She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then lapsed into silence. Then she said:
“Sort of monastery, so to speak!”
And she rose and reached for her wrap, adding:
“I’d better go, then.”
“Joe will see you home,” he said.
She faced round on me.
“Do you mind not seeing me home, Mr. Bradley?” she said, gazing at me.
“Not if you don’t want me,” said I.
“Hawken will drive you,” said Rawdon.
“Oh, no, he won’t!” she said. “I’ll walk. Good-night.”
“I’ll get my hat,” stammered Rawdon, in an agony. “Wait! Wait! The gate will be locked.”
“It was open when I came,” she said.
He rang for Hawken to unlock the iron doors at the end of the short drive, whilst he himself huddled into a greatcoat and scarf, fumbling for a flashlight.
“You won’t go till I come back, will you?” he pleaded to me. “I’d be awfully glad if you’d stay the night. The sheets will be aired.”
I had to promise — and he set off with an umbrella, in the rain, at the same time asking Hawken to take a flashlight and go in front. So that was how they went, in single file along the path over the fields to Mrs. Drummond’s house, Hawken in front, with flashlight and umbrella, curving round to light up in front of Mrs. Drummond, who, with umbrella only, walked isolated between two lights, Rawdon shining his flashlight on her from the rear from under his umbrella. I turned indoors.
So that was over! At least, for the moment!
I thought I would go upstairs and see how damp the bed in the guest-chamber was before I actually stayed the night with Rawdon. He never had guests — preferred to go away himself.
The guest-chamber was a good room across a passage and round a corner from Rawdon’s room — its door just opposite the padded service-door. This latter service-door stood open, and a light shone through. I went into the spare bedroom, switching on the light.
To my surprise, the bed looked as if it had just been left — the sheets tumbled, the pillows pressed. I put in my hands under the bedclothes, and it was warm. Very curious!
As I stood looking round in mild wonder, I heard a voice call softly: “Joe!”
“Yes!” said I instinctively, and, though startled, strode at once out of the room and through the servants’ door, towards the voice. Light shone from the open doorway of one of the servants’ rooms.
There was a muffled little shriek, and I was standing looking into what was probably Hawken’s bedroom, and seeing a soft and pretty white leg and a pretty feminine posterior very thinly dimmed in a rather short night-dress, just in the act of climbing into a narrow little bed, and, then arrested, the owner of the pretty posterior burying her face in the bed-clothes, to be invisible, like the ostrich in the sand.
I discreetly withdrew, went downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine. And very shortly Rawdon returned looking like Hamlet in the last act.
He said nothing, neither did I. We sat and merely smoked. Only as he was seeing me upstairs to bed, in the now immaculate bedroom, he said pathetically:
“Why aren’t women content to be what a man wants them to be?”
“Why aren’t they!” said I wearily.
“I thought I had made everything clear,” he said.
“You start at the wrong end,” said I.
And as I said it, the picture came into my mind of the pretty feminine butt-end in Hawken’s bedroom. Yes, Hawken made better starts, wherever he ended.
When he brought me my cup of tea in the morning, he was very soft and cat-like. I asked him what sort of day it was, and he asked me if I’d had a good night, and was I comfortable.
“Very comfortable!” said I. “But I turned you out, I’m afraid.”
“Me, sir?” He turned on me a face of utter bewilderment.
But I looked him in the eye.
“Is your name Joe?” I asked him.
“You’re right, sir.”
“So is mine,” said I. “However, I didn’t see her face, so it’s all right. I suppose you were a bit tight, in that little bed!”
“Well, sir!” and he flashed me a smile of amazing impudence, and lowered his tone to utter confidence. “This is the best bed in the house, this is.” And he touched it softly.
“You’ve not tried them all, surely?”
A look of indignant horror on his face!
“No, sir, indeed I haven’t.”
That day, Rawdon left for London, on his way to Tunis, and Hawken was to follow him. The roof of his house looked just the same.
