4

By August, as we have seen, Frieda was tired of being in Mexico and longed to be in England. For one thing she now had better prospects than ever before of seeing her children. She urged Lawrence to return, telling him among other ready half-truths that 'England was his place'. Like me she did not think so poorly of the Adelphi as Lawrence did. Like me she was even carried away by it, and what was more she could almost fancy a future in it for Lawrence. And almost he wanted to be persuaded. In August she got him as far as the quay at New York. But at that point the 'Balaam's ass in his belly' rebelled. He would not go. 'Find I just don't want to - not yet. Later.' So he wrote to me from New York after seeing Frieda off without him, and this though he had no definite plans otherwise.

I think I shall go to California, and either pack with a donkey in the mountains, or get some sailing ship to the islands - if the last is possible. Perhaps by the autumn I'll decide to come to England - who knows! At present I can't come.

On the quay Frieda and Lawrence had been through one of the worst quarrels - perhaps the very worst - of their life together. And when they parted it was in such anger that both of them felt it might be for always. Because, of course, if Lawrence felt that he must stay longer he wanted Frieda to stay with him. It was against his desire that she had persuaded him this far.

Frieda, however, presently calmed and cheered by the voyage, felt quite sure that the parting was not for always, and immediately upon her arrival in England she sent Lawrence a wifely cable. He must come to her because she needed him.

Lawrence did not come at once, though no doubt he was glad of the cable. He went to Buffalo, to Tepic, to Jalisco (which last he greatly liked), making a tour of some two months, which must have had a strong effect upon The Plumed Serpent when he came to rewrite the manuscript. In some at least of these places he had acquaintances, at others introductions.

Meanwhile, Frieda having paid her visit to her mother in Germany, was in London; and, thinking that she was preparing the way for Lawrence, was seeing much of Murry. She kept writing enthusiastic letters to Lawrence about him and the Adelphi. Yet Lawrence held back.

'Frieda says she likes England now, and it is my place, and I must come back. I wonder.' So he wrote to me from Guadalajara on October 17th, having heard that I had just read Kangaroo. The letter continues:

We rode two days down the mountains, and got to Eztadan. Mexico has a certain mystery of beauty for me, as if the gods were here. Now, in this October, the days are so pure and lovely, like an enchantment, as if some dark-faced gods were still young. I wish it could be that I could start a little centre - a ranch - where we could have our Little adobe houses and make a life, and you could come with Don and John Patrick. It is always what I work for. But it must come from the inside, not from the will. And when it will be it will be, I suppose. It is queer, all the way down the Pacific Coast, I kept thinking: Best go back to England. And then, once across the Barranca from Ixdan, it was here again, where the gods may sometimes be awful, but they are young, here in Mexico, in Jalisco, that I wanted to be. And there is room - room for all of us if it could but be. But let us watch: things, when they come, come suddenly. It may be my destiny is in Europe. Quien sabe? If it is, I'll come back Hasta el dial But by the middle of November Lawrence felt that he could, even that he must, come to England. He need not stay, but he must look after Frieda. And he could see for himself if there was anything in the Adelphi, as Frieda, unlike himself, was so sure that there was. For the moment there was nothing keeping him in America as there had been three months earlier. He had got what he then wanted. As Frieda insisted, now that Murry was a free man, and was of a mind to accept Lawrence's leading as soon as Lawrence should come upon the scene, they might carry out the old scheme of going forth together.

Eight days after writing to me he wrote to Murry:

Yes, I think I shall come back now. I think I shall be back by the beginning of December. Work awhile with you on the Adelphi. Then perhaps we'll set off to India. Quien sabe?

The promise went no further than this. Yet Murry would have us believe that in the matter of the Adelphi Lawrence had let him down. Anyhow his 'nascent confidence' in Lawrence as his leader 'had already begun to wither'. He is at pains to attribute Lawrence's return simply to his wish to rejoin Frieda.

