It was at Whitsun, falling in the latter part of May, that we three went down to Hermitage for a few days to stay at the local midwife's cottage, which was quite close to Chapel Farm Cottage where the Lawrences were. Lawrence had taken the rooms for us there, and we had goat's milk for the child, who was now weaned, from a white nanny that was tethered in the back garden.
Again it seems to have been mostly good weather that summer, though I remember some slashing showers one day when Lawrence and Donald and I went to Silchester in fond hopes of seeing something spectacular by way of Roman remains. We missed the last train back, and had to walk a long way home, without having set eyes on anything more exciting than some grass-covered mounds.
Usually Lawrence was to be found sitting on a kitchen chair, under the apple tree, in the garden that was open to the road, writing steadily and rapidly on his knee. (He had asked us to sell his typewriter for him, and my brother bought it for four pounds, which seemed a lot to all of us.) He was putting the finishing touches to the history book and writing short stories. That spring, too, after 'gnashing his teeth in vain' over something more acceptable upon the controversial subject of education for The Times Educational Supplement ('I couldn't write the educational stuff,' he said in a letter to me, 'I tried so hard - it wouldn't work in me - no go') he wrote the play Touch and Go.
Between-whiles at Hermitage we went wooding with a rickety pushchair among the sheets of bluebells, which were just past their best, and so were outshone by the suits of bright blue coarse linen worn by the Lawrences. Frieda and Lawrence were justly proud of these suits, which they had themselves cut out and made. As a woodman Lawrence excelled, collecting twice as much as anybody else and constantly rejecting our faggots as worthless. With all he had to do, in and out of the house, he found time to help the midwife's little daughter every day with her lessons, and he was ready at any time to take a turn in minding John Patrick, our boy, who was now of an age to walk round the kitchen table by clutching its edge. For the first time I had the chance to see how good Lawrence was with children. He made no special business of them, but knew how to include them warmly and naturally in his life. He was devoid of tricks with them, either old-fashioned or modern, and I was struck by the children's response to a certain light astringency in his treatment of them. It was either here or at the Forest of Dean that seeing me bathe John Patrick, he remarked with a sigh, 'He won't be having any chest trouble!' And again, with a little grin, 'I suppose he'll grow up into what they call a virile man!'
Lawrence himself was looking delicate, and as if still waiting to be delivered of that 'contained fury' of his. His chief hope now lay in the expected visit of Huebsch, his American publisher, who would, he said, make arrangements for an early visit to America. His failure with the Athenaeum had given him an additional shove towards the wilderness. England was become more than ever distasteful. As late as the July of that year, Lawrence's letters to Pinker and others showed signs of having been tampered with. Frieda was 'in accord' with him that go they must. Of their plans he wrote to me, 'Don't tell anybody what I say here. I don't tell anybody but you.' And his parting advice to me was, 'Don't be cast down, don't get used up. Above all, conserve yourself, and live only in marriage, not elsewhere.'
There had been talk of them coming to us in August - this time to the New Forest, where we were friendly with one of the agisters, lived in a rough farm, and got any amount of riding on the forest ponies.
But we had no more than a glimpse of them in town in the early summer, when they were on their way to the Midlands. After that, being offered a cottage at Pangbourne by Rosalind Baynes, they went there, and Lawrence's sisters came to stay alternately till the middle of September. We then saw them again in London, when they stayed with Koteliansky. As Ada, since getting home, had been very ill, Lawrence made yet another trip to the Midlands. But it was his farewell. Now he was really on the wing. Somebody had told him of a farm at Caserta, near Naples, and this made a good enough objective. The passports were ready at last. Lawrence has somewhere described vividly how he saw Frieda off, with a malicious grin on her face, to see her mother in Germany. Attached as he was to the old Baroness, he shrank just then from visiting Germany. He would go later. For the present he asked us to find through friends in Rome a 'very simple room' there. He would wait for Frieda in Florence, and they would go south together to prospect, staying in Rome on their way. Except by introduction he knew nobody in Italy.
Now he ran down alone to Berkshire to sell at Reading what books he had in the cottage. Lawrence never collected much of a library, as he was obliged so often to disperse his belongings. And, anyhow, he never wanted a library. On this occasion he gave us his tattered but complete set of De Quincey's works, with the hope that someday we might be rich enough to have them rebound. He wrote: 'He is a very nice man. I can go on reading and reading him. I laughed over "Goethe" yesterday. I like him, De Quincey, because he also dislikes such people as Plato and Goethe, whom I dislike.' Lawrence's De Quincey still remains in his original state on our shelves.
For the understanding of Lawrence it is needful to remember how completely he disliked and wished to transcend that classic ideal of human balance which was initiated by Plato, and of which Goethe was the great modern embodiment. The whole current of Lawrence's life and work represents a movement towards a new and different kind of balance that would be consistent with all human imperfections.
We, on our side, gave as a parting present a somewhat worn coat-lining of natural camel's hair, which we afterwards learned was 'a godsend' in Sicily in winter. And he accepted with protest, but obvious pleasure, a voluminous black and white shepherd's plaid which had been my mother's and grandmother's! This was destined to figure in Sea and Sardinia, but ultimately to fall into the hands of an Italian robber.
We both went to see the solitary pilgrim off. So far as I remember, nobody else was at the station except Koteliansky. Lawrence felt the wrench of the departure, but he was glad, very glad, to be going. He was helped on his way by a small legacy, left to him by Rupert Brooke, that came to him that summer.