It was amazing, this from Jimmy. He sat there and lectured the collier like a Puritan Father, completely forgetting the disintegrating flutter of Clarissa, in his own background.
“I want a wife who’ll please me, who’ll want to please me,” said the collier.
“Why should you be pleased, any more than anybody else?” asked the wife coldly.
“My child, my little girl wants to please me — if her mother would let her. But the women hang together. I tell you” — and here he turned to Jimmy, with a blaze in his dark blue eyes — ”I want a woman to please me, a woman who’s anxious to please me. And if I can’t find her in my own home, I’ll find her out of it.”
“I hope she pleases you,” said the wife, rocking slightly.
“Well,” said the man, “she does.”
“Then why don’t you go and live with her altogether?” she said.
He turned and looked at her.
“Why don’t I?” he said. “Because I’ve got my home. I’ve got my house, I’ve got my wife, let her be what she may, as a woman to live with. And I’ve got my child. Why should I break it all up?”
“And what about me?” she asked, coldly and fiercely.
“You? You’ve got a home. You’ve got a child. You’ve got a man who works for you. You’ve got what you want. You do as you like — ”
“Do I?” she asked, with intolerable sarcasm.
“Yes. Apart from the bit of work in the house, you do as you like. If you want to go, you can go. But while you live in my house, you must respect it. You bring no men here, you see.”
“Do you respect your home?” she said.
“Yes! I do! If I get another woman — who pleases me — I deprive you of nothing. All I ask of you is to do your duty as a housewife.”
“Down to washing your back!” she said, heavily sarcastic; and, Jimmy thought, a trifle vulgar.
“Down to washing my back, since it’s got to be washed,” he said.
“What about the other woman? Let her do it.”
“This is my home.”
The wife gave a strange movement, like a mad woman.
Jimmy sat rather pale and frightened. Behind the collier’s quietness he felt the concentration of almost cold anger and an unchanging will. In the man’s lean face he could see the bones, the fixity of the male bones, and it was as if the human soul, or spirit, had gone into the living skull and skeleton, almost invulnerable.
Jimmy, for some strange reason, felt a wild anger against this bony and logical man. It was the hard-driven coldness, fixity, that he could not bear.
“Look here!” he cried, in a resonant Oxford voice, his eyes glaring and casting inwards behind his spectacles. “You say Mrs Pinnegar is free — free to do as she pleases. In that case, you have no objection if she comes with me right away from here.”
The collier looked at the pale, strange face of the editor in wonder. Jimmy kept his face slightly averted, and sightless, seeing nobody. There was a Mephistophelian tilt about the eyebrows, and a Martyred Sebastian straightness about the mouth.
“Does she want to?” asked Pinnegar, with devastating incredulity. The wife smiled faintly, grimly. She could see the vanity of her husband in his utter inability to believe that she could prefer the other man to him.
“That,” said Jimmy, “you must ask her yourself. But it’s what I came here for: to ask her to come and live with me, and bring the child.”
“You came without having seen her, to ask her that?” said the husband, in growing wonder.
“Yes,” said Jimmy, vehemently, nodding his head with drunken emphasis. “Yes! Without ever having seen her!”
“You’ve caught a funny fish this time, with your poetry,” he said, turning with curious husband-familiarity to his wife. She hated this offhand husband-familiarity.
“What sort of fish have you caught?” she retorted. “And what did you catch her with?”
“Bird-lime!” he said, with a faint, quick grin.
Jimmy was sitting in suspense. They all three sat in suspense, for some time.
“And what are you saying to him?” said the collier at length.
Jimmy looked up, and the malevolent half-smile on his face made him look rather handsome again, a mixture of faun and Mephisto. He glanced curiously, invitingly, at the woman who was watching him from afar.
“I say yes!” she replied, in a cool voice.
The husband became very still, sitting erect in his wooden armchair and staring into space. It was as if he were fixedly watching something fly away from him, out of his own soul. But he was not going to yield at all, to any emotion.
He could not now believe that this woman should want to leave him. Yet she did.
“I’m sure it’s all for the best,” said Jimmy, in his Puritan-Father voice. “You don’t mind, really” — he drawled uneasily — ”if she brings the child. I give you my word I’ll do my very best for it.”
The collier looked at him as if he were very far away. Jimmy quailed under the look. He could see that the other man was relentlessly killing the emotion in himself, stripping himself, as it were, of his own flesh, stripping himself to the hard unemotional bone of the human male.
“I give her a blank cheque,” said Pinnegar, with numb lips. “She does as she pleases.”
“So much for fatherly love, compared with selfishness,” she said.
He turned and looked at her with that curious power of remote anger. And immediately she became still, quenched.
“I give you a blank cheque, as far as I’m concerned,” he repeated abstractedly.
“It is blank indeed!” she said, with her first touch of bitterness.
Jimmy looked at the clock. It was growing late: he might be shut out of the public-house. He rose to go, saying he would return in the morning. He was leaving the next day, at noon, for London.
