The Ladybird

by D. H. Lawrence

 

  A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

  Title: The Ladybird (1923)

  Author: D H Lawrence

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  A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

  Title: The Ladybird

  Author: D H Lawrence

  How many swords had Lady Beveridge in her pierced heart! Yet there

  always seemed room for another. Since she had determined that her

  heart of pity and kindness should never die. If it had not been

  for this determination she herself might have died of sheer agony,

  in the years 1916 and 1917, when her boys were killed, and her

  brother, and death seemed to be mowing with wide swaths through her

  family. But let us forget.

  Lady Beveridge loved humanity, and come what might, she would

  continue to love it. Nay, in the human sense, she would love her

  enemies. Not the criminals among the enemy, the men who committed

  atrocities. But the men who were enemies through no choice of

  their own. She would be swept into no general hate.

  Somebody had called her the soul of England. It was not ill said,

  though she was half Irish. But of an old, aristocratic, loyal

  family famous for its brilliant men. And she, Lady Beveridge, had

  for years as much influence on the tone of English politics as any

  individual alive. The close friend of the real leaders in the

  House of Lords and in the Cabinet, she was content that the men

  should act, so long as they breathed from her as from the rose of

  life the pure fragrance of truth and genuine love. She had no

  misgiving regarding her own spirit.

  She, she would never lower her delicate silken flag. For instance,

  throughout all the agony of the war she never forgot the enemy

  prisoners; she was determined to do her best for them. During the

  first years she still had influence. But during the last years of

  the war power slipped out of the hands of her and her sort, and she

  found she could do nothing any more: almost nothing. Then it

  seemed as if the many swords had gone home into the heart of this

  little, unyielding Mater Dolorosa. The new generation jeered at

  her. She was a shabby, old-fashioned little aristocrat, and her

  drawing-room was out of date.

  But we anticipate. The years 1916 and 1917 were the years when the

  old spirit died for ever in England. But Lady Beveridge struggled

  on. She was being beaten.

  It was in the winter of 1917--or in the late autumn. She had been

  for a fortnight sick, stricken, paralysed by the fearful death of

  her youngest boy. She felt she MUST give in, and just die. And

  then she remembered how many others were lying in agony.

  So she rose, trembling, frail, to pay a visit to the hospital where

  lay the enemy sick and wounded, near London. Countess Beveridge

  was still a privileged woman. Society was beginning to jeer at

  this little, worn bird of an out-of-date righteousness and

  aesthetic. But they dared not think ill of her.

  She ordered the car and went alone. The Earl, her husband, had

  taken his gloom to Scotland. So, on a sunny, wan November morning

  Lady Beveridge descended at the hospital, Hurst Place. The guard

  knew her, and saluted as she passed. Ah, she was used to such deep

  respect! It was strange that she felt it so bitterly, when the

  respect became shallower. But she did. It was the beginning of

  the end to her.

  The matron went with her into the ward. Alas, the beds were all

  full, and men were even lying on pallets on the floor. There was a

  desperate, crowded dreariness and helplessness in the place: as if

  nobody wanted to make a sound or utter a word. Many of the men

  were haggard and unshaven, one was delirious, and talking fitfully

  in the Saxon dialect. It went to Lady Beveridge's heart. She had

  been educated in Dresden, and had had many dear friendships in the

  city. Her children also had been educated there. She heard the

  Saxon dialect with pain.

  She was a little, frail, bird-like woman, elegant, but with that

  touch of the blue-stocking of the nineties which was unmistakable.

  She fluttered delicately from bed to bed, speaking in perfect

  German, but with a thin, English intonation: and always asking if

  there was anything she could do. The men were mostly officers and

  gentlemen. They made little requests which she wrote down in a

  book. Her long, pale, rather worn face, and her nervous little

  gestures somehow inspired confidence.

  One man lay quite still, with his eyes shut. He had a black beard.

  His face was rather small and sallow. He might be dead. Lady

  Beveridge looked at him earnestly, and fear came into her face.

  'Why, Count Dionys!' she said, fluttered. 'Are you asleep?'

  It was Count Johann Dionys Psanek, a Bohemian. She had known

  him when he was a boy, and only in the spring of 1914 he and his

  wife had stayed with Lady Beveridge in her country house in

  Leicestershire.

  His black eyes opened: large, black, unseeing eyes, with curved

  black lashes. He was a small man, small as a boy, and his face too

  was rather small. But all the lines were fine, as if they had been

  fired with a keen male energy. Now the yellowish swarthy paste of

  his flesh seemed dead, and the fine black brows seemed drawn on the

  face of one dead. The eyes, however, were alive: but only just

  alive, unseeing and unknowing.

  'You know me, Count Dionys? You know me, don't you?' said Lady

  Beveridge, bending forward over the bed.

  There was no reply for some time. Then the black eyes gathered a

  look of recognition, and there came the ghost
of a polite smile.

