But dear me, we become lyrical. Let us return to our muttons; Johanna of the golden fleece, and poor dear shorn lamb of a Gilbert, who lost another skin in his encounter yesterday with the Swiss Manageress. I think that Swiss Manageress ought not easily to be forgiven: for sure she was an upliftress.
But it was yesterday. And now surely, surely the wind is going to be tempered to the shorn lamb. Tempered indeed. Damned ill-tempered.
In Detsch at that moment the May fair was being held, the Maimesse. It had great attraction for Gilbert. He went and stared long at the booths, the woman in red satin with six monkeys; the prize-fighter who had such horrible bulk of arm-flesh in his shapeless, folded arms, and such a rudiment of a face, and no back to his head, a sickly object; at the dancers in sequins and the pictures of La Belle Turque and the family of jugglers; and the rather old-fashioned roundabouts. It was not like an English fair: nothing of our mechanical spick-and-spanness and superior vulgarity. There was here a deeper, more suggestive, more physical vulgarity, something ancient and coarse. The language was either French patois — which was more frequent — or crude German.
Since Monsieur Gilbert was uneasy, wretched inside his remaining skin in this town of Detsch, all on edge and bored, at a loose end, and semi-stupefied, he found this fair a sort of god-send. He could stand staring like any boor, for hours: not really attentive, but at any rate not so acutely burdened with himself. And the ancient pagan grossness, something Mediaeval and Roman even, in the brutality of the fair, interested him. It was as if the modern squeamishness had hardly affected this last remnant of coarse old Europe.
So he stared and strolled, and felt for some reason less of a stranger here than in the town itself. Some sort of Latin or Gallic crudity in the fair gave him a sense of familiarity, old blood-association, whereas the purely Germanic influence seemed always to put him outside his own skin, and make him so ill at ease he could not remain still for a minute.
As he strolled, behold, Johanna and Lotte coming brilliant and laughing and elegant through the fair. He rushed up.
“This is all right,” he said. “Are you going to any of the shows?”
And he put himself at their side.
Lotte gave him her hand and said Guten Morgen in her deep, nonchalant voice. But Johanna said fiercely, in a half whispering voice:
“Go away! Go away, Papa is just behind! Go away, he is not to see you! Go away, you don’t know us.”
Gilbert went pale and looked at Johanna.
“Allez! Allez done!” said Lotte, in her deep, sardonic voice. “Et au revoir. Mauvaise occasion!” And she nodded her head, and made eyes at him.
Fumbling with his hat, he stepped back. And glancing round he saw Louise with a smallish man in a German crush- hat and upturned moustaches. Louise made frightened eyes at him that he should withdraw. The Baron had not noticed him.
He left the fair-ground at once, and walked straight out, and out over the bridge, and up the hill, and away from the town, through the vineyards where peasants were working, through the deep lane, uphill, uphill towards a village.
On a sort of platform or wide terrace on the brow of the hill he sat down. Below lay the town and the canals and the fortifications and the plain. He did not look out. Black rage was in his heart.
The wide level place on the brow of the slope was the real centre of the village. Horse-chestnut trees, deep in new leaf and flower, made flat shade. A blue soldier was exercising a bright brown horse in and out of the horizontal shade. Other greyish soldiers stood near the parapet, looking out. Down on the high-road below, where they were looking, some artillery was rattling along far away, a cavalcade.
Gilbert felt it was all strange — just strange. In the old vineyards on the slope out here in the country there was a strong sense of Rome — old Rome. This was old Roman territory. But in the school beyond the chestnut trees he could hear the children saying their lessons in German — a queer sound to him.
The soldiers made him feel uneasy. He went across the place into the village — an old, French seeming village, where still he felt the old Roman influence. He went into a clean, old-fashioned inn. A tall, black-eyed man, peasant-farmer and inn-keeper, brought him wine and bread and sausage. And they talked in slow French. And in the black eyes of the inn-keeper was a sort of slow, implacable malice. He had a son — in France, and a daughter — in France. With his laconic, malicious smile he said that they spoke no German. His children were educated in France: if they were educated here, they would be forced to speak German. He did not intend that they should speak German. He smiled slowly and maliciously.
And Gilbert sympathised sincerely. This rampant Germanism of Detsch was beginning to gall him: a hateful, insulting militarism that made a man’s blood turn to poison. It was so force, unnatural too. It wasn’t like the quiet lovely German villages of the Black Forest, or the beery roisterousness of Munich. It was an insulting display of militaristic insolence and parvenu imperialism. The whole thing was a presumption, a deliberate, insolent, Germanistic insult to everybody, even to the simpler Germans themselves. The spirit was detestably ill-bred, such a mechanical heel-clicking assumption of haughtiness without any deep, real human pride. When men of a great nation go a bit beyond themselves, and foster a cock-a- doodling haughtiness and a supercilious insolence in their own breasts, well, then they are asking for it, whoever they may be. There is such a thing as passional violence, and that is natural: there is such a thing as profound, deep-rooted human pride, even haughtiness. But that self-conscious conceit and insolence of Detsch had nothing to be said for it, it was all worked up deliberately.