He plunged into the darkness and mud of that black, night-ridden country. There was a curious elation in his spirits, mingled with fear. But then he always needed an element of fear, really, to elate him. He thought with terror of those two human beings left in that house together. The frightening state of tension! He himself could never bear an extreme tension. He always had to compromise, to become apologetic and pathetic. He would be able to manage Mrs Pinnegar that way. Emily! He must get used to saying it. Emily! The Emilia was absurd. He had never known an Emily.
He felt really scared, and really elated. He was doing something big. It was not that he was in love with the woman. But, my God, he wanted to take her away from that man. And he wanted the adventure of her. Absolutely the adventure of her. He felt really elated, really himself, really manly.
But in the morning he returned rather sheepishly to the collier’s house. It was another dark, drizzling day, with black trees, black road, black hedges, blackish brick houses, and the smell and the sound of collieries under a skyless day. Like living in some weird underground.
Unwillingly he went up that passage-entry again, and knocked at the back door, glancing at the miserable little back garden with its cabbage-stalks and its ugly sanitary arrangements.
The child opened the door to him: with her fair hair, flushed cheeks, and hot, dark-blue eyes.
“Hello, Jane!” he said.
The mother stood tall and square, by the table, watching him with portentous eyes, as he entered. She was handsome, but her skin was not very good: as if the battle had been too much for her health. Jimmy glanced up at her smiling his slow, ingratiating smile, that always brought a glow of success into a woman’s spirit. And as he saw her gold-flecked eyes searching in his eyes, without a bit of kindliness, he thought to himself: “My God, however am I going to sleep with that woman!” His will was ready, however, and he would manage it somehow.
And when he glanced at the motionless, bony head and lean figure of the collier seated in the wooden armchair by the fire, he was the more ready. He must triumph over that man.
“What train are you going by?” asked
Mrs Pinnegar.
“By the twelve thirty.” He looked up at her as he spoke, with the wide, shining, childlike, almost coy eyes that were his peculiar asset. She looked down at him in a sort of interested wonder. She seemed almost fascinated by his childlike, shining, inviting dark-grey eyes, with their long lashes: such an absolute change from that resentful unyielding that looked out always from the back of her husband’s blue eyes. Her husband always seemed like a menace to her, in his thinness, his concentration, his eternal unyielding. And this man looked at one with the wide, shining, fascinating eyes of a young Persian kitten, something at once bold and shy and coy and strangely inviting. She fell at once under their spell.
“You’ll have dinner before you go,” she said.
“No!” he cried in panic, unwilling indeed to eat before that other man. “No, I ate a fabulous breakfast. I will get a sandwich when I change in Sheffield: really!”
She had to go out shopping. She said she would go out to the station with him when she got back. It was just after eleven.
“But look here,” he said, addressing also the thin abstracted man who sat unnoticing, with a newspaper, “we’ve got to get this thing settled. I want Mrs Pinnegar to come and live with me, her and the child. And she’s coming! So don’t you think, now, it would be better if she came right along with me to-day! Just put a few things in a bag and come along. Why drag the thing out?”
“I tell you,” replied the husband, “she has a blank cheque from me to do as she likes.”
“All right, then! Won’t you do that? Won’t you come along with me now?” said Jimmy, looking up at her exposedly, but casting his eyes a bit inwards. Throwing himself with deliberate impulsiveness on her mercy.
“I can’t!” she said decisively. “I can’t come to-day.”
“But why not — really? Why not, while I’m here? You have that blank cheque, you can do as you please — ”
“The blank cheque won’t get me far,” she said rudely; “I can’t come to-day, anyhow.”
“When can you come, then?” he said, with that queer, petulant pleading. “The sooner the better, surely.”
“I can come on Monday,” she said abruptly.
“Monday!” He gazed up at her in a kind of panic, through his spectacles. Then he set his teeth again, and nodded his head up and down. “All right, then! To-day is Saturday. Then Monday!”
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I’ve got to go out for a few things. I’ll walk to the station with you when I get back.”
She bundled Jane into a little sky-blue coat and bonnet, put on a heavy black coat and black hat herself, and went out.
Jimmy sat very uneasily opposite the collier, who also wore spectacles to read. Pinnegar put down the newspaper and pulled the spectacles off his nose, saying something about a Labour Government.
“Yes,” said Jimmy. “After all, best be logical. If you are democratic, the only logical thing is a Labour Government. Though, personally, one Government is as good as another, to me.”
“Maybe so!” said the collier. “But something’s got to come to an end, sooner or later.”
“Oh, a great deal!” said Jimmy, and they lapsed into silence.
“Have you been married before?” asked Pinnegar, at length.
“Yes. My wife and I are divorced.”
“I suppose you want me to divorce my wife?” said the collier.
“Why — yes! — that would be best — ”
“It’s the same to me,” said Pinnegar; “divorce or no divorce. I’ll live with another woman, but I’ll never marry another. Enough is as good as a feast. But if she wants a divorce, she can have it.”
“It would certainly be best,” said Jimmy.
There was a long pause. Jimmy wished the woman would come back.
“I look on you as an instrument,” said the miner. “Something had to break. You are the instrument that breaks it.”