  'Lady Beveridge.' The lips formed the words. There was

  practically no sound.

  'I am so glad you can recognize me. And I am so sorry you are

  hurt. I am so sorry.'

  The black eyes watched her from that terrible remoteness of death,

  without changing.

  'There is nothing I can do for you? Nothing at all?' she said,

  always speaking German.

  And after a time, and from a distance, came the answer from his

  eyes, a look of weariness, of refusal, and a wish to be left alone;

  he was unable to strain himself into consciousness. His eyelids

  dropped.

  'I am so sorry,' she said. 'If ever there is anything I can do--'

  The eyes opened again, looking at her. He seemed at last to hear,

  and it was as if his eyes made the last weary gesture of a polite

  bow. Then slowly his eyelids closed again.

  Poor Lady Beveridge felt another sword-thrust of sorrow in her

  heart, as she stood looking down at the motionless face, and at the

  black fine beard. The black hairs came out of his skin thin and

  fine, not very close together. A queer, dark, aboriginal little

  face he had, with a fine little nose: not an Aryan, surely. And he

  was going to die.

  He had a bullet through the upper part of his chest, and another

  bullet had broken one of his ribs. He had been in hospital five

  days.

  Lady Beveridge asked the matron to ring her up if anything

  happened. Then she drove away, saddened. Instead of going to

  Beveridge House, she went to her daughter's flat near the park--

  near Hyde Park. Lady Daphne was poor. She had married a commoner,

  son of one of the most famous politicians in England, but a man

  with no money. And Earl Beveridge had wasted most of the large

  fortune that had come to him, so that the daughter had very little,

  comparatively.

  Lady Beveridge suffered, going in the narrow doorway into the

  rather ugly flat. Lady Daphne was sitting by the electric fire in

  the small yellow drawing-room, talking to a visitor. She rose at

  once, seeing her little mother.

  'Why, mother, ought you to be out? I'm sure not.'

  'Yes, Daphne darling. Of course I ought to be out.'

  'How are you?' The daughter's voice was slow and sonorous,

  protective, sad. Lady Daphne was tall, only twenty-five years old.

  She had been one of the beauties, when the war broke out, and her

  father had hoped she would make a splendid match. Truly, she had

  married fame: but without money. Now, sorrow, pain, thwarted

  passion had done her great damage. Her husband was missing in the

  East. Her baby had been born dead. Her two darling brothers were

  dead. And she was ill, always ill.

  A tall, beautifully-built girl, she had the fine stature of her

  father. Her shoulders were still straight. But how thin her white

  throat! She wore a simple black frock stitched with coloured wool

  round the top, and held in a loose coloured girdle: otherwise no

  ornaments. And her face was lovely, fair, with a soft exotic white

  complexion and delicate pink cheeks. Her hair was soft and heavy,

  of a lovely pallid gold colour, ash-blond. Her hair, her

  complexion were so perfectly cared for as to be almost artificial,

  like a hot-house flower.

  But alas, her beauty was a failure. She was threatened with

  phthisis, and was far too thin. Her eyes were the saddest part of

  her. They had slightly reddened rims, nerve-worn, with heavy,

  veined lids that seemed as if they did not want to keep up. The

  eyes themselves were large and of a beautiful green-blue colour.

  But they were full, languid, almost glaucous.

  Standing as she was, a tall, finely-built girl, looking down with

  affectionate care on her mother, she filled the heart with ashes.

  The little pathetic mother, so wonderful in her way, was not really

  to be pitied for all her sorrow. Her life was in her sorrows, and

  her efforts on behalf of the sorrows of others. But Daphne was not

  born for grief and philanthropy. With her splendid frame, and her

  lovely, long, strong legs, she was Artemis or Atalanta rather than

  Daphne. There was a certain width of brow and even of chin that

  spoke a strong, reckless nature, and the curious, distraught slant

  of her eyes told of a wild energy dammed up inside her.

  That was what ailed her: her own wild energy. She had it from her

  father, and from her father's desperate race. The earldom had

  begun with a riotous, dare-devil border soldier, and this was the

  blood that flowed on. And alas, what was to be done with it?

  Daphne had married an adorable husband: truly an adorable husband.

  Whereas she needed a dare-devil. But in her MIND she hated all

  dare-devils: she had been brought up by her mother to admire only

  the good.

  So, her reckless, anti-philanthropic passion could find no outlet--

  and SHOULD find no outlet, she thought. So her own blood turned

  against her, beat on her own nerves, and destroyed her. It was

  nothing but frustration and anger which made her ill, and made the

  doctors fear consumption. There it was, drawn on her rather wide

  mouth: frustration, anger, bitterness. There it was the same in

  the roll of her green-blue eyes, a slanting, averted look: the same

  anger furtively turning back on itself. This anger reddened her

  eyes and shattered her nerves. And yet her whole will was fixed in

  her adoption of her mother's creed, and in condemnation of her

  handsome, proud, brutal father, who had made so much misery in the

  family. Yes, her will was fixed in the determination that life

  should be gentle and good and benevolent. Whereas her blood was

  reckless, the blood of daredevils. Her will was the stronger of

  the two. But her blood had its revenge on her. So it is with

  strong natures today: shattered from the inside.

