna. “And tomorrow we’ll go out to Louise. Do you want to eat?”
The hotel was near: they were soon installed: and soon launched on the wild seas of the bridal bed. It is usual in books to avoid such topics, so we will merely mention them. We wish to hint that Gilbert, in spite of his various gallant adventures, was but an acolyte at the Dionysic or Priapic altar. He was a raw hand.
Now in no field of human activity is so much rare adjustment and well-balanced niceness required as in the service of the great Priapic god. Your libertine, with his thousand experiences and his many dodges, your Don Juan and Dona Juanita, they are always only apprentices: life-long apprentices. Your Don Juan is a life-long apprentice, who could never master his craft.
Should a man really become a master, then, in the Priapic craft? Ah yes, gentle reader. Ah yes! When all is said and done, the Father of life is a passional begetter, not an ideal. The ideal is but a nice little end in itself. But the creative cycle is one strange, incalculable, passional round, eternal.
Let us confess our belief: our deep, our religious belief. The great eternity of creation does not lie in the spirit, in the ideal. It lies in the everlasting and incalculable throb of passion and desire. The ideal is but the iridescence of the strange flux. Life does not begin in the mind: or in some ideal spirit. Life begins in the deep, the indescribable sensual throb of desire, pre-mental.
What is the soul, gentle reader? What is your soul, what is my soul? It is not some evaporated spirit. Ah no. It is that deep core of individual unity where life itself, the very God, throbs incalculably, whose throbbing unfolds the leaves and stem of the body, and brings forth the flower of the mind and the spirit. But the spirit is not the soul. Ah no. The soul has its deep fibrilled foliage in the damp earth, has its dark leaves in the air, it tosses the flower of the spirit like a bauble, a lovely plaything, on to the winds of time. Man can live without spirit or ideal, as dark pine-trees live without flowers: dark and sap-powerful. But without the deep sensual soul man is even inconceivable. This angel business, this spirit nonsense! Even spirits, such as really exist, are potent sensual entities.
If you would like to get at the secret of tree worship — Druid and Germanic, nay, universal — then realise the dark, sap- powerful, flowerless tree of the mindless, non-spiritual, sensual soul.
Gentle reader, our era has landed in the ail de sac of the spirit and the ideal. And I, poor darling, grope my way back to the tree of life, on which Jesus was crucified. He did so want to be a free, abstract spirit, like a thought. And he was crucified upon the tree of the eternal, primal sensual soul, which is man’s first and greatest being. Now I, gende reader, love my tree. And if my mind, my spirit, my conscious consciousness blossom upon the tree of me for a little while, then sheds its petals and is gone, well, that is its affair. I don’t like dried flowers, immortels. I love my tree. And the tree of life itself never dies, however many blossoms and leaves may fall and turn to dust. I place my immortality in the dark sap of life, stream of eternal blood. And as for my mind and spirit — this book, for example, all my books — I toss them out like so much transient tree-blossom and foliaged leaves, on to the winds of time. The static, written-down eternity is nothing to me: or rather, it is only a lovely side-show, almost a bauble: but lovely. Yes I love it — the spirit, the mind, the ideal. But not primarily. The primal soul I see in the face of the donkey that is tied to my gate, and which shifts its long ears. The dark, sensual soul, and that gorgeous mystery of sensual individuality.
Enough! Basta! Revenons a nos deux moutons. Let us return once more to our two sheep, Mr Gilbert and Mistress Johanna. We left them in the Priapic bed, and there we find them again, you will no doubt be glad to hear.
“Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but as long as time lasts his most excruciating tragedy is, has been, and will be — the tragedy of the bedroom.”
Pray note the inverted commas. I am quoting the great Leo Tolstoi, who, in such matters — matters of didactic judgment, I mean — seems to me a quite comical fool.
Friends, let us put our money on the tragedy of the bedroom. I could do with tragedy if it weren’t so very sorry for itself: if it would only admit how it enjoyed itself in its throes.