Lawrence arrived in London at the beginning of December, and Murry went with Kot to the station to meet him. Murry has described the meeting - how ill Lawrence looked, with a face of 'greenish pallor', and how almost his first words were 'I can't bear it,' so that Murry 'supposes' he felt 'as though the nightmare were upon him again'.

Murry's supposition is correct. But this time it was a different nightmare. It arose from a conviction which had begun to form in Lawrence upon his arrival at Southampton, had hardened during the journey through the Southern Counties, and had been clinched as by a hammer-stroke when he was greeted by Frieda and the others on the London platform. This conviction was that he had made a mistake in coming - that he ought to have waited for Frieda to come to him. If he could have been back in America at that moment, there would have been nothing but a fierce little greenish tongue of flame for Frieda and Murry to fetch from Waterloo to Hampstead. Now that he had come, however, he must see it through. From all this the reader is requested to make no obvious deductions. Lawrence had an uncanny and instantaneous way that was entirely his own, of 'sizing up' any situation. For him to see, for example, Murry and Frieda waiting for him so chummily together was enough to turn him greenish pale all over. 'Chumminess'... 'palliness' between people was anyhow detestable to him. Again, though Murry might be Lawrence's self-appointed lieutenant on a self-constituted Adelphi, Frieda was another matter. Here Murry would find himself up against the 'Unknown God' with a vengeance. In Lawrence's marriage there was no place for any lieutenancy, however platonic.

For some little time before Lawrence's arrival Frieda had already been living in the same house as ourselves - not our own house, but a large old one belonging to my brother who lived on the top floor. We had a lower part, and the Lawrences the flat above us. Murry had been Frieda's constant visitor and she was clearly prepared to back him up with all her strength (though why he should need her backing I could never understand) to Lawrence upon his arrival. 'After all,' she said to me one day, 'Murry is Somebody! And the Adelphi is Something!!' Her enthusiasm was childlike and infectious - at least it was childlike, and I should have found it infectious if I could have brought myself to believe in Murry. I respected his talent, and admired his capacity for eliciting emotion in others, but that was as far as I could get. Yet I could see, and can now, why it was that for so long he made a special appeal to Lawrence. He seemed made to subserve another's compelling genius.

Lawrence's immediate suggestion, says Murry - made perhaps on the way to Hampstead - was that the Adelphi 'should attack everything, everything; and explode in one blaze of denunciation'. Murry could see nothing for it but to treat this as a joke, whereupon Lawrence could see no alternative but for Murry to give the Adelphi up and go back to Mexico with him to 'begin the nucleus of a new society'. Lawrence's lingering belief that his own scale of values might have some practical bearing on Murry's should, one thinks, have been the real joke of the occasion for Murry, had Murry been able to regard the situation with detachment. But of course he could not, and we hardly blame him. Strange as it may seem, Lawrence was the only one detached enough to see the true irony of events.

That afternoon I was asked upstairs while Lawrence bustled about unpacking. I cannot understand Mabel Dodge Luhan's description of him at such times, or when travelling, as fussy or inefficient. He always appeared to me as a model of neatness and precision, neither wasting a movement nor permitting even a temporary disorder. Perhaps as an onlooker Mrs Luhan was upsetting. Some people are. And I have noticed that it is often the inefficient onlooker that most upsets the efficient worker.

On this occasion, while settling in, he talked with the greatest animation. And, although he was thin, I saw none of the 'greenish pallor' which struck Murry. Never had I seen him more energetic. So much so that Frieda asked him didn't he think after the journey he ought to 'rest for a bit'?