  'You have no news, darling?' asked the mother.

  'No. My father-in-law had information that British prisoners had

  been brought into Hasrun, and that details would be forwarded by

  the Turks. And there was a rumour from some Arab prisoners that

  Basil was one of the British brought in wounded.'

  'When did you hear this?'

  'Primrose came in this morning.'

  'Then we can hope, dear.'

  'Yes.'

  Never was anything more dull and bitter than Daphne's affirmative

  of hope. Hope had become almost a curse to her. She wished there

  need be no such thing. Ha, the torment of hoping, and the INSULT

  to one's soul. Like the importunate widow dunning for her deserts.

  Why could it not all be just clean disaster, and have done with it?

  This dilly-dallying with despair was worse than despair. She had

  hoped so much: ah, for her darling brothers she had hoped with such

  anguish. And the two she loved best were dead. So were most

  others she had hoped for, dead. Only this uncertainty about her

  husband still rankling.

  'You feel better, dear?' said the little, unquenched mother.

  'Rather better,' came the resentful answer.

 
; 'And your night?'

  'No better.'

  There was a pause.

  'You are coming to lunch with me, Daphne darling?'

  'No, mother dear. I promised to lunch at the Howards with

  Primrose. But I needn't go for a quarter of an hour. Do sit

  down.'

  Both women seated themselves near the electric fire. There was

  that bitter pause, neither knowing what to say. Then Daphne roused

  herself to look at her mother.

  'Are you sure you were fit to go out?' she said. 'What took you

  out so suddenly?'

  'I went to Hurst Place, dear. I had the men on my mind, after the

  way the newspapers had been talking.'

  'Why ever do you read the newspapers!' blurted Daphne, with a

  certain burning, acid anger. 'Well,' she said, more composed.

  'And do you feel better now you've been?'

  'So many people suffer besides ourselves, darling.'

  'I know they do. Makes it all the worse. It wouldn't matter if it

  were only just us. At least, it would matter, but one could bear

  it more easily. To be just one of a crowd all in the same state.'

  'And some even worse, dear.'

  'Oh, quite! And the worse it is for all, the worse it is for one.'

  'Is that so, darling? Try not to see too darkly. I feel if I can

  give just a little bit of myself to help the others--you know--it

  alleviates me. I feel that what I can give to the men lying there,

  Daphne, I give to my own boys. I can only help them now through

  helping others. But I can still do that, Daphne, my girl.'

  And the mother put her little white hand into the long, white cold

  hand of her daughter. Tears came to Daphne's eyes, and a fearful

  stony grimace to her mouth.

  'It's so wonderful of you that you can feel like that,' she said.

  'But you feel the same, my love. I know you do.'

  'No, I don't. Everyone I see suffering these same awful things, it

  makes me wish more for the end of the world. And I quite see that

  the world won't end--'

  'But it will get better, dear. This time it's like a great

  sickness--like a terrible pneumonia tearing the breast of the

  world.'

  'Do you believe it will get better? I don't.'

  'It will get better. Of course it will get better. It is perverse

  to think otherwise, Daphne. Remember what HAS been before, even in

  Europe. Ah, Daphne, we must take a bigger view.'

  'Yes, I suppose we must.'

  The daughter spoke rapidly, from the lips, in a resonant,

  monotonous tone. The mother spoke from the heart.

  'And Daphne, I found an old friend among the men at Hurst Place.'

  'Who?'

  'Little Count Dionys. You remember him?'

  'Quite. What's wrong?'

  'Wounded rather badly--through the chest. So ill.'

  'Did you speak to him?'

  'Yes. I recognized him in spite of his beard.'

  'Beard!'

  'Yes--a black beard. I suppose he could not be shaven. It seems

  strange that he is still alive, poor man.'

  'Why strange? He isn't old. How old is he?'

  'Between thirty and forty. But so ill, so wounded, Daphne. And so

  small. So small, so sallow--smorto, you know the Italian word.

  The way dark people look. There is something so distressing in

  it.'

  'Does he look VERY small now--uncanny?' asked the daughter.

  'No, not uncanny. Something of the terrible far-awayness of a

  child that is very ill and can't tell you what hurts it. Poor

  Count Dionys, Daphne. I didn't know, dear, that his eyes were so

  black, and his lashes so curved and long. I had never thought of

  him as beautiful.'

  'Nor I. Only a little comical. Such a dapper little man.'

  'Yes. And yet now, Daphne, there is something remote and in a sad

  way heroic in his dark face. Something primitive.'

  'What did he say to you?'

  'He couldn't speak to me. Only with his lips, just my name.'