To return to our two tragedians. — The Priapic mysteries are not tricks. They can’t be learned with the head, nor dictated from the mind, nor practised by deliberate intent. You can no more bring about, deliberately, a splendid passional sexual storm between yourself and your woman than you can bring about a thunderstorm in the air. All the little tricks, all the intensifications of will remain no more than tricks and will-pressure. You have got to release from mental control the deep springs of passion: and after that there has got to be the leap to polarised adjustment with the woman. And these two things are deep mysteries. It takes us a long time, us, to release the profound desires from all mental control. Even the young animals, it is terrible to them, and difficult. And as for the leaping into the chasm to pure connection with the woman, that needs a basic courage and a strange concerted unison between the two protagonists, which life alone can give. It is absolutely useless going to a prostitute or a libertine. The deep accustomedness of marriage is the only way of preparation. Only those who know one another in the intricate dark ways of physical custom can pass through the seven dark hells and the seven bright heavens of sensual fulfilment. And this is why marriage is sacred. And this is perhaps the secret of the English greatness. The English have gone far into the depths of marriage, far down the sensual avenues of the marriage bed, and they have not so easily, like the French or Germans or other nations, given up and turned to prostitution or chastity or some other pis aller.
But now alas the English adventure has broken down. There is no going on. There is cul de sac and white-livered fawning.
Mr Gilbert, therefore — we will get back to our tragedians — was no very wonderful experience for Johanna, though she was a wonderful experience to him. To tell the truth, Johanna had had far more sensual satisfaction out of her husband, Everard, than out of her other lovers. Everard was a dark- eyed, handsome man, rather stiff and marquis-like, learned and a bit sarcastic. He loved his Johanna violently: and he loved his learning with an almost mediaeval passion.
There you are, then. As a husband he was darkly, furiously sensual — in his hour: and, in his hour, deeply satisfying to the woman. Yet here she was, racing round and looking for sexual love, and taking it from men who could not give her half the passional gratification and fulfilment Everard had given. Which is the perversity of women.
But hold a minute. Women are not so perverse as men would like to find them.
Everard’s nature was basically sensual. But this he hid — though mind you, he was au fond proud of it. Secretly, almost diabolically he flattered himself on his dark, sensual prowess: and not without reason. But he had to keep it lurking in secret. Openly: ah, openly, he was all for the non-existence of such things.
He had a terrible passion for Johanna — and he craved madly that it should remain a tacit secret even between him and her. Let it remain in the dark. He kneeled before her, he kissed her feet in a frenzy of craving sensual desire. If she would give him his tremendous gratification, he would sacrifice his very soul for her. Truly. He would sacrifice his individual male soul for her.
So you see, he did not ask and take his terrific sexual gratification as if it was something natural and true to marriage. He asked for it, he craved for it as if in some way it were a sin. The terrific, the magnificent black sin of sensual marriage: the gorgeous legal sin, which one was proud of, but which one kept dark: which one hated to think of in the open day, but which one lusted for by night.
Ah, he could not bear to be consciously reminded of it. And so he called Johanna his snowflower, his white snowflower. He liked to think of her as an eternal white virgin whom he was almost violating.
So that she should continue in this wise, he kneeled before her, he gave her everything. He gave her all the money he had, and perfect, perfect freedom. Nay, he would gladly have borne that she had lovers, if only she would have pretended it was not so.
This is typical of him. In the daytime, he had no lower man. In the night-time, he had nothing else. He was madly sensitive about this. Though he would read his Rabelais, and make risky jokes, and admire his Maupassant — though he seemed the very freest of the free — yet he had a weak horror of any sensual or really physical reference by day.
For example, a water-closet was a place which really must not exist for him, in his world. There was an end of it. We may well call it Number O, or even doubly nought, Number 00. It is twice nought.
Now Johanna, in her reckless and unEnglish way, instead of with circumspection looking if the coast was clear, would dash off recklessly to this 00, this non-existent place. She would seize the door-handle, and if it would not open, shake the door fiercely. For of course, if one wants to go somewhere, one wants to go. An Italian, finding the non-existent door locked, invariably puts his shoulder to it and proceeds to burst the hinges. But this aside.
There would Johanna seize this nameless door-handle and twist and pull, till from within came the snarl of a wounded and enraged tiger.
“Oh, are you there!” she would exclaim, and stand aside.
And presendy would emerge Everard, handsome and white with rage, trembling with fury.
“Are you mad, woman!” he would snarl as he passed her.
“But why? Are you the only man in the world that never must go to the W?” she would jeer.
He would only grind his teeth. At such moments his hate of her was diabolical, inhuman.
Now perhaps we may judge Everard: the darkly-passionate, upright, unmercenary man, noble enough, whose sensual secrecy and weakness in this direction prevents him from ever being quite loveable. Whatever we are, this we must stand by. If we are sensual, and deeply, utterly so, then let us not be humble about it. Man has his native right to his dark, flaming, sensual fulfilment. It is incumbent upon him, and upon his honour he must get this fulfilment. Shall he creep then for it, and grovel for it: even under the permission of the law? Shall he? If he does, he will pay the price.