In a temper Gilbert went back to town. Far from having had the wind tempered to him, the wind had taken a bit more skin off. He was angry, and rawer than ever. But at evening he sat in his room, so remote and still, and gradually he recovered somewhat. And then, on a large sheet of paper, he wrote a letter to Johanna’s husband.
“Dear Doctor X, I hope you will not mind if I write to you direct.
I am here in Detsch with Johanna, and I have asked her to tell you everything openly. I love her. It is no use making a calamity of things. What is done is done, and there remains only to make the best of it. Johanna is in a queer state, mentally and nervously. I know it would be fatal for her to come back to America. You must know yourself that her state is not normal. One day you will be perhaps grateful to me for saving you from something worse than this “
So Mr Gilbert ran himself down his sheet of foolscap, saying what he actually thought and felt, without imagining the husband at the other end of the communication. He did not talk about love and tears: only that this was something which had come to pass, and which, given Johanna’s state of mind, was bound to come to pass, and which coming to pass might have taken a far more painful form, bringing far more nastiness and misery than at present. Therefore it remained for him, Everard, and for himself, Gilbert Noon, to work for the best solution of the difficulty, and to try not to make further disaster.
Which screed of half-innocent earnestness Gilbert signed, and sealed, and addressed, and went out into the night and posted. Which was another finality secured. It is just as well to have a faculty for intense abstraction and impersonality, but it is very dangerous to use it. However, Gilbert poured out this private effusion from his abstracting soul, and committed it to fate and the international post.
We shall notice a few little gusts of uplift. Our young mathematical friend could not be English without being a bit of a St. George. Behold, Johanna posing as the fair Sabra, with a huge dragon of nerves and theories and unscrupulous German theorisers just about to devour her, all unbeknown to her fatherly husband, when up rides St. George in the shape of Mr Noon, and proceeds to settle the brute. How very agreeable! Yes, he saved his own moral bacon when he waved that red-cross flag of greater disaster under Everard’s far-off nose. And yet, he was right. The fair Johanna was in the dragon’s mouth, and the brave Saint Gilbert hadn’t half settled the rept
ile yet. In fact he hadn’t begun. But he spoke as heroes speak before the fight: as if it was finished.
The next morning he met Johanna — and what did they do? Ah friends, you would perhaps expect them to go into the cathedral and light a still fatter ghostly candle. No, Gilbert was not in a candle-lighting mood. The dark red torch of his wicked passion was feeling a bit quenched for the moment, but he was prepared to blow on the spark. Therefore he drifted with Johanna away from the town, down across the river. There at the side of the high-road were green thick trees, and narrow paths into the seeming wood. It looked very and parvenu imperialism. The whole thing was a presumption, a deliberate, insolent, Germanistic insult to everybody, even to the simpler Germans themselves. The spirit was detestably ill-bred, such a mechanical heel-clicking assumption of haughtiness without any deep, real human pride. When men of a great nation go a bit beyond themselves, and foster a cock-a- doodling haughtiness and a supercilious insolence in their own breasts, well, then they are asking for it, whoever they may be. There is such a thing as passional violence, and that is natural: there is such a thing as profound, deep-rooted human pride, even haughtiness. But that self-conscious conceit and insolence of Detsch had nothing to be said for it, it was all worked up deliberately.
In a temper Gilbert went back to town. Far from having had the wind tempered to him, the wind had taken a bit more skin off. He was angry, and rawer than ever. But at evening he sat in his room, so remote and still, and gradually he recovered somewhat. And then, on a large sheet of paper, he wrote a letter to Johanna’s husband.
“Dear Doctor X, I hope you will not mind if I write to you direct.
I am here in Detsch with Johanna, and I have asked her to tell you everything openly. I love her. It is no use making a calamity of things. What is done is done, and there remains only to make the best of it. Johanna is in a queer state, mentally and nervously. I know it would be fatal for her to come back to America. You must know yourself that her state is not normal. One day you will be perhaps grateful to me for saving you from something worse than this “
So Mr Gilbert ran himself down his sheet of foolscap, saying what he actually thought and felt, without imagining the husband at the other end of the communication. He did not talk about love and tears: only that this was something which had come to pass, and which, given Johanna’s state of mind, was bound to come to pass, and which coming to pass might have taken a far more painful form, bringing far more nastiness and misery than at present. Therefore it remained for him, Everard, and for himself, Gilbert Noon, to work for the best solution of the difficulty, and to try not to make further disaster.
