Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 569
The woman of Isis stood in the hollow by the tiny spring.
Only one slave at a time could pass. The girl-slaves waited at the entrance to the narrow place. When the man who had died appeared, the woman sent the girls away. The men-slaves still arranged the bed, making the job as long as possible. But the woman of Isis dismissed them too. And the man who had died came to look at his house.
“Is it well?” the woman asked him.
“It is very well,” the man replied. “But the lady, your mother, and he who is no doubt the steward, watched while the slaves brought the goods. Will they not oppose you?”
“I have my own portion! Can I not give of my own? Who is going to oppose me and the gods?” she said, with a certain soft fury, touched with exasperation. So that he knew that her mother would oppose her, and that the spirit of the little life would fight against the spirit of the greater. And he thought: ‘Why did the woman of Isis relinquish her portion in the daily world? She should have kept her goods fiercely!’
“Will you eat and drink?” she said. “On the ashes are warm eggs. And I will go up to the meal at the villa. But in the second hour of the night I shall come down to the temple. 0, then, will you come too to Isis?” She looked at him, and a queer glow dilated her eyes. This was her dream, and it was greater than herself. He could not bear to thwart her or hurt her in the least thing now. She was in the full glow of her woman’s mystery.
“Shall I wait at the temple?” he said.
“0, wait at the second hour and I shall come.” He heard the humming supplication in her voice and his fibres quivered. “But the lady, your mother?” he said gently.
The woman looked at him, startled.
“She will not thwart me!” she said.
So he knew that the mother would thwart the daughter, for the daughter had left her goods in the hands of her mother, who would hold fast to this power.
But she went, and the man who had died lay reclining on his couch, and ate the eggs from the ashes, and dipped his bread in oil, and ate it, for his flesh was dry: and he mixed wine and water, and drank. And so he lay still, and the lamp made a small bud of light.
He was absorbed and enmeshed in new sensations. The woman of Isis was lovely to him, not so much in form as in the wonderful womanly glow of her. Suns beyond suns had dipped her in mysterious fire, the mysterious fire of a potent woman, and to touch her was like touching the sun. Best of all was her tender desire for him, like sunshine, so soft and still.
“She is like sunshine upon me,” he said to himself, stretching his limbs. “I have never before stretched my limbs in such sunshine, as her desire for me. The greatest of all gods granted me this.”
At the same time he was haunted by the fear of the outer world. “If they can, they will kill us,” he said to himself. “But there is a law of the sun which protects us.”
And again he said to himself: “I have risen naked and branded. But if I am naked enough for this contact, I have not died in vain. Before I was clogged.”
He rose and went out. The night was chill and starry, and of a great wintry splendour. “There are destinies of splendour,” he said to the night, “after all our doom of littleness and meanness and pain.”
So he went up silently to the temple, and waited in darkness against the inner wall, looking out on a grey darkness, stars, and rims of trees. And he said again to himself: “There are destinies of splendour, and there is a greater power.”
So at last he saw the light of her silk lanthorn swinging, coming intermittent between the trees, yet coming swiftly. She was alone, and near, the light softly swishing on her mantle-hem. And he trembled with fear and with joy, saying to himself: “I am almost more afraid of this touch than I was of death. For I am more nakedly exposed to it.”
“I am here, Lady of Isis,” he said softly out of the dark. “Ah!” she cried, in fear also, yet in rapture. For she was given to her dream.
She unlocked the door of the shrine, and he followed after her. Then she latched the door shut again. The air inside was warm and close and perfumed. The man who had died stood by the closed door and watched the woman. She had come first to the goddess. And dim-lit, the goddess-statue stood surging forward, a little fearsome like a great woman-presence urging.
The priestess did not look at him. She took off her saffron mantle and laid it on a low couch. In the dim light she was bare-armed, in her girdled white tunic. But she was still hiding herself away from him. He stood back in shadow and watched her softly fan the brazier and fling on incense. Faint clouds of sweet aroma arose on the air. She turned to the statue in the ritual of approach, softly swaying forward with a slight lurch, like a moored boat, tipping towards the goddess.
