Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 543
Mrs. Witt watched her daughter quizzically.
“Louise,” she said, “you won’t tell me that the mere animal is all that counts in a man. I will never believe it. Man is wonderful because he is able to think.”
“But is he?” cried Lou, with sudden exasperation. “Their thinking seems to me all so childish: like stringing the same beads over and over again. Ah, men! They and their thinking are all so paltry. How can you be impressed?”
Mrs. Witt raised her eyebrows sardonically.
“Perhaps I’m not — any more,” she said with a grim smile.
“But,” she added, “I still can’t see that I am to be impressed by the mere animal in man. The animals are the same as we are. It seems to me they have the same feelings and wants as we do in a commonplace way. The only difference is that they have no minds: no human minds, at least. And no matter what you say, Louise, lack of minds makes the commonplace.”
Lou knitted her brows nervously.
“I suppose it does, mother. — But men’s minds are so commonplace: look at Dean Vyner and his mind! Or look at Arthur Balfour, as a shining example. Isn’t that commonplace, that cleverness? I would hate St. Mawr to be spoilt by such a mind.”
“Yes, Louise, so would I. Because the men you mention are really old women, knitting the same pattern over and over again. Nevertheless, I shall never alter my belief that real mind is all that matters in a man, and it’s that that we women love.”
“Yes, mother! — But what is real mind? The old woman who knits the most complicated pattern? Oh, I can hear all their needles clicking, the clever men! As a matter of fact, mother, I believe Lewis has far more real mind than Dean Vyner or any of the clever ones. He has a good intuitive mind, he knows things without thinking them.”
“That may be, Louise! But he is a servant. He is under. A real man should never be under. And then you could never be intimate with a man like Lewis.”/
“I don’t want intimacy, mother. I’m too tired of it all. I love St. Mawr because he isn’t intimate. He stands where one can’t get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That’s the mystery. That great burning life in him, which never is dead. Most men have a deadness in them, that frightens me so, because of my own deadness. Why can’t men get their life straight, like St. Mawr, and then think? Why can’t they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do? Why isn’t men’s thinking quick like fire, mother? Why is it so slow, so dead, so deadly dull?”
“I can’t tell you, Louise. My own opinion of the men of to-day has grown very small. But I can live in spite of it.”
“No, mother. We seemed to be living off old fuel, like the camel when he lives off his hump. Life doesn’t rush into us, as it does even into St. Mawr, and he’s a dependent animal. I can’t live, mother. I just can’t.”
“I don’t see why not! I’m full of life.”
“I know you are, mother. But I’m not, and I’m your daughter. — And don’t misunderstand me, mother! I don’t want to be an animal like a horse or a cat or a lioness, though they all fascinate me, the way they get their life straight, not from a lot of old tanks, as we do. I don’t admire the caveman, and that sort of thing. But think, mother, if we could get our lives straight from the source, as the animals do, and still be ourselves. You don’t like men yourself. But you’ve no idea how men just tire me out: even the very thought of them. You say they are too animal. But they’re not, mother. It’s the animal in them has gone perverse, or cringing, or humble, or domesticated, like dogs. I don’t know one single man who is a proud living animal. I know they’ve left off really thinking. But then men always do leave off really thinking when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”
“Because we have minds — ”
“We have no minds once we are tame, mother. Men are all women, knitting and crocheting words together.”
“I can’t altogether agree, you know, Louise.”
“I know you don’t. — You like clever men. But clever men are mostly such unpleasant animals. As animals, so very unpleasant. And in men like Rico, the animal has gone queer and wrong. And in those nice clean boys you liked so much in the war, there is no wild animal left in them. They’re all tame dogs, even when they’re brave and well-bred. They’re all tame dogs, mother, with human masters. There’s no mystery in them.”
“What do you want, Louise? You do want the cave man, who’ll knock you on the head with a club.”