The Drummonds moved too — went away somewhere, and left a lot of unsatisfied tradespeople behind.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
Virginia Bodoin had a good job: she was head of a department in a certain government office, held a responsible position, and earned, to imitate Balzac and be precise about it, seven hundred and fifty pounds a year. That is already something. Rachel Bodoin, her mother, had an income of about six hundred a year, on which she had lived in the capitals of Europe since the effacement of a never very important husband.
Now, after some years of virtual separation and “freedom”, mother and daughter once more thought of settling down. They had become, in course of time, more like a married couple than mother and daughter. They knew one another very well indeed, and each was a little “nervous” of the other. They had lived together and parted several times. Virginia was now thirty, and she didn’t look like marrying. For four years she had been as good as married to Henry Lubbock, a rather spoilt young man who was musical. Then Henry let her down: for two reasons. He couldn’t stand her mother. Her mother couldn’t stand him. And anybody whom Mrs Bodoin could not stand she managed to sit on, disastrously. So Henry had writhed horribly, feeling his mother-in-law sitting on him tight, and Virginia, after all, in a helpless sort of family loyalty, sitting alongside her mother. Virginia didn’t really want to sit on Henry. But when her mother egged her on, she couldn’t help it. For ultimately, her mother had power over her; a strange female power, nothing to do with parental authority. Virginia had long thrown parental authority to the winds. But her mother had another, much subtler form of domination, female and thrilling, so that when Rachel said: Let’s squash him! Virginia had to rush wickedly and gleefully to the sport. And Henry knew quite well when he was being squashed. So that was one of his reasons for going back on Vinny. — He called her Vinny, to the superlative disgust of Mrs Bodoin, who always corrected him: My daughter Virginia —
The second reason was, again to be Balzacian, that Virginia hadn’t a sou of her own. Henry had a sorry two hundred and fifty. Virginia, at the age of twenty-four, was already earning four hundred and fifty. But she was earning them. Whereas Henry managed to earn about twelve pounds per annum, by his precious music. He had realized that he would find it hard to earn more. So that marrying, except with a wife who could keep him, was rather out of the question. Vinny would inherit her mother’s money. But then Mrs Bodoin had the health and muscular equipment of the Sphinx. She would live forever, seeking whom she might devour, and devouring him. Henry lived with Vinny for two years, in the married sense of the words: and Vinny felt they were married, minus a mere ceremony. But Vinny had her mother always in the background; often as far back as Paris or Biarritz, but still, within letter reach. And she never realized the funny little grin that came on her own elvish face when her mother, even in a letter, spread her skirts and calmly sat on Henry. She never realized that in spirit she promptly and mischievously sat on him too: she could no more have helped it than the tide can help turning to the moon. And she did not dream that he felt it, and was utterly mortified in his masculine vanity. Women, very often, hypnotize one another, and then, hypnotized, they proceed gently to wring the neck of the man they think they are loving with all their hearts. Then they call it utter perversity on his part, that he doesn’t like having his neck wrung. They think he is repudiating
a heart-felt love. For they are hypnotized. Women hypnotize one another, without knowing it.
In the end, Henry backed out. He saw himself being simply reduced to nothingness by two women, an old witch with muscles like the Sphinx, and a young, spell-bound witch, lavish, elvish and weak, who utterly spoilt him but who ate his marrow.
Rachel would write from Paris: My dear Virginia, as I had a windfall in the way of an investment, I am sharing it with you. You will find enclosed my cheque for twenty pounds. No doubt you will be needing it to buy Henry a suit of clothes, since the spring is apparently come, and the sunlight may be tempted to show him up for what he is worth. I don’t want my daughter going around with what is presumably a street-corner musician, but please pay the tailor’s bill yourself, or you may have to do it over again later. — Henry got a suit of clothes, but it was as good as a shirt of Nessus, eating him away with subtle poison.
So he backed out. He didn’t jump out, or bolt, or carve his way out at the sword’s point. He sort of faded out, distributing his departure over a year or more. He was fond of Vinny, and he could hardly do without her, and he was sorry for her. But at length he couldn’t see her apart from her mother. She was a young, weak, spendthrift witch, accomplice of her tough-clawed witch of a mother.