He watched the strange rapt woman, and he said to himself: “I must leave her alone in her rapture, her female mysteries.” So she tipped in her strange forward-swaying rhythm before the goddess. Then she broke into a murmur of Greek, which he could not understand. And, as she murmured, her swaying softly subsided, like a boat on a sea that grows still. And as he watched her, he saw her soul in its aloneness, and its female difference. He said to himself: “How different she is from me, how strangely different! She is afraid of me, and my male difference. She is getting herself naked and clear of her fear. How sensitive and softly alive she is, with a life so different from mine! How beautiful with a soft, strange courage, of life, so different from my courage of death! What a beautiful thing, like the heart of a rose, like the core of a flame. She is making herself completely penetrable. Ah! how terrible to fail her, or to trespass on her!”
She turned to him, her face glowing from the goddess. “You are Osiris, aren’t you?” she said naively.
“If you will,” he said.
“Will you let Isis discover you? Will you not take off your things?”
He looked at the woman, and lost his breath. And his wounds, and especially the death-wound through his belly, began to cry again.
“It has hurt so much!” he said. “You must forgive me if I am still held back.”
But he took off his cloak and his tunic and went naked towards the idol, his breast panting with the sudden terror of overwhelming pain, memory of overwhelming pain, and grief too bitter.
“They did me to death!” he said in excuse of himself, turning his face to her for a moment.
And she saw the ghost of the death in him as he stood there thin and stark before her, and suddenly she was terrified, and she felt robbed. She felt the shadow of the grey, grisly wing of death triumphant.
“Ah, Goddess,” he said to the idol in the vernacular. “I would be so glad to live, if you would give me my clue again.”
For her again he felt desperate, faced by the demand of life, and burdened still by his death.
“Let me anoint you!” the woman said to him softly. “Let me anoint the scars! Show me, and let me anoint them!”
He forgot his nakedness in this re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: “What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life; this scar is the eye of the violet.”
And he could not help smiling at her, in her naïve priestess’s absorption. This was her dream, and he was only a dream-object to her. She would never know or understand what he was. Especially she would never know the death that was gone before in him. But what did it matter? She was different. She was woman: her life and her death were different from him. Only she was good to him.
When she chafed his feet with oil and tender, tender healing, he could not refrain from saying to her:
“Once a woman washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with her hair, and poured on precious ointment.”
The woman of Isis looked up at him from her earnest work, interrupted again.
“Were they hurt then?” she said. “Your feet?”
“No, no! It was while they were whole.”
“And did you love her?”
“Love had passed in her. She only warned to serve,” he replied. “She had been a prostitute.”
“And did you let her serve you?” she asked.
“Yea.”
“Did you let her serve you with the corpse of her love?”
“Ay!”
Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love. This is my body — take and eat — my corpse —
A vivid shame went through him. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of love — ’
There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight. “And I told them, blessed are they that mourn,” he said to himself. “Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live. Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more to me now than all my words. For I want to live — ”
“Go then to the goddess!” she said softly, gently pushing him towards Isis. And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing, he heard the woman murmuring to the goddess, murmuring, murmuring with a plaintive appeal. She was stooping now, looking at the scar in the soft flesh of the socket of his side, a scar deep and like an eye sore with endless weeping, just in the soft socket above the hip. It was here that his blood had left him, and his essential seed. The woman was trembling softly and murmuring in Greek. And he in the recurring dismay of having died, and in the anguished perplexity of having tried to force life, felt his wounds crying aloud, and the deep places of the body howling again: “I have been murdered, and I lent myself to murder. They murdered me, but I lent myself to murder — ”
The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her palm over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed his life again, as thousands of times before. And in the dark, wild pain and panic of his consciousness rang only one cry: “Oh, how can she take this death out of me? She can never know! She can never understand! She can never equal it!...”
In silence, she softly rhythmically chafed the scar with oil. Absorbed now in her priestess’s task, softly, softly gathering power, while the vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power, and passed in a girdle round him to the opposite scar, gradually warmth began to take the place of the cold terror, and he felt: ‘I am going to be Warm again, and I am going to be whole! I shall be warm like the morning. I shall be a man. It doesn’t need understanding. It needs newness. She brings me newness — ’
And he listened to the faint, ceaseless wail of distress of his wounds, sounding as if for ever under the horizons of his consciousness. But the wail was growing dim, more dim.