It was strange to sit in the room with this thin, remote, wilful man. Jimmy was a bit fascinated by him. But, at the same time, he hated him because he could not be in the same room with him without being under his spell. He felt himself dominated. And he hated it.
“My wife,” said Pinnegar, looking up at Jimmy with a peculiar, almost humorous, teasing grin, “expects to see me go to the dogs when she leaves me. It is her last hope.”
Jimmy ducked his head and was silent, not knowing what to say. The other man sat still in his chair, like a sort of infinitely patient prisoner, looking away out of the window and waiting.
“She thinks,” he said again, “that she has some wonderful future awaiting her somewhere, and you’re going to open the door.”
And again the same amused grin was in his eyes.
And again Jimmy was fascinated by the man. And again he hated the spell of this fascination. For Jimmy wanted to be, in his own mind, the strongest man among men, but particularly among women. And this thin, peculiar man could dominate him. He knew it. The very silent unconsciousness of Pinnegar dominated the room, wherever he was.
Jimmy hated this.
At last Mrs Pinnegar came back, and Jimmy set off with her. He shook hands with the collier.
“Good-bye!” he said.
“Good-bye!” said Pinnegar, looking down at him with those amused blue eyes, which Jimmy knew he would never be able to get beyond.
And the walk to the station was almost a walk of conspiracy against the man left behind, between the man in spectacles and the tall woman. They arranged the details for Monday. Emily was to come by the nine o’clock train: Jimmy would meet her at Marylebone, and instal her in his house in St John’s Wood. Then, with the child, they would begin a new life. Pinnegar would divorce his wife, or she would divorce him: and then, another marriage.
Jimmy got a tremendous kick out of it all on the journey home. He felt he had really done something desperate and adventurous. But he was in too wild a flutter to analyse any results. Only, as he drew near London, a sinking feeling came over him. He was desperately tired after it all, almost too tired to keep up.
Nevertheless, he went after dinner and sprang it all on Severn.
“You damn fool!” said Severn, in consternation. “What did you do it for?”
“Well,” said Jimmy, writhing. “Because I wanted to.”
“Good God! The woman sounds like the head of Medusa. You’re a hero of some stomach, I must say! Remember Clarissa?”
“Oh,” writhed Jimmy. “But this is different.”
“Ay, her name’s Emma, or something of that sort, isn’t it?”
“Emily!” said Jimmy briefly.
“Well, you’re a fool, anyway, so you may as well keep on acting in character. I’ve no doubt, by playing weeping-willow, you’ll outlive all the female storms you ever prepare for yourself. I never yet did see a weeping-willow uprooted by a gale, so keep on hanging your harp on it, and you’ll be all right. Here’s luck! But for a man who was looking for a little Gretchen to adore him, you’re a corker!”
Which was all that Severn had to say. But Jimmy went home with his knees shaking. On Sunday morning he wrote an anxious letter. He didn’t know how to begin it: Dear Mrs Pinnegar and Dear Emily seemed either too late in the day or too early. So he just plunged in, without dear anything.
“I want you to have this before you come. Perhaps we have been precipitate. I only beg you to decide finally, for yourself, before you come. Don’t come, please, unless you are absolutely sure of yourself. If you are in the least unsure, wait a while, wait till you are quite certain, one way or the other.
“For myself, if you don’t come I shall understand. But please send me a telegram. If you do come, I shall welcome both you and the child. Yours ever — J.F.”
He paid a man his return fare, and three pounds extra, to go on the Sunday and deliver this letter.
The man came back in the evening. He had delivered the letter. There was no answer.
Awful Sunday night: tense Monday morning!
; A telegram: “Arrive Marylebone 12.50 with Jane. Yours ever. Emily.”
Jimmy set his teeth and went to the station. But when he felt her looking at him, and so met her eyes: and after that saw her coming slowly down the platform, holding the child by the hand, her slow cat’s eyes smouldering under her straight brows, smouldering at him: he almost swooned. A sickly grin came over him as he held out his hand. Nevertheless he said:
“I’m awfully glad you came.”
And as he sat in the taxi, a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him.
And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall — the woman, or the man, her husband?
THE FLYING FISH
1 Departure from Mexico
COME home else no Day in Daybrook.’ This cablegram was the first thing Gethin Day read of the pile of mail which he found at the hotel in the lost town of South Mexico, when he returned from his trip to the coast. Though the message was not signed, he knew whom it came from and what it meant.
He lay in his bed in the hot October evening, still sick with malaria. In the flush of fever he saw yet the parched, stark mountains of the south, the villages of reed huts lurking among trees, the black-eyed natives with the lethargy, the ennui, the pathos, the beauty of an exhausted race; and above all he saw the weird, uncanny flowers, which he had hunted from the high plateaux, through the valleys, and down to the steaming crocodile heat of the tierra caliente, towards the sandy, burning, intolerable shores. For he was fascinated by the mysterious green blood that runs in the veins of plants, and the purple and yellow and red blood that colours the faces of flowers. Especially the unknown flora of South Mexico attracted him, and above all he wanted to trace to the living plant the mysterious essences and toxins known with such strange elaboration to the Mayas, the Zapotecas, and the Aztecs.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 655
