Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 295
Gilbert afterwards lay shattered, his old soul, his old mind and psyche shattered and gone. And he lay prostrate, a new thing, a new creature: a prostrate, naked, new thing.
And he and Johanna slept, with his arm round her, and her breast, one breast, in his hand: the perfect, consummating sleep of true, terrible marriage. As a new-born child sleeps at the breast, so the newly-naked, shattered, new-born couple sleep together upon the heaving wave of the invisible creative life, side by side, two together, enveloped in fruition.
Ah gentle reader, what have we done! What have we done, that sex, and the sacred, awful communion should have become degraded into a thing of shame, excused only by the accident of procreation, or the perversion of spiritual union. It is no spiritual union. It is the living blood-soul in each being palpitating from the shock of a new metamorphosis. What have we done, that men and women should have so far lost themselves, and lost one another, that marriage has become a mere affair of comradeship, “pals,” or brother-and-sister business, or spiritual unison, or prostitution? Ah God, God, why do we always try to run away from our own splendour. Why are we all such Jonahs? And why must I be the whale to swim back to the right shore with you, gentle reader.
Marriage, gentle reader, rests upon the root-quivering of the awful, surpassing sex embrace, full and unspeakable. It is a terrible adjustment of two fearful opposites, their approach to a final crisis of contact, and then the flash and explosion, as when lightning is released. And then, the two, the man and the woman, quiver in a newness. This is the real creation: not the accident of childbirth, but the miracle of man-birth and woman-birth. No matter how many children are born, each one of them has still to be man-born, or woman-born, later on. And failing this second birth, there is no life but bread and butter and machine toys: no living life.
And the man-birth and the woman-birth lasts a life long, and is never finished. Spasm after spasm we are born into manhood and womanhood, and there is no end to the pure creative process. Man is born into further manhood, forever: and woman into further womanhood.
And it is no good trying to force it. It must come of itself. It is no use having ideals — they only hinder. One must have the pride and dignity of one’s own naked, unabateable soul: no more.
Don’t strive after finality. Nothing is final except an idea, or an ideal. That can never grow. But eternity is, livingly, the unceasing creation after creation after creation, and heaven is to live onwards, and hell is to hold back. Ah, how many times have I, myself, been shattered and born again, how many times still do I hope to be shattered and born again, still, while I live. In death I do not know, do not ask. Life is my affair.
“And oh that a man would arise in me That the man I am might cease to be.”
Which is putting it backwards. The shattering comes before the arising. So let us pray for our shattering, gentle reader, if we pray at all. And we, who have paid such exaggerated respect for the Gethsemanes and Whitsuntides of renunciation, let us now proceed to pay a deeper, and at last real respect for the Gethsemanes and Whitsuntides of the life-passion itself, the surging life-passion which we will never, never deny, however many ideal gods may ask it.
The year was passing on. The rye was ripe, and the farmhands were out in a line, mowing with the scythe. The corn was tall, taller than the men who stooped and swayed in a slanting line, downhill towards the wood’s edge. Gilbert would stand a long time on his high balcony, watching them work in the misty morning, watching them come in at noon-day, when the farm-bell rang, watching the dusk gather over them. And always, he wished he were one with them — even with the laborers who worked and whetted their scythes and sat down to rest under the shade of the standing corn. To be at one with men in a physical activity. Why could he not? He had only his life with Johanna, and the bit of work he was doing.
The life with Johanna was his all-in-all: the work was secondary. Work was always a solitary, private business with him. It did not unite him with mankind.
Why could he not really mix and mingle with men? For he could not. He could be free and easy and familiar — but from any sort of actual intimacy or commingling, or even unison, something in his heart held back, tugged him back as by a string round his heart. He had no comrade, no actual friend. Casual friends he had in plenty — and he was quite popular. He had even friends who wrote and said they loved him. But the moment he read the words his heart shut like a trap, and would not open. — As far as men were concerned he was cut off — and more or less he knew it. He could share their company and their casual activities, their evenings and their debates and their excursions, but one with them he was not, ever, and he really knew it. As far as men went, he was a separate, unmixing specimen.