But he turned on her. 'Rest!' he snapped. 'When Frieda says England is "so restful!" it gives me the cold shudders. I don't want to rest nowadays. I feel full of energy!' And he went on producing things for me to see - his Indian belt of plaited horsehair, Frieda's snow-leopard skin, or a painted Mexican vase - fawn and pink and grey, with here and there a dab of light red or pale blue - all earth colours from a place where sun and earth were in close communion. He gave me one of these, after warning me that I must never put flowers in it, as even the eggshell glaze was porous to water. But first he drew from it his sewing and first-aid kit, and unscrewing a pot of boracic he produced from the lid an engraved disk of metal - bigger than an English half-crown, and heavy and shining - a coin of Mexican gold! Somehow, as he gave it to me to handle, it was as if he passed on to me the pristine magnificence of Mexico that had meant so much to him. By this he was to measure us in England and to find us wanting.

Already Frieda, who was great on making a place 'homelike', had hung pictures about the walls, which Mark Gertler or Dorothy Brett, or both, had lent or given for this purpose. Enthusiastically she drew his attention to them. Lawrence inspected them coolly. 'They want thinking about, I guess!' was his comment, uttered in that precise Nottingham speech of his that somehow agreed so well with his emphatic phrases; and Frieda subsided.

At the time I did what I wish I had done oftener. I noted down immediately what I could remember of Lawrence's conversation that first afternoon during his 'getting straight', as it ran on largely in the form of a monologue. I put it down now as it stands in my note.

'The spirits of everybody on board the boat just went right down into their boots when we first sighted the coast of Europe, at Corunna . . . The English are no longer flowering... we are the seed ... we should be scattered. We are the best-bred people on earth. But now we are caged and fearful.'

I asked him if he would rather have New York or London? 'New York,' he replied, without hesitating. 'London as a city - yes, I like it better, love it more. But it is locked away, out of touch. With New York one is in touch with the free outer world, and with the world of Mexico.' Of Mexico he spoke much, with loathing of many things about it, but saying that it had spoiled him, he feared, for Europe. 'Sicily?' he said. 'Never again!'

While he talked, he left all the letters that had collected for him in London unopened - did not even glance at them. He had liked it in Mexico, he said, that there had been no mail for him and no English newspapers. He described with delight how on the voyage home he had hung over the bows, watching a school of porpoises playing about the steamer in the translucent water. Then later the rain on the surface of black water . . . and the beauty of the flying fish. Then the shaking of the little English train - 'so light, so light, as if it would fall to pieces long before we reached London'.

Between Southampton and London he had been oppressed by the hedged fields - 'I feel I am a mouse - a net put over me - the network of the English hedged fields.'

Then suddenly, 'What do you think of the world these days?' he asked me.

I told him, what indeed I have always felt, that the world never seemed to come within my orbit. And that I was kept so busy endeavouring to keep a roof over our heads and food on our table that I never had much time to think about the world.

At this he laughed with a kind of mingled pleasure and disgust that it was so with me. It became a convention between us that I was attached to a little ship, which for me to leave would be infidelity. 'And how is the ship sailing?' he would ask, with a touch of mockery that I liked while I felt it was justified. Or again 'More bric-à-brac!' he would exclaim reproachfully, when I showed him some odd object newly-acquired for the house. I pointed out that he himself found it hard to resist bric-à-brac, though he might not call it so. What about the snow-leopard skin, and the Navajo rings he had been describing to me? And he shook his head laughing. All the same, he was in the right and I knew it, and he knew that I knew, though I fear he thought me incorrigible. He had ceased to collect things, and I had not.

It may have been Dorothy Brett - who now became as constant a visitor as Murry to the Lawrences' rooms - who introduced the craze for modelling small figures and beasts and flowers, which seized upon us that Christmas, and upon Lawrence in particular. He and Dorothy Brett were by far the best at it. Murry worked hard, but without conspicuous success, making all the while little jokes at his own expense. Frieda and Donald and Koteliansky stood resolutely aside as spectators, when they troubled to look at us at all. To a richly herbaceous garden of Eden, which owed its very red Adam to Lawrence and its paler Eve to Dorothy Brett, I remember I contributed several species of wildfowl, including a kiwi.