For the sensual humbleness in her husband threw Johanna off her balance. It made her distraught, and at last even vindictive. For is it not a maddening thing for a woman to have the deep sensual relation so insulted, written Number O, like a W.C. Johanna turned against her husband, and because he was humble, she trampled on him. It is the fate of slaves. Because he was craving, she flouted him. Yet she feared him, as one fears a lurking beast. She feared him as one fears a cringing beast, that may fly at one’s throat.
Look you then! Everard was a true Englishman. Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, even Tennyson, these are the truly sensual poets of England: great men they are, perhaps the greatest. But they are the great sensual non-admitters. There is a doom on them.
And of such non-admitting, cowering sensualists, Tolstoi is the flagrant example.
There are the other people — the non-sensual, quite spiritual poets like Shelley. These, having nothing much to admit, admit it openly. Even Swinburne. But the true dark ones have much to admit, therefore they are the more convulsive in their retention.
What is to be done? Are we to fly off at the spiritual tangent, like Milton or Tolstoi? or at the intellectual, like Everard and very many more? — or at the romantic and fantastic? — or at the sensuous like Keats? — or at the hopeless tragic, like Hardy. Hardy is the last word, and reaches the verge of the ridiculous, which Conrad passes.
We’ve got to start all afresh, and laugh at the W.C., and give reverence and honorable fear to the passional sensual fulfilment.
Now Johanna, after Everard, was aiming in the Shelley direction, at the mid-heaven spiritual, which is still sexual but quite spiritually so. Sex as open and as common and as simple as any other human conversation. And this, we urge, is a quite logical conclusion of the spiritual programme. If In the beginning was the Word — then sex is a word also. — And we know that the Word is one word for all of us. Therefore why not free sexual love, as free as human speech?
Why not? Because the a priori are all wrong. In the beginning was not the Word, but something from which the Word merely proceeded later on. Let us stick to the first and greatest god, and let the Logos look after itself. The first, great, passionately generating God.
So Gilbert seemed a really lovely and spiritual lover to Johanna. He was really frightened, like Everard. But gathering his courage in both his hands, he managed to look on the naked woman of his desire without starting to grovel. Which, if you have profound desire, isn’t so easy. You either grovel or overween. Or else, grovelling, you overween. To be neither more nor less than just yourself on such an occasion: well, that takes time and a sound heart.
In the morning they were happy. The coffee, the lovely new crisp rolls, the honey, the Alp butter — how good it seemed, all of it. Gilbert was very joyful to be back in Munich. And as they sat at breakfast, they heard the strange, heavy thresh-thresh-thresh of marching soldiers. They went to the window. A squadron of blue Bavarian infantry marching heavily past. Strange and heart-penetrating the sound of their motion — so rhythmic, with a sound like a heavy lash.
They were not to stay in Munich. Alfred had appearances to consider. Gilbert would not go back to the university. He dropped all that. Johanna had promised to go out with Gilbert to Louise at Schloss Wolfratsberg.
Therefore the two sauntered in Munich till after lunch, then took the train towards the mountains. It was a dull day, rather cold, with some rain.
Louise sat in her rather dark, warm sitting-room, that had grey linen walls, and dark oriental carpets, and dark, shapely furniture, and many of the pale-yellow books that are current in France and Germany. She was writing, but she put away her pen. She seemed to Gilbert like some spider spinning in a jewelled web: or like a dark, magical Lady of Shalott who never looked out of the window, but sat weaving heaven knows what.
“So, you have come back again!” she gave her hand to Gilbert and smiled at him oddly. Beautiful she was. She had lovely white, well-shapen teeth, small and attractive. And in her big, dark-grey eyes a half-laugh, mocking, yet as if misted with tears. In an instant Gilbert fell again under the fascination she had thrown over him before.
“And what will you do? Ach! What will you do-oo?”
She sat down and glanced at him wickedly from under her long lashes — but with a half winsome wickedness, mingled with benevolence and kindliness.
“What shall I do?” said Gilbert, abstract.
The fire went bright in her eyes.
“Ach, you ask me! You ask me! Come, that is strange. How shall I know? — Now you have come back to Johanna — Ah, Johanna, I have a letter for thee — from thine husband — ”
Incredible irony in the last phrase.
“Oh yea!” cried Johanna. “Where is it?”
Louise produced the letter, Johanna went with it to a window. Louise resumed her seat opposite Gilbert. He glanced at the proud figure of Johanna, as she stood in the window-light — then back, abstractedly, at Louise.
