Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 679
So he made his ablutions and went downstairs and ate. And he slept in the guest-room, for he could not sleep in the presence of the little red glow. Indeed he could not sleep at all, but lay and groaned in spirit, thinking of that little red light which alone of all light was not the light of God. And he knew it would grow and grow, and be a man, most splendid, a man who would never die. And all the people would think: What is the most wonderful of all things, seen or unseen? — And there would come the
THE MAN WHO WAS THROUGH WITH THE WORLD
THERE was a man not long ago, who felt he was through with the world, so he decided to be a hermit. He had a little money, and he knew that nowadays there are no hermitages going rent-free. So he bought a bit of wild land on a mountain-side, with a few chestnut trees growing on it. He waited till spring; then went up and started building himself a little cabin, with the stones from the hillside. By summer, he had got himself a nice little hut with a chimney and one little window, a table, a chair, a bed, and the smallest number of things a hermit may need. Then he considered himself set up as a hermit.
His hermitage stood in a sheltered nook in the rocks of the mountain, and through the open door he looked out on the big, staggering chestnut trees of the upper region. These trees, this bit of property was his legal own, but he wanted to dedicate it to somebody: to God, preferably.
He felt, however, a bit vague about God. In his youth he had been sent to Sunday School, but he had long been through with all that. He had, as a matter of fact, even forgotten the Lord’s Prayer, like the old man in the Tolstoi parable. If he tried to remember it, he mixed it up with The Lord is my Shepherd, and felt annoyed. He might, of course, have fetched himself a Bible. But he was through with all that.
Because, before he was through with everything, he had read quite a lot about Brahma and Krishna and Shiva, and Buddha and Confucius and Mithras, not to mention Zeus and Aphrodite and that bunch, nor the Wotan family. So when he began to think: The Lord is my Shepherd, somehow Shiva would start dancing a Charleston in the back of his mind, and Mithras would take the bull by the horns, and Mohammed would start patting the buttery flanks of Ayesha, and Abraham would be sitting down to a good meal off a fat ram, till the grease ran down his beard. So that it was very difficult to concentrate on God with a large ‘g’, and the hermit had a natural reluctance to go into refinements of the great I Am, or of thatness. He wanted to get away from all that sort of thing. For what else had he become a hermit?
But alas, he found it wasn’t so easy. If you’re a hermit, you’ve got to concentrate. You’ve got to sit in the door of your hut in the sunshine, and concentrate on something holy. This hermit would sit in the door of his hut in the sunshine right enough, but he couldn’t find anything holy enough really to keep him concentrated. If he tried some nice Eastern mode of meditation, and sat cross-legged with a faint lotus-like smile on his face, some dog-in-the-manger inside him growled: Oh, cut it out, Henry, Nirvana’s a cold egg for the likes of you.
So gradually the hermit became desperate. There he was, all rigged up quite perfect as a holy man, a hermit, and an anchorite, and he felt like an acrobat trying to hang on to a tight wire with his eyebrows. He simply had nothing to hold on to. There wasn’t a single holiness or high-and-mightiness that interested him enough to bring concentration. And a hermit with nothing to concentrate on is like a fly in the cream jug.
Spring changed into summer. The primroses by the little stream where the hermit dipped his water faded and were gone, only their large leaves spread to the hotter days. The violets flickered to a finish; at last not a purple spark was left. The chestnut burrs upon the ground finally had melted away, the leaves overhead had emerged and over-lapped one another, to make the green roof of summer. And the hermit was bored, and rather angry with himself and everything else. He saw nobody up there: an occasional goat-boy, an occasional hunter shooting little birds went by, looking askance. The hermit nodded a salutation, but no more.
Then at intervals he went down to the village for food. The village was four long miles away, down the steep side of the mountain. And when you got there, you found nothing but the silence, the dirt, the poverty and the suspicion of a mountain hamlet. And there was very little to buy.
The hermit always hurried back to his hermitage in disgust. Absence from his fellow-men did not make him love them any the more. On the contrary, they seemed more repulsive and smelly, when he came among them, after his isolation among the chestnut trees, and their weird sort of greed about money, tiny sums of money, made them seem like a plague of caterpillars to him. ‘People badly need to have souls, to hatch out with wings after death,’ he thought to himself, ‘for they really are repulsive pale grubs in this life.’
So he went back to his hermitage glad to get away from his fellow-men, but no happier at having to hang on to his solitude by his eyebrows, in danger of slipping off any minute. For he still had nothing to concentrate on, and no sense of holiness came to soothe him.
He had brought no books with him, having renounced the world of which they are part. Sometimes he regretted this, sometimes he didn’t. But he did nothing about it. He lived stubbornly on from day to day, letting his brown beard grow bushy round his nose, and his black hair long on his neck. When it was warm enough, he went nude, with just a loincloth. For long hours he sat near his hut in the sun, not meditating, not even musing, just being stubborn, and getting browned to a beautiful gold-brown colour. He did not mind so much, while the sun shone, and he could stroll nude through the trees, or sit out in the glow or in the shade. Then he didn’t mind not being able to meditate nor to concentrate, and not having any holiness to bless himself with. The sun on his body seemed to do all the meditating and concentrating he needed. His limbs were thin, and golden brown, and his thin body was as brown as his face. He was, like the savage in the story, ‘face all over’.