Yet he wanted, wanted to have friends and a common activity. At the bottom of his heart he set an immense value on friendship — eternal, manly friendship. And even he longed for association with other men, in some activity. He had almost envied the soldiers — now he almost envied the mowers. Not quite. Not altogether.
Because, of course, he had mixed hard enough with men all his life. He knew what they were. He knew that they had no wonderful secret — none: rather a wonderful lack of secret. He knew they were like ants, that toil automatically in concert because they have no meaning, singly. Singly, men had no meaning. In their concerted activities, soldier or labor, they had all their significance.
And so Gilbert felt himself cut off from one half of man’s life. With a curious, blank certainty he knew it, as he leaned on the balcony, high up, and watched the men at work. Because he could never be an ant in the colony, or a soldier in the hive, he must stand outside of life, outside the man’s life, the world activity, in a way, divorced.
He must make all his life with Johanna, and with his work. He would finish his book of songs before August. And he had written down a sketch of a symphony which he knew in his heart was genuine from him. So much for that.
And he clung with intensity to Johanna. Since he had been with her, and his old closed heart had broken open, he knew that she and he were fate and life to one another. She was his one connection in the universe. And because he had no other connection, and could have no other, apparently; and also because, since his old, closed, more-or-less self-sufficient heart had been broken open, and set in a pulsing correspondence with the soul of the woman, he could no longer live alone; therefore he grasped at Johanna with a kind of frenzy.
The family was working once more for a reunion with Everard. Everard had written saying that he would allow Johanna to have a flat in New York, with her boys, if she would live there in complete honor, as his wife; personally, he could never return to her, as a husband.
This seemed a very fine offer, and a very satisfactory capitulation, in the eyes of the Baron and family. All pressure was to be brought to bear. Johanna was invited again by Louise to Wolfratsberg. Gilbert accompanied her: and was rather coldly received, and made to feel an interloper.
“Tonight,” said the officious Louise, “Johanna will stay here. Because there is much to talk about, which we must say ALONE.”
Whereupon, it being evening, Gilbert said Goodnight to Johanna, and Johanna said Goodnight to him. She half expected, and wished, that he would command, or at least request her to refuse Louise, and to return to Ommerbach with him. He did neither. It was part of his nature, that, cost what it might, everyone must make his own, or her own decision for herself. So he said Goodnight, and Johanna rather mockingly called Goodnight back again.
“You will come tomorrow?” he said, looking at her.
She always quailed when he looked direct at her, and asked her a stripped question.
“Yes,” she said, a little grudgingly. “I’ll come.”
“In the morning?”
“In the morning or in the afternoon.”
“Yes — yes — she shall come. Do not fear,” laughed Louise rather jeeringly.
Gilbert looked at them both with black eyes, and took his leave. He walked back, up the steep hill through the wood, and along the high Landstrasse by the railway and the rye. Night fell, and a moon hung low down. The road was silent, and strangely foreign to him in the night. It seemed to him that it ran towards Russia — he could feel Russia at the end of the road — and that the century was not his own century. England was all switched off, gone out of connection. One might imagine wolves.
He looked round at the bristling shadows. He saw the white, foreign road. And something in his wrists, and in his heart, seemed to be swollen turgid almost to bursting. In his wrists particularly. He veered slowly right round, in a circle, and felt Europe, strange lands, wheeling slowly round him. And he felt he was mad: like a hub of a wheeling continent. And it seemed the skies would break. And his wrists felt turgid, swollen. And very dim in his consciousness was a thought of Johanna in Wolfratsberg being talked to by that infernal Louise: infernal, that was what she was.
At last he came to the house, and entered the silent, empty, dark flat. He went out on to the balcony and hung over the night, hearing the distant hoarseness of the river, seeing the bristling of fir-trees in the dark, and remaining himself suspended.
