The housekeeper looked at her again.
“You knew there was a young man in the sitting-room?” she said.
“No. Really!” cried the girl. “What, the young policeman? I’d forgotten all about him. He came in in the storm to warm himself. Hasn’t he gone?”
“No, Miss James.”
“How extraordinary of him! What time is it? Quarter to nine! Why didn’t he go when he was warm? I must go and see him, I suppose.”
“He says he’s lame,” said the housekeeper censoriously and loudly.
“Lame! That’s extraordinary. He certainly wasn’t last night. But don’t shout. I can hear quite well.”
“Is Mr. Marchbanks coming in to breakfast, Miss James?” said the housekeeper, more and more censorious.
“I couldn’t say. But I’ll come down as soon as mine is ready. I’ll be down in a minute, anyhow, to see the policeman. Extraordinary that he is still here.”
She sat down before her window, in the sun, to think a while. She could see the snow outside, the bare, purplish trees. The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven.
“It really is extraordinary!” she said to herself. “I certainly saw that man’s face. What a wonderful face it was! I shall never forget it. Such laughter! He laughs longest who laughs last. He certainly will have the last laugh. I like him for that: he will laugh last. Must be someone really extraordinary! How very nice to be the one to laugh last. He certainly will. What a wonderful being! I suppose I must call him a being. He’s not a person exactly.
“But how wonderful of him to come back and alter all the world immediately! Isn’t that extraordinary. I wonder if he’ll have altered Marchbanks. Of course Marchbanks never saw him. But he heard him. Wouldn’t that do as well, I wonder! — I wonder!”
She went off into a muse about Marchbanks. She and he were such friends. They had been friends like that for almost two years. Never lovers. Never that at all. But friends.
And after all, she had been in love with him: in her head. This seemed now so funny to her: that she had been, in her head, so much in love with him. After all, life was too absurd.
Because now she saw herself and him as such a funny pair. He so funnily taking life terribly seriously, especially his own life. And she so ridiculously determined to save him from himself. Oh, how absurd! Determined to save him from himself, and wildly in love with him in the effort. The determination to save him from himself.
Absurd! Absurd! Absurd! Since she had seen the man laughing among the holly bushes — such extraordinary, wonderful laughter — she had seen her own ridiculousness. Really, what fantastic silliness, saving a man from himself! Saving anybody. What fantastic silliness! How much more amusing and lively to let a man go to perdition in his own way. Perdition was more amusing than salvation anyhow, and a much better place for most men to go to.
She had never been in love with any man, and only spuriously in love with Marchbanks. She saw it quite plainly now. After all, what nonsense it all was, this being-in-love business. Thank goodness she had never made the humiliating mistake.
No, the man among the holly bushes had made her see it all so plainly: the ridiculousness of being in love, the infra dig. business of chasing a man or being chased by a man.
“Is love really so absurd and infra dig.?” she said aloud to herself.
“Why, of course!” came a deep, laughing voice.
She started round, but nobody was to be seen.
“I expect it’s that man again!” she said to herself. “It really is remarkable, you know. I consider it’s a remarkable thing that I never really wanted a man, any man. And there I am over thirty. It is curious. Whether it’s something wrong with me, or right with me, I can’t say. I don’t know till I’ve proved it. But I believe, if that man kept on laughing something would happen to me.”
She smelt the curious smell of almond blossom in the room, and heard the distant laugh again.
“I do wonder why Marchbanks went with that woman last night — that Jewish-looking woman. Whatever could he want of her? — or she of him? So strange, as if they both had made up their minds to something! How extraordinarily puzzling life is! So messy, it all seems.
“Why does nobody laugh in life like that man? He did seem so wonderful. So scornful! And so proud! And so real! With those laughing, scornful, amazing eyes, just laughing and disappearing again. I can’t imagine him chasing a Jewish-looking woman. Or chasing any woman, thank goodness. It’s all so messy. My policeman would be messy if one would let him: like a dog. I do dislike dogs, really I do. And men do seem so doggy! — ”
But even while she mused, she began to laugh again to herself with a long, low chuckle. How wonderful of that man to come and laugh like that and make the sky crack and shrivel like an old skin! Wasn’t he wonderful! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he just touched her. Even touched her. She felt, if he touched her, she herself would emerge new and tender out of the old, hard skin. She was gazing abstractedly out of the window.
“There he comes, just now,” she said abruptly. But she meant Marchbanks, not the laughing man.
There he came, his hands still shoved down in his overcoat pockets, his head still rather furtively ducked in the bowler hat, and his legs still rather shambling. He came hurrying across the road, not looking up, deep in thought, no doubt. Thinking profoundly, with agonies of agitation, no doubt about his last night’s experience. It made her laugh.
She, watching from the window above, burst into a long laugh, and the canaries went off their heads again.
He was in the hall below. His resonant voice was calling, rather imperiously:
“James! Are you coming down?”
“No,” she called. “You come up.”
