Hence, the Earl, who never intended to be swamped by unclean scum, whatever else happened to him, stamped his heels in the ground and stood on his own feet. When Basil said to him, would he allow the Count to have a fortnight’s decent peace in Thoresway before all was finished, Lord Beveridge gave a slow consent, scandal or no scandal. Indeed, it was really to defy scandal that he took such a step. For the thought of his dead boys was bitter to him: and the thought of England fallen under the paws of smelly mongrels was bitterer still.
Lord Beveridge was at Thoresway to receive the Count, who arrived escorted by Basil. The English Earl was a big, handsome man, rather heavy, with a dark, sombre face that would have been haughty if haughtiness had not been made so ridiculous. He was a passionate man, with a passionate man’s sensitiveness, generosity, and instinctive overbearing. But his dark passionate nature, and his violent sensitiveness had been subjected now to fifty-five years’ subtle repression, condemnation, repudiation, till he had almost come to believe in his own wrongness. His little, frail wife, all love for humanity, she was the genuine article. Himself, he was labelled selfish, sensual, cruel, etc., etc. So by now he always seemed to be standing aside, in the shadow, letting himself be obliterated by the pallid rabble of the democratic hurry. That was the impression he gave of a man standing back, half-ashamed, half-haughty, semi-hidden in the dark background.
He was a little on the defensive as Basil came in with the Count.
‘Ah — how do you do, Count Psanek?’ he said, striding largely forward and holding out his hand. Because he was the father of Daphne the Count felt a certain tenderness for the taciturn Englishman.
‘You do me too much honour, my lord, receiving me in your house,’ said the small Count proudly.
The Earl looked at him slowly, without speaking: seemed to look down on him, in every sense of the words.
‘We are still men, Count. We are not beasts altogether.’
‘You wish to say that my countrymen are so very nearly beasts, Lord Beveridge?’ smiled the Count, curling his fine nose.
Again the Earl was slow in replying.
‘You have a low opinion of my manners, Count Psanek.’
‘But perhaps a just appreciation of your meaning, Lord Beveridge,’ smiled the Count, with the same reckless little look of contempt on his nose.
Lord Beveridge flushed dark, with all his native anger offended.
‘I am glad Count Psanek makes my own meaning clear to me,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon a thousand times, my lord, if I give offence in doing so,’ replied the Count.
The Earl went black, and felt a fool. He turned his back on the Count. And then he turned round again, offering his cigar-case.
‘Will you smoke?’ he said. There was kindness in his tone.
‘Thank you,’ said the Count, taking a cigar.
‘I dare say,’ said Lord Beveridge, ‘that all men are beasts in some way. I am afraid I have fallen into the common habit of speaking by rote, and not what I really mean. Won’t you take a seat?’
‘It is only as a prisoner that I have learned that I am not truly a beast. No, I am myself. I am not a beast,’ said the Count, seating himself.
The Earl eyed him curiously.
‘Well,’ he said, smiling, ‘I suppose it is best to come to a decision about it.’
‘It is necessary, if one is to be safe from vulgarity.’
The Earl felt a twinge of accusation. With his agate-brown, hard-looking eyes he watched the black-browed little Count.
‘You are probably right,’ he said.
But he turned his face aside.
They were five people at dinner — Lady Beveridge was there as hostess.
‘Ah, Count Dionys,’ she said with a sigh, ‘do you really feel that the war is over?’
‘Oh yes,’ he replied quickly. ‘This war is over. The armies will go home. Their cannon will not sound any more. Never again like this.’
‘Ah, I hope so,’ she sighed.
‘I am sure,’ he said.
‘You think there’ll be no more war?’ said Daphne.
For some reason she had made herself very fine, in her newest dress of silver and black and pink-chenille, with bare shoulders, and her hair fashionably done. The Count in his shabby uniform turned to her. She was nervous, hurried. Her slim white arm was near him, with the bit of silver at the shoulder. Her skin was white like a hot-house flower. Her lips moved hurriedly.