When a man’s life has been broken open, and its single flow definitely connected with the life-flow in another being, so that some invisible pulsing life-blood flows between their two selves all the time, some current of invisible vital flow, then it is a horror and a madness to derange this flow. And strange, very strange Gilbert felt that night on the balcony: untellable: deranged in soul, in life-self, not in mind. He knew, with stark, deranged inevitability, that Johanna was his fate, he was to be balanced in changeless vital correspondence with her: or else there was before him a wandering incompleteness like idiocy.
However, he went to bed: and awoke after a short time with agony: and looked at the empty pillow at his side: and for a moment it was as if she was dead.
After which he lay watching for the dawn, and the sound of the farm-bells. And never, in all his life, was he more grateful for any sound than for the sound of the jangle-jangling farm- bell in the whitish dawn. He went out at once on to the road. And there, strange enough, was a hunter or forester, in the first dawn-light, walking with a dead deer slung over his shoulder. It was tied by its four little feet, in a bunch, and its head hung back. It was hard to forget.
Soon the laborers came out of the farm, into the morning- chill, dew-drenched world. And he watched them go down the slope with their scythes. And the sun came up. And he thanked God there was sun, and sweet day, and that his soul’s insanity was soothed.
He hung on during the day. Johanna did not come till four o’clock: and then, with Louise and Professor Sartorius. Gilbert made the tea. The conversation was German and critical — and it turned on Goethe. Gilbert said Goethe was cold, less than human, nasty and functional, scientific in the worst sense: that where man should have a reverent soul, Goethe had only a nasty scientific inspiration. He talked, saying what he really felt. It all arose out of a volume of Goethe’s lyrics which Louise had bestowed on him. He talked as one is used to talk, openly.
He was therefore startled when Professor Sartorius bounced up as if a cracker had gone off in his trouser-seat, said he could hear no more of this from one who knew nothing about the great Goethe, ganz und gar nichts, gabbled Danke schon for the tea, seized his hat and made for the door. There he looked round.
“You are coming?” he said to Louise.
“Ja — Ja — ! — Goodbye — ” said Louise to Gilbert, pursing her mouth. “You see we think very much of Goethe — and perhaps you speak without understanding him at all. Yes? — don’t you think?”
Gilbert did not answer, and they went.
“I said what I think, and I believe it’s true,” he said, looking at Johanna with hot, angry eyes.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said.
And she liked him for raising the professorial dust.
They were silent for some moments.
“Are you glad I’ve come?” she said.
“I knew you’d come,” he answered, speaking more jauntily now she was actually here.
“But did you want me?”
He looked at her, a dark look. He could not bear such questions. He was queer to her — incomprehensible. He did not seem a bit glad. Yet she was awfully glad to be with him again — inexpressibly. Why wasn’t he festive too? Oh she was so glad. She had escaped again. Queer and sombre and inscrutable he was. Why didn’t he say anything.
“You are glad, aren’t you, that I’ve come back to you?” she said, looking round the room with pleasure.
“Why should you ever stay away!” he replied, with a good deal of resentment showing.
“Oh, I should think I can stay away one night,” she replied lightly, flattered.
“But Louise is a treacherous creature, really,” she said.
“Why?”
He still did not believe in the tricks of the other woman.
Johanna was rather piqued that he did not make a fuss of her: did not make love to her. But he didn’t. He was silent, and rather withheld. Inside him his soul was gripped and tense, as from the shock, and from a certain desperate clutching at certainty. He had had a shock: and his soul was desperate. It is a horrible thing for a man to realise, not so much in his mind as in his soul, that his very life, his very being depends upon his connection with another being. It is a terrible thing to realise that our soul’s sanity and integrity depends upon the adjustment of another individual to ourself: that if this individual, wantonly or by urgency break the adjustment and depart, the soul must bleed to death, not whole, and not quite sane.