Henry made other alliances, got a good hold on elsewhere, and gradually extricated himself. He saved his life, but he had lost, he felt, a good deal of his youth and marrow. He tended now to go fat, a little puffy, somewhat insignificant. And he had been handsome and striking-looking.
The two witches howled when he was lost to them. Poor Virginia was really half crazy, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She had a violent recoil from her mother. Mrs Bodoin was filled with furious contempt for her daughter: that she should let such a hooked fish slip out of her hands! that she should allow such a person to turn her down! — ”I don’t quite see my daughter seduced and thrown over by a sponging individual such as Henry Lubbock,” she wrote. “But if it has happened, I suppose it is somebody’s fault — ”
There was a mutual recoil, which lasted nearly five years. But the spell was not broken. Mrs Bodoin’s mind never left her daughter, and Virginia was ceaselessly aware of her mother, somewhere in the universe. They wrote, and met at intervals, but they kept apart in recoil.
The spell, however, was between them, and gradually it worked. They felt more friendly. Mrs Bodoin came to London. She stayed in the same quiet hotel with her daughter: Virginia had had two rooms in an hotel for the past three years. And, at last, they thought of taking an apartment together.
Virginia was now over thirty. She was still thin and odd and elvish, with a very slight and piquant cast in one of her brown eyes, and she still had her odd, twisted smile, and her slow, rather deep-toned voice, that caressed a man like the stroking of subtle finger-tips. Her hair was still a natural tangle of curls, a bit dishevelled. She still dressed with a natural elegance which tended to go wrong and a tiny bit sluttish. She still might have a hole in her expensive and perfectly new stockings, and still she might have to take off her shoes in the drawing-room, if she came to tea, and sit there in her stockinged-feet. True, she had elegant feet: she was altogether elegantly shaped. But it wasn’t that. It was neither coquetry nor vanity. It was simply that, after having gone to a good shoemaker and paid five guineas for a pair of perfectly simple and natural shoes, made to her feet, the said shoes would hurt her excruciatingly, when she had walked half a mile in them, and she would simply have to take them off, even if she sat on the kerb to do it. It was a fatality. There was a touch of the gamin in her very feet, a certain sluttishness that wouldn’t let them stay properly in nice proper shoes. She practically always wore her mother’s old shoes. — Of course I go through life in mother’s old shoes. If she died and left me without a supply, I suppose I should have to go in a bathchair, she would say, with her odd twisted little grin. She was so elegant, and yet a slut. It was her charm, really.
Just the opposite of her mother. They could wear each other’s shoes and each other’s clothes, which seemed remarkable, for Mrs Bodoin seemed so much the bigger of the two. But Virginia’s shoulders were broad, if she was thin, she had a strong frame, even when she looked a frail rag.
Mrs Bodoin was one of those women of sixty or so, with a terrible inward energy and a violent sort of vitality. But she managed to hide it. She sat with perfect repose, and folded hands. One thought: What a calm woman! Just as one may look at the snowy summit of a quiescent volcano, in the evening light, and think: What peace!
It was a strange muscular energy which possessed Mrs Bodoin, as it possesses, curiously enough, many women over fifty, and is usually distasteful in its manifestations. Perhaps it accounts for the lassitude of the young.
But Mrs Bodoin recognized the bad taste in her energetic coevals, so she cultivated repose. Her very way of pronouncing the word, in two syllables: re-pose, making the second syllable run on into the twilight, showed how much suppressed energy she had. Faced with the problem of iron-grey hair and black eyebrows, she was too clever to try dyeing herself back into youth. She studied her face, her whole figure, and decided that it was positive. There was no denying it. There was no wispiness, no hollowness, no limp frail blossom-on-a-bending-stalk about her. Her figure, though not stout, was full, strong, and cambré. Her face had an aristocratic arched nose, aristocratic, who-the-devil-are-you grey eyes, and cheeks rather long but also rather full. Nothing appealing or youthfully skittish here.