‘Such a war as this there will never be again,’ he said.
‘What makes you so sure?’ she replied, glancing into his eyes.
‘The machine of war has got out of our control. We shall never start it again, till it has fallen to pieces. We shall be afraid.’
‘Will everybody be afraid?’ said she, looking down and pressing back her chin.
‘I think so.’
‘We will hope so,’ said Lady Beveridge.
‘Do you mind if I ask you, Count,’ said Basil, ‘what you feel about the way the war has ended? The way it has ended for you, I mean.’
‘You mean that Germany and Austria have lost the war? It was bound to be. We have all lost the war. All Europe.’
‘I agreee there,’ said Lord Beveridge.
‘We’ve all lost the war?’ said Daphne, turning to look at him.
There was pain on his dark, low-browed face. He suffered having the sensitive woman beside him. Her skin had a hothouse delicacy that made his head go round. Her shoulders were broad, rather thin, but the skin was white and so sensitive, so hot-house delicate. It affected him like the perfume of some white, exotic flower. And she seemed to be sending her heart towards him. It was as if she wanted to press her breast to his. From the breast she loved him, and sent out love to him. And it made him unhappy; he wanted to be quiet, and to keep his honour before these hosts.
He looked into her eyes, his own eyes dark with knowledge and pain. She, in her silence and her brief words seemed to be holding them all under her spell. She seemed to have cast a certain muteness on the table, in the midst of which she remained silently master, leaning forward to her plate, and silently mastering them all.
‘Don’t I think we’ve all lost the war?’ he replied, in answer to her question. ‘It was a war of suicide. Nobody could win it. It was suicide for all of us.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘What about America and Japan?’
‘They don’t count. They only helped us to commit suicide. They did not enter vitally.’
There was such a look of pain on his face, and such a sound of pain in his voice, that the other three closed their ears, shut off from attending. Only Daphne was making him speak. It was she who was drawing the soul out of him, trying to read the future in him as the augurs read the future in the quivering entrails of the sacrificed beast. She looked direct into his face, searching his soul.
‘You think Europe has committed suicide?’ she said.
‘Morally.’
‘Only morally?’ came her slow, bronze-like words, so fatal.
‘That is enough,’ he smiled.
‘Quite,’ she said, with a slow droop of her eyelids. Then she turned away her face. But he felt the heart strangling inside his breast. What was she doing now? What was she thinking? She filled him with uncertainty and with uncanny fear.
‘At least,’ said Basil, ‘those infernal guns are quiet.’
‘For ever,’ said Dionys.
‘I wish I could believe you, Count,’ said the Major.
The talk became more general — or more personal. Lady Beveridge asked Dionys about his wife and family. He knew nothing save that they had gone to Hungary in 1916, when his own house was burnt down. His wife might even have gone to Bulgaria with Prince Bogorik. He did not know.
‘But your children, Count!’ cried Lady Beveridge.
‘I do not know. Probably in Hungary, with their grandmother. I will go when I get back.’
‘But have you never written? — never inquired?�
��
‘I could not write. I shall know soon enough — everything.’
‘You have no son?’
‘No. Two girls.’
‘Poor things!’
‘Yes.’
‘I say, isn’t it an odd thing to have a ladybird on your crest?’ asked Basil, to cheer up the conversation.
‘Why queer? Charlemagne had bees. And it is a Marienkäfer — a Mary-beetle. The beetle of Our Lady. I think it is quite a heraldic insect, Major,’ smiled the Count.
‘You’re proud of it?’ said Daphne, suddenly turning to look at him again, with her slow, pregnant look.
‘I am, you know. It has such a long genealogy — our spotted beetle. Much longer than the Psaneks. I think, you know, it is a descendant of the Egyptian scarabeus, which is a very mysterious emblem. So I connect myself with the Pharaohs: just through my ladybird.’
‘You feel your ladybird has crept through so many ages,’ she said.
‘Imagine it!’ he laughed.