‘I am face all over,’ he thought to himself, with a smile. The strings of the chestnut flowers had fallen, the fruits set and grew big, of a clear green colour, and fuzzy. The hermit had to decide whether he would stay on after the chestnuts had come down, when the snow would fall and the mountains lapse into isolation. He was still hanging on to solitude by his eye-brows, and nothing holy had turned up for him to concentrate on.
But he was getting used to the condition. And the very fact that he was alone, that no people came near him, was a source of positive satisfaction. He decided he would stay on all Winter.
This, however, meant getting in certain supplies for the cold months, and especially boots and clothing and bedding, for he had no mind to mortify the flesh by shivering with cold. The snow would lie round his cabin, and the icy wind would whistle through his chestnut trees in huge blasts. Prepare for the wrath to come.
So he put on his decent suit of clothes, clipped his beard a little, descended, took the post-omnibus and then the train, and found himself in the city. His chief feeling was that everything smelled unpleasantly, that the noise was hellish, and that people had terrible and repulsive faces; and that everywhere was a rancid odour of money, a terrible over-smell that reeked from everything animate and inanimate.
He bought his necessities with disgust, hurrying to get it over. Everybody stared at him as if he were a cameleopard, and he knew the police wanted to arrest him at sight. He had to spend the night in town, so he stayed at the big hotel near the station. And he fixed the clerk with a cold and haughty eye, and spoke in his coldest, calmly arrogant voice, knowing that if he were for one moment modest or uncertain, the worm behind the desk would deny him a room.
As it was, he had to put up with an inner bedroom, beside the lift. But at dawn, he left the place, having settled his bill the night before, and getting all his bundles into a carriage, drove across to the station. The porter who helped him eyed him with the usual insolent stare, and took his tip and dodged away with the air of a contemptuous human being who has just about had enough of attending to animals in a menagerie.
The hermit, for his part, hired a donkey at the village, piled his goods upon it, and shook the stink of his fellow-men out of his clothing. Never had he been so glad to climb through the trees. Never had anything looked so nice as his stone hut with its barrel roof, the first yellow leaves of the chestnuts dropping around it, and the rosy little cyclamens in the moss just near the door.
It was a warm afternoon. He hastily took off his clothing and put it in the sun, to remove the taint of the city and the train. He went down to his pool to wash himself, and stayed naked in the sun till sunset, to clear himself from the pollution of people.
There followed a busy period. He gathered the chestnuts scrupulously as they fell, piling them in a heap near the door, then carefully getting them from their burrs, and spreading the bright nuts on his small roof. He built a lean-to against his little house, and stacked his wood there, that he cut in the forest. Also he began to collect the big pine-cones that have pine-kernels inside them: though for these it was as yet full early.
Already the mornings and evenings were touched with ice. He emerged in the morning in warm woollen clothing, which he peeled off as the sun rose, and at last went about in his own brown skin. But many days were cold, and many were rainy, and he had to remain covered up.
Then he was never happy. He found, the more clothing he had to wear, the more he was restless and needed to think, needed some sort of salvation; and on the other hand, the more he could go naked in the sun, the less he went in need of any salvation. So while he could, he went about stark, and gradually he grew tougher. But as winter and the snow-winds swept the mountains, he could less and less afford to lose his bodily heat, by exposing himself.
In the days of cold rain, he did his chores in his hut, and made himself bread, and cooked pies, and mended his clothes.
THE MAN WHO LOVED ISLANDS
First Island
There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself. He wanted an island all of his own: not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own.
An island, if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, before it feels like an island; and this story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.
Now circumstances so worked out, that this lover of islands, by the time he was thirty-five, actually acquired an island of his own. He didn’t own it as freehold property, but he had a ninety-nine years’ lease of it, which, as far as a man and an island are concerned, is as good as everlasting. Since, if you are like Abraham, and want your offspring to be numberless as the sands of the sea-shore, you don’t choose an island to start breeding on. Too soon there would be overpopulation, overcrowding, and slum conditions. Which is a horrid thought, for one who loves an island for its insulation. No, an island is a nest which holds one egg, and one only. This egg is the islander himself.
The island acquired by our potential islander was not in the remote oceans. It was quite near at home, no palm-trees nor boom of surf on the reef, nor any of that kind of thing; but a good solid dwelling-house, rather gloomy, above the landing-place, and beyond, a small farmhouse with sheds, and a few outlying fields. Down on the little landing bay were three cottages in a row, like coastguards’ cottages, all neat and white-washed.
What could be more cozy and home-like? It was four miles if you walked all round your island, through the gorse and the blackthorn bushes, above the steep rocks of the sea and down in the little glades where the primroses grew. If you walked straight over the two humps of hills, the length of it, through the rocky fields where the cows lay chewing, and through the rather sparse oats, on into the gorse again, and so to the low cliffs’ edge, it took you only twenty minutes. And when you came to the edge, you could see another, bigger island lying beyond. But the sea was between you and it. And as you returned over the turf where the short, downland cowslips nodded you saw to the east still another island, a tiny one this time, like the calf of the cow. This tiny island also belonged to the islander.