He came up two at a time, as if his feet were a bit savage with the stairs for obstructing him.
In the doorway he stood staring at her with a vacant, sardonic look, his grey eyes moving with a queer light. And she looked back at him with a curious, rather haughty carelessness.
“Don’t you want your breakfast?” she asked. It was his custom to come and take breakfast with her each morning.
“No,” he answered loudly. “I went to a tea-shop.”
“Don’t shout,” she said. “I can hear you quite well.”
He looked at her with mockery and a touch of malice.
“I believe you always could,” he said, still loudly.
“Well, anyway, I can now, so you needn’t shout,” she replied.
And again his grey eyes, with the queer, greyish phosphorescent gleam in them, lingered malignantly on her face.
“Don’t look at me,” she said calmly. “I know all about everything.”
He burst into a pouf of malicious laughter.
“Who taught you — the policeman?” he cried.
“Oh, by the way, he must be downstairs! No, he was only incidental. So, I suppose, was the woman in the shawl. Did you stay all night?”
“Not entirely. I came away before dawn. What did you do?”
“Don’t shout. I came home long before dawn.” And she seemed to hear the long, low laughter.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he said curiously. “What have you been doing?”
“I don’t quite know. Why? — are you going to call me to account?”
“Did you hear that laughing?”
“Oh yes. And many more things. And saw things too.”
“Have you seen the paper?”
“No. Don’t shout, I can hear.”
“There’s been a great storm, blew out the windows and doors of the church outside here, and pretty well wrecked the place.”
“I saw it. A leaf of the church Bible blew right in my face: from the Book of Job — ” She gave a low laugh.
“But what else did you see?” he
cried loudly.
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Ah, that I can’t say.”
“But what was he like?”
“That I can’t tell you. I don’t really know.”
“But you must know. Did your policeman see him too?”
“No, I don’t suppose he did. My policeman!” And she went off into a long ripple of laughter. “He is by no means mine. But I must go downstairs and see him.”
“It’s certainly made you very strange,” Marchbanks said. “You’ve got no soul, you know.”
“Oh, thank goodness for that!” she cried. “My policeman has one, I’m sure. My policeman!” And she went off again into a long peal of laughter, the canaries pealing shrill accompaniment.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“Having no soul. I never had one really. It was always fobbed off on me. Soul was the only thing there was between you and me. Thank goodness it’s gone. Haven’t you lost yours? The one that seemed to worry you, like a decayed tooth?”
“But what are you talking about?” he cried.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s all so extraordinary. But look here, I must go down and see my policeman. He’s downstairs in the sitting-room. You’d better come with me.”
They went down together. The policeman in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves was lying on the sofa, with a very long face.
“Look here!” said Miss James to him. “Is it true you’re lame?”
“It is true. That’s why I’m here. I can’t walk,” said the fair-haired young man as tears came to his eyes.
“But how did it happen? You weren’t lame last night,” she said.
“I don’t know how it happened — but when I woke up and tried to stand up, I couldn’t do it.” The tears ran down his distressed face.
“How very extraordinary!” she said. “What can we do about it?”
“Which foot is it?” asked Marchbanks. “Let us have a look at it.”
“I don’t like to,” said the poor devil.
“You’d better,” said Miss James.
He slowly pulled off his stocking, and showed his white left foot curiously clubbed, like the weird paw of some animal. When he looked at it himself, he sobbed.
And as he sobbed, the girl heard again the low, exulting laughter. But she paid no heed to it, gazing curiously at the weeping young policeman.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“It does if I try to walk on it,” wept the young man.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “We’ll telephone for a doctor, and he can take you home in a taxi.”
The young fellow shamefacedly wiped his eyes.
“But have you no idea how it happened?” asked Marchbanks anxiously.
“I haven’t myself,” said the young fellow.
At that moment the girl heard the low, eternal laugh right in her ear. She started, but could see nothing.
She started round again as Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself.
“Why,” he yelped in a high voice, “I knew it was he!” And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening.
Miss James stared with round, staring brown eyes.
“Is he dead?” she asked quickly.
The young policeman was trembling so that he could hardly speak. She could hear his teeth chattering.
“Seems like it,” he stammered.
There was a faint smell of almond blossom in the air.
GLAD GHOSTS
I knew Carlotta Fell in the early days before the war. Then she was escaping into art, and was just “Fell”. That was at our famous but uninspired school of art, the Thwaite, where I myself was diligently murdering my talent. At the Thwaite they always gave Carlotta the Still-life prizes. She accepted them calmly, as one of our conquerors, but the rest of the students felt vicious about it. They called it buttering the laurels, because Carlotta was Hon., and her father a well-known peer.
She was by way of being a beauty too. Her family was not rich, yet she had come into five hundred a year of her own, when she was eighteen; and that, to us, was an enormity. Then she appeared in the fashionable papers, affecting to be wistful, with pearls, slanting her eyes. Then she went and did another of her beastly still-lives, a cactus-in-a-pot.