‘The scarab is a piquant insect,’ said Basil.
‘Do you know Fabre?’ put in Lord Beveridge. ‘He suggests that the beetle rolling a little ball of dung before him, in a dry old field, must have suggested to the Egyptians the First Principle that set the globe rolling. And so the scarab became the symbol of the creative principle — or something like that.’
‘That the earth is a tiny ball of dry dung is good,’ said Basil.
‘Between the claws of a ladybird,’ added Daphne.
‘That is what it is, to go back to one’s origin,’ said Lady Beveridge.
‘Perhaps they meant that it was the principle of decomposition which first set the ball rolling,’ said the Count.
‘The ball would have to be there first,’ said Basil.
‘Certainly. But it hadn’t started to roll. Then the principle of decomposition started it.’ The Count smiled as if it were a joke.
‘I am no Egyptologist,’ said Lady Beveridge, ‘so I can’t judge.’
The Earl and Countess Beveridge left next day. Count Dionys was left with the two young people in the house. It was a beautiful Elizabethan mansion, not very large, but with those magical rooms that are all a twinkle of small-paned windows, looking out from the dark panelled interior. The interior was cosy, panelled to the ceiling, and the ceiling moulded and touched with gold. And then the great square bow of the window with its little panes intervening like magic between oneself and the world outside, the crest in stained glass crowning its colour, the broad window-seat cushioned in faded green. Dionys wandered round the house like a little ghost, through the succession of small and large twinkling sitting-rooms and lounge rooms in front, down the long, wide corridor with the wide stairhead at each end, and up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms above, and on to the roof.
It was early spring, and he loved to sit on the leaded, pale-grey roof that had its queer seats and slopes, a little pale world in itself. Then to look down over the garden and the sloping lawn to the ponds massed round with trees, and away to the elms and furrows and hedges of the shires. On the left of the house was the farmstead, with ricks and great-roofed barns and dark-red cattle. Away to the right, beyond the park, was a village among trees, and the spark of a grey church spire.
He liked to be alone, feeling his soul heavy with its own fate. He would sit for hours watching the elm trees standing in rows like giants, like warriors across the country. The Earl had told him that the Romans had brought these elms to Britain. And he seemed to see the spirit of the Romans in them still. Sitting there alone in the spring sunshine, in the solitude of the roof, he saw the glamour of this England of hedgerows and elm trees, and the labourers with slow horses slowly drilling the sod, crossing the brown furrow: and the roofs of the village, with the church steeple rising beside a big black yew tree: and the chequer of fields away to the distance.
And the charm of the old manor around him, the garden with its grey stone walls and yew hedges — broad, broad yew hedges and a peacock pausing to glitter and scream in the busy silence of an English spring, when celandines open their yellow under the hedges, and violets are in the secret, and by the broad paths of the garden polyanthus and crocuses vary the velvet and flame, and bits of yellow wallflower shake raggedly, with a wonderful triumphance, out of the cracks of the wall. There was a fold somewhere near, and he could hear the treble bleat of the growing lambs, and the deeper, contented baa-ing of the ewes.
This was Daphne’s home, where she had been born. She loved it with an ache of affection. But now it was hard to forget her dead brothers. She wandered about in the sun, with two old dogs padding after her. She talked with everybody — gardener, groom, stableman, with the farm-hands. That filled a large part of her life — straying round talking with the work-people. They were, of course, respectful to her — but not at all afraid of her. They knew she was poor, that she could not afford a car, nor anything. So they talked to her very freely: perhaps a little too freely. Yet she let it be. It was her one passion at Thoresway to hear the dependants talk and talk — about everything. The curious feeling of intimacy across a breach fascinated her. Their lives fascinated her: what they thought, what they felt. These, what they felt. That fascinated her. There was a gamekeeper she could have loved — an impudent, ruddy-faced, laughing, ingratiating fellow; she could have loved him, if he had not been isolated beyond the breach of his birth, her culture, her consciousness. Her consciousness seemed to make a great gulf between her and the lower classes, the unconscious classes. She accepted it as her doom. She could never meet in real contact anyone but a super-conscious, finished being like herself: or like her husband. Her father had some of the unconscious blood-warmth of the lower classes. But he was like a man who is damned. And the Count, of course. The Count had something that was hot and invisible, a dark flame of life that might warm the cold white fire of her own blood. But —
They avoided each other. All three, they avoided one another. Basil, too, went off alone. Or he immersed himself in poetry. Sometimes he and the Count played billiards. Sometimes all three walked in the park. Often Basil and Daphne walked to the village, to post. But truly, they avoided one another, all three. The days slipped by.