Thus it seems that even islands like to keep each other company.
Our islander loved his island very much. In early spring, the little ways and glades were a snow of blackthorn, a vivid white among the celtic stillness of close green and grey rock, blackbirds calling out in the whiteness their first long, triumphant calls. After the blackthorn and the nestling primroses came the blue apparition of hyacinths, like elfin lakes and slipping sheets of blue, among the bushes and under the glade of trees. And many birds with nests you could peep into, on the island all your own. Wonderful what a great world it was!
Followed summer, and the cowslips gone, the wild roses faintly fragrant through the haze. There was a field of hay, the foxgloves stood looking down. In a little cove, the sun was on the pale granite where you bathed, and the shadow was in the rocks. Before the mist came stealing, and you went home through the ripening oats, the glare of the sea fading from the high air as the foghorn started to moo on the other island. And then the sea-fog went, it was autumn, and oat-sheaves lying prone; the great moon, another island, rose golden out of the sea, and, rising higher, the world of the sea was white.
So autumn ended with rain, and winter came, dark skies and dampness and rain, but rarely frost. The island, your island, cowered dark, holding away from you. You could feel, down in the wet, sombre hollows, the resentful spirit coiled upon itself, like a wet dog coiled in gloom, or a snake that is neither asleep nor awake. Then in the night, when the wind left off blowing in great gusts and volleys, as at sea, you felt that your island was a universe, infinite and old as the darkness; not an island at all, but an infinite dark world where all the souls from all the other bygone nights lived on, and the infinite distance was near.
Strangely, from your little island in space, you were gone forth into the dark, great realms of time, where all the souls that never die veer and swoop on their vast, strange errands. The little earthly island has dwindled, like a jumping-off place, into nothingness, for you have jumped off, you know not how, into the dark wide mystery of time, where the past is vastly alive, and the future is not separated off.
This is the danger of becoming an islander. When, in the city, you wear your white spats and dodge the traffic with the fear of death down your spine, then you are quite safe from the terrors of infinite time. The moment is your little islet in time, it is the spatial universe that careers round you.
But once isolate yourself on a little island in the sea of space, and the moment begins to heave and expand in great circles, the solid earth is gone, and your slippery, naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world, where the chariots of the so-called dead dash down the old streets of centuries, and souls crowd on the footways that we, in the moment, call bygone years. The souls of all the dead are alive again, and pulsating actively around you. You are out in the other infinity.
Something of this happened to our islander. Mysterious “feelings” came upon him, that he wasn’t used to; strange awarenesses of old, far-gone men, and other influences; men of Gaul, with big moustaches, who had been on his island, and had vanished from the face of it, but not out of the air of night. They were there still, hurtling their big, violent, unseen bodies through the night. And there were priests, with golden knives and mistletoe; then other priests with a crucifix; then pirates with murder on the sea.
Our islander was uneasy. He didn’t believe, in the daytime, in any of this nonsense. But at night it just was so. He had reduced himself to a single point in space, and, a point being that which has neither length nor breadth, he had to step off it into somewhere else. Just as you must step into the sea, if the waters wash your foothold away, so he had, at night, to step off into the otherworld of undying time.
He was uncannily aware, as he lay in the dark, that the blackthorn grove that seemed a bit uncanny even in the realm of space and day, at night was crying with old men of an invisible race, around the altar stone. What was a ruin under the hornbeam trees by day, was a moaning of bloodstained priests with crucifixes, on the ineffable night. What was a cave and hidden beach between coarse rocks, became in the invisible dark the purple-lipped imprecation of pirates.
To escape any more of this sort of awareness, our islander daily concentrated upon his material island. Why should it not be the Happy Isle at last? Why not the last small isle of the Hesperides, the perfect place, all filled with his own gracious, blossom-like spirit? A minute world of pure perfection, made by man, himself.
He began, as we begin all our attempts to regain Paradise, by spending money. The old, semi-feudal dwelling-house he restored, let in more light, put clear lovely carpets on the floor, clear, flower-petal curtains at the sullen windows, and wines in the cellars of rock. He brought over a buxom housekeeper from the world, and a soft-spoken, much-experienced butler. These too were to be islanders.
In the farm-house he put a bailiff, with two farm-hands. There were Jersey cows, tinkling a slow bell, among the gorse. There was a call to meals at midday, and the peaceful smoking of chimneys at evening, when rest descended.
A jaunty sailing-boat with a motor accessory rode in the shelter in the bay, just below the row of three white cottages. There was also a little yawl, and two row-boats drawn up on the sand. A fishing net was drying on its supports, a boat-load of new white planks stood crisscross, a woman was going to the well with a bucket.
In the end cottage lived the skipper of the yacht, and his wife and son. He was a man from the other, large island, at home on this sea. Every fine day he went out fishing, with his son, every fine day there was fresh fish on the island.