Like an independent woman, she used her wits, and decided most emphatically not to be either youthful or skittish or appealing. She would keep her dignity, for she was fond of it. She was positive. She liked to be positive. She was used to her positivity. So she would just be positive.
She turned to the positive period; to the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, to Ninon de l’Enclos and the Pompadour, to Madame la Duchesse and Monsieur le Marquis. She decided that she was not much in the line of la Pompadour or la Duchesse, but almost exactly in the line of Monsieur le Marquis. And she was right. With hair silvering to white, brushed back clean from her positive brow and temples, cut short, but sticking out a little behind, with her rather full, pink face and thin black eyebrows plucked to two fine, superficial crescents, her arching nose and her rather full insolent eyes she was perfectly eighteenth-century, the early half. That she was Monsieur le Marquis rather than Madame la Marquise made her really modern.
Her appearance was perfect. She wore delicate combinations of grey and pink, maybe with a darkening iron-grey touch, and her jewels were of soft old coloured paste. Her bearing was a sort of alert repose, very calm, but very assured. There was, to use a vulgarism, no getting past her.
She had a couple of thousand pounds she could lay hands on. Virginia, of course, was always in debt. But, after all, Virginia was not to be sniffed at. She made seven hundred and fifty a year.
Virginia was oddly clever, and not clever. She didn’t really know anything, because anything and everything was interesting to her for the moment, and she picked it up at once. She picked up languages with extraordinary ease, she was fluent in a fortnight. This helped her enormously with her job. She could prattle away with heads of industry, let them come from where they liked. But she didn’t know any language, not even her own. She picked things up in her sleep, so to speak, without knowing anything about them.
And this made her popular with men. With all her curious facility, they didn’t feel small in front of her, because she was like an instrument. She had to be prompted. Some man had to set her in motion, and then she worked, really cleverly. She could collect the most valuable information. She was very useful. She worked with men, spent most of her time with men, her friends were practically all men. She didn’t feel easy with women.
Yet she had no lover, nobody seemed eager to marry her, nobody seemed eager to come close to her at all. Mrs Bodoin said: I’m afraid Virginia is a one-man woman. I am a one-man woman. So was my mother, and so was my grandmoth
er. Virginia’s father was the only man in my life, the only one. And I’m afraid Virginia is the same, tenacious. Unfortunately, the man was what he was, and her life is just left there.
Henry had said, in the past, that Mrs Bodoin wasn’t a one-man woman, she was a no-man woman, and that if she could have had her way, everything male would have been wiped off the face of the earth, and only the female element left.
However, Mrs Bodoin thought that it was now time to make a move. So she and Virginia took a quite handsome apartment in one of the old Bloomsbury Squares, fitted it up and furnished it with extreme care, and with some quite lovely things, got in a very good man, an Austrian, to cook, and they set up married life together, mother and daughter.
At first it was rather thrilling. The two reception-rooms, looking down on the dirty old trees of the square garden, were of splendid proportions, and each with three great windows coming down low, almost to the level of the knees. The chimney-piece was late eighteenth-century. Mrs Bodoin furnished the rooms with a gentle suggestion of Louis Seize merged with Empire, without keeping to any particular style. But she had, saved from her own home, a really remarkable Aubusson carpet. It looked almost new, as if it had been woven two years ago, and was startling, yet somehow rather splendid, as it spread its rose-red borders and wonderful florid array of silver-grey and gold-grey roses, lilies and gorgeous swans and trumpeting volutes away over the floor. Very aesthetic people found it rather loud, they preferred the worn, dim yellowish Aubusson in the big bedroom. But Mrs Bodoin loved her drawing-room carpet. It was positive, but it was not vulgar. It had a certain grand air in its floridity. She felt it gave her a proper footing. And it behaved very well with her painted cabinets and grey-and-gold brocade chairs and big Chinese vases, which she liked to fill with big flowers: single Chinese peonies, big roses, great tulips, orange lilies. The dim room of London, with all its atmospheric colour, would stand the big, free, fisticuffing flowers.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 693