At evening they sat together in the small west room that had books and a piano and comfortable shabby furniture of faded rose-coloured tapestry: a shabby room. Sometimes Basil read aloud: sometimes the Count played the piano. And they talked. And Daphne stitch by stitch went on with a big embroidered bedspread, which she might finish if she lived long enough. But they always went to bed early. They were nearly always avoiding one another.
Dionys had a bedroom in the east bay — a long way from the rooms of the others. He had a habit, when he was quite alone, of singing, or rather crooning, to himself the old songs of his childhood. It was only when he felt he was quite alone: when other people seemed to fade out of him, and all the world seemed to dissolve into darkness, and there was nothing but himself, his own soul, alive in the middle of his own small night, isolate for ever. Then, half unconscious, he would croon in a small, high-pitched, squeezed voice, a sort of high dream-voice, the songs of his childhood dialect. It was a curious noise: the sound of a man who is alone in his own blood: almost the sound of a man who is going to be executed.
Daphne heard the sound one night when she was going downstairs again with the corridor lantern to find a book. She was a bad sleeper, and her nights were a torture to her. She, too, like a neurotic, was nailed inside her own fretful self-consciousness. But she had a very keen ear. So she started as she heard the small, bat-like sound of the Count’s singing to himself. She stood in the midst of the wide corridor, that was wide as a room, carpeted with a faded lavender-coloured carpet, with a piece of massive dark furniture at intervals by the wall, and an oak arm-chair and sometimes a faded, reddish Oriental rug. The big horn lantern which stood at nights at the end of the corridor she held in her hand. The intense ‘peeping’ sound of the Count, like a witchcraft, made her forget everyt
hing. She could not understand a word, of course. She could not understand the noise even. After listening for a long time, she went on downstairs. When she came back again he was still, and the light was gone from under his door.
After this, it became almost an obsession to her to listen for him. She waited with fretful impatience for ten o’clock, when she could retire. She waited more fretfully still for the maid to leave her, and for her husband to come and say good-night. Basil had the room across the corridor. And then in resentful impatience she waited for the sounds of the house to become still. Then she opened her door to listen.
And far away, as if from far, far away in the unseen, like a ventriloquist sound or a bat’s uncanny peeping, came the frail, almost inaudible sound of the Count’s singing to himself before he went to bed. It was inaudible to anyone but herself. But she, by concentration, seemed to hear supernaturally. She had a low arm-chair by the door, and there, wrapped in a huge old black silk shawl, she sat and listened. At first she could not hear. That is, she could hear the sound. But it was only a sound. And then, gradually, gradually she began to follow the thread of it. It was like a thread which she followed out of the world: out of the world. And as she went, slowly, by degrees, far, far away, down the thin thread of his singing, she knew peace — she knew forgetfulness. She could pass beyond the world, away beyond where her soul balanced like a bird on wings, and was perfected.
So it was, in her upper spirit. But underneath was a wild, wild yearning, actually to go, actually to be given. Actually to go, actually to die the death, actually to cross the border and be gone, to be gone. To be gone from this herself, from this Daphne, to be gone from father and mother, brothers and husband, and home and land and world: to be gone. To be gone to the call from the beyond: the call. It was the Count calling. He was calling her. She was sure he was calling her. Out of herself, out of her world, he was calling her.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 518