“Don’t be silly, mother. That’s much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind — I don’t consider the cave man is a real human animal at all. He’s a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he’d be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he’d never cease to wonder, he’d breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He’d be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves. — Ah, no, mother, I want the wonder back again, or I shall die. I don’t want to be like you, just criticising and annihilating these dreary people, and enjoying it.”
“My dear daughter, whatever else the human animal might be, he’d be a dangerous commodity.”
“I wish he would, mother. I’m dying of these empty danger-less men, who are only sentimental and spiteful.”
“Nonsense, you’re not dying.”
“I am, mother. And I should be dead if there weren’t St. Mawr and Phoenix and Lewis in the world.”
“St. Mawr and Phoenix and Lewis! I thought you said they were servants.”
“That’s the worst of it. If only they were masters! If only there were some men with as much natural life as they have, and their brave, quick minds that commanded instead of serving!”
“There are no such men,” said Mrs. Witt, with a certain grim satisfaction.
“I know it. But I’m young, and I’ve got to live. And the thing that is offered me as life just starves me, starves me to death, mother. What am I to do? You enjoy shattering people like Dean Vyner. But I am young, I can’t live that way!”
“That may be.”
It had long ago struck Lou how much more her mother realised and understood than ever Rico did. Rico was afraid, always afraid of realising. Rico, with his good manners and his habitual kindness, and that peculiar imprisoned sneer of his.
He arrived home next morning on St. Mawr, rather flushed and gaudy, and over-kind, with an empressé anxiety about Lou’s welfare which spoke too many volumes. Especially as he was accompanied by Flora Manby, and by Flora’s sister Elsie, and Elsie’s husband, Frederick Edwards. They all came on horseback.
“Such awful ages since I saw you!” said Flora to Lou. “Sorry if we burst in on you. We’re only just saying ‘How do you do!’ and going on to the inn. They’ve got rooms all ready for us there. We thought we’d stay just one night over here, and ride to-morrow to the Devil’s Chair. Won’t you come? Lots of fun! Isn’t Mrs. Witt at home?”
Mrs. Witt was out for the moment. When she returned she had on her curious stiff face, yet she greeted the newcomers with a certain cordiality: she felt it would be diplomatic, no doubt.
“There are two rooms here,” she said, “and if you care to poke into them, why, we shall be delighted to have you. But I’ll show them to you first, because they are poor, inconvenient rooms, with no running water and miles from the baths.”
Flora and Elsie declared that they were “perfectly darling sweet rooms — not overcrowded.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Witt, “the conveniences certainly don’t fill up much space. But if you like to take them for what they are — ”
“Why, we feel absolutely overwhelmed, don’t we, Elsie? — But we’ve no clothes — !”
Suddenly the silence had turned into a house-party. The Manby girls appeared to lunch in fine muslin dresses, bought in Paris, fresh as daisies. Women’s clothing takes up so little space, especially in summer! Fred Edwards was one of those blond Englishmen with a little brush moustache and those strong blue eyes which were always attempting the sentimental, but which Lou, in her prejudice, considered cruel: upon what grounds she never analysed. However, he took a gallant tone with her at once, and she had to seem to simper. Rico, watching her, was so relieved when he saw the simper coming.
It had begun again, the whole clockwork of ‘lots of fun’!
“Isn’t Fred flirting perfectly outrageously with Lady Carrington! — She looks so sweet!” cried Flora, over her coffee-cup. “Don’t you mind, Harry!”
They called Rico ‘Harry’! His boy-name.
“Only a very little,” said Harry. “L’uomo è cacciatore.”
“Oh, now, what does that mean?” cried Flora, who always thrilled to Rico’s bits of affectation.
“It means,” said Mrs. Witt, leaning forward and speaking in her most suave voice, “that man is a hunter.”
Even Flora shrank under the smooth acid of the irony. “Oh, well now!” she cried. “If he is, then what is woman?”
“The hunted,” said Mrs. Witt, in a still smoother acid. “At least,” said Rico, “she is always game!”