At the Thwaite, being snobs, we were proud of her too. She showed off a bit, it is true, playing bird of paradise among the pigeons. At the same time, she was thrilled to be with us, and out of her own set. Her wistfulness and yearning “for something else” was absolutely genuine. Yet she was not going to hobnob with us either, at least not indiscriminately.
She was ambitious, in a vague way. She wanted to coruscate, somehow or other. She had a family of clever and “distinguished” uncles, who had flattered her. What then?
Her cactuses-in-a-pot were admirable. But even she didn’t expect them to start a revolution. Perhaps she would rather glow in the wide if dirty skies of life than in the somewhat remote and unsatisfactory ether of Art.
She and I were “friends” in a bare, stark, but real sense. I was poor, but I didn’t really care. She didn’t really care either. Whereas I did care about some passionate vision which, I could feel, lay embedded in the half-dead body of this life. The quick body within the dead. I could feel it. And I wanted to get at it, if only for myself.
She didn’t know what I was after. Yet she could feel that I was It, and, being an aristocrat of the Kingdom of It, as well as the realm of Great Britain, she was loyal — loyal to me because of It, the quick body which I imagined within the dead.
Still, we never had much to do with one another. I had no money. She never wanted to introduce me to her own people. I didn’t want it either. Sometimes we had lunch together, sometimes we went to a theatre, or we drove in the country, in some car that belonged to neither of us. We never flirted or talked love. I don’t think she wanted it, any more than I did. She wanted to marry into her own surroundings, and I knew she was of too frail a paste to face my future.
Now I come to think of it, she was always a bit sad when we were together. Perhaps she looked over seas she would never cross. She belonged finally, fatally, to her own class. Yet I think she hated them. When she was in a group of people who talked “smart”, titles and beau monde and all that, her rather short nose would turn up, her wide mouth press into discontent, and a languor of bored irritation come even over her broad shoulders. Bored irritation, and a loathing of climbers, a loathing of the ladder altogether. She hated her own class: yet it was also sacrosanct to her. She disliked, even to me, mentioning the titles of her friends. Yet the very hurried resentment with which she said, when I asked her: Who is it — ?
“Lady Nithsdale, Lord Staines — old friends of my mother,” proved that the coronet was wedged into her brow, like a ring of iron grown into a tree.
She had another kind of reverence for a true artist: perhaps more genuine, perhaps not; anyhow, more free and easy.
She and I had a curious understanding in common: an inkling, perhaps, of the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which we call life: and hence a tacit hostility to the commonplace world, its inert laws. We were rather like two soldiers on a secret mission into enemy country. Life, and people, was an enemy country to us both. But she would never declare herself.
She always came to me to find out what I thought, particularly in a moral issue. Profoundly, fretfully discontented with the conventional moral standards, she didn’t know how to take a stand of her own. So she came to me. She had to try to get her own feelings straightened out. I
n that she showed her old British fibre. I told her what, as a young man, I thought: and usually she was resentful. She did so want to be conventional. She would even act quite perversely, in her determination to be conventional. But she always had to come back to me, to ask me again. She depended on me morally. Even when she disagreed with me, it soothed her, and restored her to know my point of view. Yet she disagreed with me.
We had then a curious abstract intimacy, that went very deep, yet showed no obvious contact. Perhaps I was the only person in the world with whom she felt, in her uneasy self, at home, at peace. And to me, she was always of my own intrinsic sort, of my own species. Most people are just another species to me. They might as well be turkeys.
But she would always act according to the conventions of her class, even perversely. And I knew it.
So, just before the war she married Lord Lathkill. She was twenty-one. I did not see her till war was declared; then she asked me to lunch with her and her husband, in town. He was an officer in a Guards regiment, and happened to be in uniform, looking very handsome and well set-up, as if he expected to find the best of life served up to him for ever. He was very dark, with dark eyes and fine black hair, and a very beautiful, diffident voice, almost womanish in its slow, delicate inflections. He seemed pleased and flattered at having Carlotta for a wife.
To me he was beautifully attentive, almost deferential, because I was poor, and of the other world, those poor devils of outsiders. I laughed at him a little, and laughed at Carlotta, who was a bit irritated by the gentle delicacy with which he treated me.
She was elated too. I remember her saying:
“We need war, don’t you think? Don’t you think men need the fight, to keep life chivalrous and put martial glamour into it?”
And I remember saying: “I think we need some sort of fight; but my sort isn’t the war sort.” It was August, we could take it lightly.
“What’s your sort?” she asked quickly.
“I don’t know: single-handed, anyhow,” I said, with a grin. Lord Lathkill made me feel like a lonely sansculotte, he was so completely unostentatious, so very willing to pay all the attention to me, and yet so subtly complacent, so unquestionably sure of his position. Whereas I was not a very sound earthenware pitcher which had already gone many times to the well.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 667