This pretty piece of knowledge Gilbert realised in his clairvoyant depths. And it shook him profoundly at the time, so that he could not gather himself together, or come forth, or be free. He could not finally trust Johanna: there was some strain of volition in his heart. So his love-making was gripped and intense and almost cruel.
Two nights after this he awoke again with a start. He felt at once that Johanna was not at his side. In the same instant he heard a low, muffled sound that seemed to shatter his heart.
He sat up. There was a white blotch beneath the low window. It was Johanna crouching there, sobbing.
“What is it? Why are you there?”
“Nothing,” she sobbed.
“Why have you got up? You’ll be cold.”
“Oh no — oh no — ” she sobbed.
“But what’s the matter? Come back to bed.”
“No — No — no-o!” she sobbed madly.
The night and the dark room seemed to bristle with the sound.
“What is the matter? Is anything wrong?” he said. At last he was perhaps full awake: if man is ever full awake in the middle of the sleep-night.
“No — no! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” she sobbed in a wild despair.
He rose in pure bewilderment, and went to her.
“But what is it,” he said, taking her gently in his arms as he crouched beside her. “Tell me what it is.”
“Oh, you are cruel to me, you are cruel to me, you are — ” she sobbed, with the strange, irrational continuance of a child.
“I? Why? How? How am I cruel to you?”
“You are! You torture me. You torture me — yes — you do!”
“But how? How? I don’t torture you. — You are cold. You are quite cold. Come to bed. You are cold.”
“No. No. You don’t love me. You are cruel to me. Oh, you are cruel to me, you are.”
“But come to bed — you are so cold — come to bed and tell me how. Come to bed and tell me how — come and be warm.”
“You’ll torture me. You’ll torture me.”
“No no! I’ll only make you warm. Come. Come.”
At last, still sobbing in the curious abandon, she let herself be led back to the bed. He took her in his arms, and wrapped the bedclothes round her closely, and wrapped her with himself drawing her in to his breast, and putting his cheek down upon her round, soft head, so that he seemed to have folded her all together.
“You are cruel! You are cruel to me,” she sobbed, sobbing more violently, but with the curious heavy remoteness departing from the sound.
“But I’m not!” he said. “I’m not. How am I? I love you. I love you. I only love you. And I love nothing but you in all the world — nothing in all the world. How am I?”
“You are. You don’t really love me.”
“I do. I do nothing else. What have you got in this state for? It’s ridiculous. And you are cold through.”
He gathered her closer and closer. Her sobbing was subsiding.
“Because you don’t love me,” she sobbed, “and it makes you cruel to me. You torture me.”
“I don’t,” he said, clutching her nearer. “Tell me how. — Are you getting warm now?”
“Yes,” she piped faintly.
“And it’s nonsense,” he said. “I do love you, my love. If only I didn’t love you so much. — You’re so cold still. Why are you so silly? Why are you so silly. You startled me horribly.”
“But you don’t know.”
“Yes I do! My love! My pigeon. Be warm, be warm, my love — be warm with me.”
She wriggled and nestled nearer, and gave a little shuddering sound.
“Now you’re getting warm,” he sang softly, in a monotone. “Now you’re getting warm with me. Aren’t you, my love. We’re getting warm, so warm, aren’t we.”
She nestled nearer and nearer in his arms, seeming to get smaller, whilst he seemed to grow bigger in the darkness.
“To say I don’t love you! To say such things!” he whispered into her hair. ‘.’To say I don’t love you — ! when — oh God!” And he clung to her and enfolded her as a tree enfolds a great stone with its roots. And she nestled in silence enveloped by him.
So they were happy again, and restored — but a little more frightened than before. They had both had a lesson — and each began to fear the other, and to fear the inter-relation: perhaps a wholesome fear.
As Johanna sat in bed having her coffee she brooded as her plaits dangled. He sat on a chair by the bed, where he had carried the little table and the tray. He too was quiet. His heart was still again.