He thought of the woman toiling over him: ‘She does not know! She does not realise the death in me. But she has another consciousness. She comes to me from the opposite end of the night.’
Having chafed all his lower body with oil, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river. And the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness, and darkness in his soul, unbroken, dark stillness, wholeness.
Then slowly, slowly, in the perfect darkness of his inner man, he felt the stir of something coming. A dawn, a new sun. A new sun was coming up in him, in the perfect inner darkness of himself. He waited for it breathless, quivering with a fearful hope...”Now I am not myself. I am something new...”
And as it rose, he felt, with a cold breath of disappointment, the girdle of the living woman slip down from him, the warmth and the glow slipped from him, leaving him stark. She crouched, spent, at the feet of the goddess, hiding her face.
Stooping, he laid his hand softly on her warm, bright shoulder, and the shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.
Now all his consciousness was there in the crouching, hidden woman. He stooped beside her and caressed her softly, blindly, murmuring inarticulate things. And his death and his passion of sacrifice were all as nothing to him now, he knew only the crouching fullness of the woman there, the soft white rock of life...”On this rock I built my life.” The deep-folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn.
He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.
“I am risen!”
Magnificent, blazing indomitable in the depths of his loins, his own sun dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone unconsciously.
He untied the string on the linen tunic and slipped the garment down, till he saw the white glow of her white-gold breasts. And he touched them, and he felt his life go molten. “Father!” he said, “why did you hide this from me?” And he touched her with the poignancy of wonder, and the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire. “Lo!” he said, “this is beyond prayer.” It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose! My mansion is the intricate warm rose, my joy is this blossom!
She looked up at him suddenly, her face like a lifted light, wistful, tender, her eyes like many wet flowers. And he drew her to his breast with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire, and the last thought: ‘My hour is upon me, I am taken unawares — ’
So he knew her, and was one with her.
Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his sides with her finger-tips, and said:
“But they no longer hurt?”
“They are suns!” he said. “They shine from your torch. They are my atonement with you.”
And when they left the temple, it was the coldness before dawn. As he closed the door, he looked again at the goddess, and he said: “Lo, Isis is a kindly goddess; and full of tenderness. Great gods are warm-hearted, and have tender goddesses.”
The woman wrapped herself in her mantle and went home in silence, sightless, brooding like the lotus softly shutting again, with its gold core full of fresh life. She saw nothing, for her own petals were a sheath to her. Only she thought: ‘I am full of Osiris. I am full of the risen Osiris!
But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to the sea, and the dog-star green towards the sea’s rim. And he thought: ‘How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose of dark-petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness! How full it is, and great beyond all gods. How it leans around me, and I am part of it, the great rose of Space. I am like a grain of its perfume, and the woman is a grain of its beauty. Now the world is one flower of many petalled darknesses, and I am in its perfume as in a touch.’
So, in the absolute stillness and fullness of touch, he slept in his cave while the dawn came. And after the dawn, the wind rose and brought a storm, with cold rain. So he stayed in his cave in the peace and the delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on the earth, and to see one white-and-gold narcissus bowing wet, and still wet. And he said: “This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one.”
He waited at the temple for the woman, and she came in the rain. But she said to him:
“Let me sit awhile with Isis. And come to me, will you come to me, in the second hour of night?”
So he went back to the cave and lay in stillness and in the joy of being in touch, waiting for the woman who would come with the night, and consummate again the contact. Then when night came the woman came, and came gladly, for her great yearning, too, was upon her, to be in touch, to be in touch with him, nearer.
So the days came, and the nights came, and days came again, and the contact was perfected and fulfilled. And he said: “I will ask her nothing, not even her name, for a name would set her apart.”
And she said to herself: “He is Osiris. I wish to know no more.”
Plum blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past, anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean-field was in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its petals and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact was established, the man and the woman were fulfilled of one another, and departure was in the air.
One day he met her under the trees, when the morning sun was hot, and the pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pear blossom was scattering. She came slowly towards him, and in her gentle lingering, her tender hanging back from him, he knew a change in her.
“Hast thou conceived?” he asked her.
“Why?” she said.
“Thou art like a tree whose green leaves follow the blossom, full of sap. And there is a withdrawing about thee.”
“It is so,” she said. “I am with young by thee. Is it good?”