Which screed of half-innocent earnestness Gilbert signed, and sealed, and addressed, and went out into the night and posted. Which was another finality secured. It is just as well to have a faculty for intense abstraction and impersonality, but it is very dangerous to use it. However, Gilbert poured out this private effusion from his abstracting soul, and committed it to fate and the international post.
We shall notice a few little gusts of uplift. Our young mathematical friend could not be English without being a bit of a St. George. Behold, Johanna posing as the fair Sabra, with a huge dragon of nerves and theories and unscrupulous German theorisers just about to devour her, all unbeknown to her fatherly husband, when up rides St. George in the shape of Mr Noon, and proceeds to settle the brute. How very agreeable! Yes, he saved his own moral bacon when he waved that red-cross flag of greater disaster under Everard’s far-off nose. And yet, he was right. The fair Johanna was in the dragon’s mouth, and the brave Saint Gilbert hadn’t half setded the reptile yet. In fact he hadn’t begun. But he spoke as heroes speak before the fight: as if it was finished.
The next morning he met Johanna — and what did they do? Ah friends, you would perhaps expect them to go into the cathedral and light a still fatter ghostly candle. No, Gilbert was not in a candle-lighting mood. The dark red torch of his wicked passion was feeling a bit quenched for the moment, but he was prepared to blow on the spark. Therefore he drifted with Johanna away from the town, down across the river. There at the side of the high-road were green thick trees, and narrow paths into the seeming wood. It looked very quiet and still, even forbidding, this dark bit of close woodland almost in the town itself.
“Shall we go down there?” said Gilbert, pointing to the path that went straight from the high-road rather sombrely under the trees and into the unknown. To be sure there was some sort of not-very-new-looking notice-board: but why notice notice-boards.
“Yes,” said Johanna. “It looks nice.”
So they strayed down the narrow, tree-crowded, sombre path, on and on till they came to an opening. It was rather romantic. There was a smooth greensward bank, very square and correct, and a sort of greensward dry moat, and a high greensward bastion opposite, all soft and still and lovely, with a spot of sunshine shining on it, and the trees around. So in this green seclusion the two sat down, looking at the romantic velvety slopes and moated formality of their quiet nook, and feeling very remote and nice, like Hansel and Gretel, or the Babes in the Wood.
Johanna put her hand in his as they sat side by side in the spot of sunshine, and musingly, gently he turned the jewelled rings on her soft finger.
“I wrote to Everard,” he said.
“Did you! What did you say?”
Gilbert told her.
“I wrote to him too,” she said.
“And what did you say?”
“I said I didn’t think I could ever go back.”
“You should have said you were sure,” said Gilbert.
“Oh, but one must go gently.”
“Do you call this going gently?” he asked.
“With Everard. I mustn’t give him too great a shock.”
“But you won’t go back.”
“No,” she said, rather indefinitely. “Don’t you want me “You know all about that. What are we going to do?” He seemed indefinite now.
“Why — shall we go somewhere — later?” she said.
“Where?”
“I thought to Munich. We might go to Louise. I love the Isar valley — don’t you?”
“I do,” he said. “Go there as man and wife?”
“Dare we?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But they know I’ve got a husband in America.”
“Let them know. I can be he.”
“It would be rather fun,” she said.
“And we could find some little place, and live cheap.”
“Oh, cheap as dirt in Bavaria. I don’t mind what we do so long as I can get away from all that awful Boston business. Oh, you don’t know how I suffered being a correct, highly- thought-of doctor’s wife among all those good middle-class people. Ah the agony, when I think of standing on deck and seeing that town again — seeing Everard waiting for me there! No, I couldn’t do it. It is real agony.”
“Weren’t they nice with you?”
“Oh, they were! They were awfully nice. That made it all the more horrible. I never felt I could breathe among them. I never felt I could breathe — never — not till I was on board the ship and coming to Germany. All the rest of the time I simply couldn’t get a deep breath — I don’t know why.”
She put her hand on her breast and breathed to the depths of her magnificent chest.
“Oh, you don’t know what I suffered. Because they were all so nice to me. I used to think — Oh, if they knew, if they knew about me! — That was after Eberhard. I’m sure I wonder I’m not mad. I got into such a state of terror. I am terrified. I’m so terrified I know I shall go mad if ever I set foot on Boston dock again. I’m not the sort that gets ill, I’m the sort that goes mad. Everard says so himself.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 286