“Ah, is she though!” came Fred’s manly, well-bred tones. “I’m not so sure.”
Mrs. Witt looked from one man to the other, as if she were dropping them down the bottomless pit.
Lou escaped to look at St. Mawr. He was still moist where the saddle had been. And he seemed a little bit extinguished, as if virtue had gone out of him.
But when he lifted his lovely naked head, like a bunch of flames, to see who it was had entered, she saw he was still himself. Forever sensitive and alert, his head lifted like the summit of a fountain. And within him the clean bones striking to the earth, his hoofs intervening between him and the ground like lesser jewels.
He knew her and did not resent her. But he took no notice of her. He would never ‘respond’. At first she had resented It. Now she was glad. He would never be intimate, thank heaven.
She hid herself away till tea-time, but she could not hide from the sound of voices. Dinner was early, at seven. Dean Vyner came — Mrs. Vyner was an invalid — and also an artist who had a studio in the village and did etchings. He was a man of about thirty-eight, and poor, just beginning to accept himself as a failure, as far as making money goes. But he worked at his etchings and studied esoteric matters like astrology and alchemy. Rico patronised him, and was a little afraid of him. Lou could not quite make him out. After knocking about Paris and London and Munich, he was trying to become staid, and to persuade himself that English village life, with squire and dean in the background, humble artist in the middle, and labourer in the common foreground, was a genuine life. His self-persuasion was only moderately successful. This was betrayed by the curious arrest in his body: he seemed to have to force himself into movements: and by the curious duplicity in his yellow-grey, twinkling eyes, that twinkled and expanded like a goat’s, with mockery, irony, and frustration.
“Your face is curiously like Pan’s,” said Lou to him at dinner.
It was true, in a commonplace sense. He had the tilted eyebrows, the twinkling goaty look, and the pointed ears of a goat-Pan.
“People have said so,” he replied. “But I’m afraid it’s not the face of the Great God Pan. Isn’t it rather the Great Goat Pan!”
“I say, that’s good!” cried Rico. “The Great Goat Pan!”
“I have always found it difficult,” said the Dean, “to see the Great God Pan in that goat-legged old father of satyrs. He may have a good deal of influence — the world will always be full of goaty old satyrs. But we find them somewhat vulgar. The goaty old satyrs are too comprehensible to me to be venerable, and I fail to see a Great God in the father of them all.”
“Your ears should be getting red,” said Lou to Cartwright. She, too, had an odd squinting smile that suggested nymphs. so irresponsible and unbelieving.
“Oh no, nothing personal!” cried the Dean.
“I am not sure,” said Cartwright, with a small smile. “But don’t you imagine Pan once was a great god before the anthropomorphic Greeks turned him into half a man?”
“Ah! — maybe. This is very possible. But — I have noticed the limitation in myself — my mind has no grasp whatsoever of Europe before the Greeks arose. Mr. Wells’s Outline does not help me there, either,” the Dean added with a smile.
“But what was Pan before he was a man with goat legs?” asked Lou.
“Before he looked like me!” said Cartwright, with a faint grin. “I should say he was the god that is hidden in everything. In those days you saw the thing, you never saw the god in it: I mean in the tree or the fountain or the animal. If you ever saw the God instead of the thing, you died. If you saw it with the naked eye, that is. But in the night you might see the God. And you knew it was there.”
“The modern pantheist not only sees the God in everything, he takes photographs of it,” said the Dean.
“Oh, and the divine pictures he paints!” cried Rico.
“Quite!” said Cartwright.
“But if they never saw the God in the thing, the old ones, how did they know he was there? How did they have any Pan at all?” said Lou.
“Pan was the hidden mystery — the hidden cause. That’s how it was a Great God. Pan wasn’t he at all: not even a great God. He was Pan. All: what you see when you see in full. In the day-time you see the thing. But if your third eye is open, which sees only the things that can’t be seen, you may see Pan within the thing, hidden: you may see with your third eye, which is darkness.”
“Do you think I might see Pan in a horse, for example?”
“Easily. In St. Mawr!” — Cartwright gave her a knowing look.
“But,” said Mrs. Witt, “it would be difficult, I should say, to open the third eye and see Pan in a man.”
“Probably,” said Cartwright, smiling. “In man he is over-visible: the old satyr: the fallen Pan.”
“Exactly!” said Mrs. Witt. And she fell into a muse. “The fallen Pan!” she re-echoed. “Wouldn’t a man be wonderful in whom Pan hadn’t fallen!”
Over the coffee in the grey drawing-room she suddenly asked:
“Supposing, Mr. Cartwright, one did open the third eye and see Pan in an actual man — I wonder what it would be like?”
She half lowered her eyelids and tilted her face in a strange way, as if she were tasting something, and not quite sure.
“I wonder!” he said, smiling his enigmatic smile. But she could see he did not understand.
“Louise!” said Mrs. Witt at bed-time. “Come into my room for a moment, I want to ask you something.”
“What is it, mother?”
“You, you get something from what Mr. Cartwright said about seeing Pan with the third eye? Seeing Pan in something?”
Mrs. Witt came rather close and tilted her face with strange insinuating question at her daughter.
“I think I do, mother.”
“In what?” — The question came as a pistol-shot.
“I think, mother,” said Lou reluctantly, “in St. Mawr.”
“In a horse!” — Mrs. Witt contracted her eyes slightly. “Yes, I can see that. I know what you mean. It is in St. Mawr. It is! But in St. Mawr it makes me afraid — ” she dragged out the word. Then she came a step closer. “But, Louise, did you ever see it in a man?”
“What, mother?”
“Pan. Did you ever see Pan in a man, as you see Pan in St. Mawr?”
Louise hesitated.
“No, mother, I don’t think I did. When I look at men with my third eye, as you call it — I think I see — mostly — a sort of — pancake.” She uttered the last word with a despairing grin, not knowing quite what to say.
“Oh, Louise, isn’t that it! Doesn’t one always see a pancake! Now listen, Louise. Have you ever been in love?”
“Yes, as far as I understand it.”
“Listen, now. Did you ever see Pan in the man you loved? Tell me if you did.”
“As I see Pan in St. Mawr? — no, mother!” And suddenly her lips began to tremble and the tears came to her eyes.
“Listen, Louise. I’ve been in love innumerable times — and really in love twice. Twice! — yet for fifteen years I’ve left off wanting to have anything to do with a man, really. For fifteen years! And why? Do you know? Because I couldn’t see that peculiar hidden Pan in any of them. And I became that I needed to. I needed it. But it wasn’t there. Not in any man. Even when I was in love with a man, it was for other things: because I understood him so well, or he understood me, or we had such sympathy. Never the hidden Pan. Do you understand what I mean? Unfallen Pan!”
“More or less, mother.”
“But now my third eye is coming open, I believe. I am tired of all these men like breakfast cakes, with a teaspoonful of mind or a teaspoonful of spirit in them, for baking-powder. Isn’t it extraordinary: that young man Cartwright talks about Pan, but he knows nothing of it all. He knows nothing of the unfallen Pan: only the fallen Pan with goat legs and a leer — and that sort of power, don’t you know.”
“But what do you know of the unfallen Pan, mother?”
“Don’t ask me, Louise! I feel all of a tremble, as if I was just on the verge.”
She flashed a little look of incipient triumph, and said goodnight.
An excursion on horseback had been arranged for the next day, to two old groups of rocks, called the Angel’s Chair and the Devil’s Chair, which crowned the moor-like hills looking into Wales, ten miles away. Everybody was going — they were to start early in the morning, and Lewis would be the guide, since no one exactly knew the way.
Lou got up soon after sunrise. There was a summer scent in the trees of early morning, and monkshood flowers stood up dark and tall, with shadows. She dressed in the green linen riding-skirt her maid had put ready for her, with a close bluish smock.