Again I recollect seeing Lawrence sitting by the table, his head on his hand, reading with astonishing intentness (which made the activity seem so much more than mere reading) Conrad's then latest novel, The Rover. Without once relaxing his concentrated attention he read it all through, then closed it and pushed it from him with the ejaculation that it was 'poor and sad stuff'. Conrad at his best in a sea-story, I gathered, he had never regarded as the equal of Herman Melville. As compared with the true sea literature of Moby Dick, Lawrence dismissed the storm in Typhoon as descriptive journalism. Still, Almayer's Folly was a fine book, and it was depressing to find the author of that declining into the author of The Rover.

It was at this time that I heard Lawrence take Murry to task in his role of propagandist of Katherine Mansfield. As I came in only for the end of the conversation I cannot tell what went before. The guess might be hazarded that Lawrence had not shrunk from denouncing the whole policy and atmosphere of the Adelphi in this particular matter, which I know he had found repugnant. On the other hand, it would be more characteristic if he let that be, and plunged straight to the quick of the subject. This was what he was doing when I entered. 'You are wrong about Katherine,' he was saying to Murry. 'She was not a great genius. She had a charming gift, and a finely cultivated one. But not more. And to try, as you do, to make it more is to do her no true service.' To this Murry made no reply, but turned away in a kind of obstinate mortification. Long before this, when I read her Prelude and praised it to Lawrence, he had said, 'Yes, yes, but prelude to what?' It was his opinion that the author of Prelude would come in time to find a certain essential falseness so closely entwined with the charm in her literary fabric that she would herself condemn even the charm and would write nothing further until she had disentangled herself from the falseness.

Looking back now I find it extraordinary that I could live for so many weeks in the same house and realise so little what a struggle was going on, chiefly between Lawrence and Murry, but also between Lawrence and all of us. In spite of what critics - usually hostile ones - have said about his morbid sensitiveness, Lawrence was not the man to wear his heart on his sleeve. And when he forced an issue he did so with a kind of delicacy that easily concealed the crisis from those concerned. It was the issue, never the person, that he forced.

Murry, not long after Lawrence's arrival, had considered giving up the Adelphi and going back to New Mexico with him. But he appears to have been undecided.

It had come to this, that Lawrence's only purpose for staying a day longer in England was to discover if all of us, or some of us, or even one of us, would feel the compulsion to go with him and Frieda to a freer and richer air, where things 'could happen' as they could not happen in England. The Adelphi was a proof to Lawrence of just how things happened in England. But with Murry in a new atmosphere and away from the cloying influences of his past, Lawrence still felt that something might be done. As for the rest of us, we were his friends of whose support he would be glad in a less crucial way. It would neither be out of personal affection, nor to 'live to ourselves' in a pleasant spot, as Murry has suggested, 'rejecting the world, washing our hands of it altogether', though something of both these things would naturally be included. It would be to leave the associations of the old ideals that we might live and work freshly in the belief that of such a departure something good was sure to come. Katherine could not come now, hiding her fun behind a solemn face, to prove by timetables and guidebooks that Rananim was impossible. Lawrence had gone on and had found the very place for us.

There was nothing wrong with Taos except the Americans. The Indian mode had sunk so far into forgetfulness, so far beyond the confident prying of the intellect, that it was almost one with nature and therefore ready to renourish human life. We must get away from the white benevolence that spouted of 'life' and resulted in Adelphis, and learn instead something of the dark malignity that revealed the realm of death. Our mode had come to an end. The new mode must be from a different source.

Who shall say that Lawrence was wrong? To him it was as clear as in old time it was to Noah or to Lot. It may yet be found that before a new spirit can grow up in the world some men and women will have to get together and leave their homes in a special kind of faith. However this may be, only one person in London went with the Lawrences back to New Mexico, and of all Lawrence's friends today she is perhaps the happiest.

For a day or two Lawrence had to stay in bed with cold and a mild attack of malaria. He sent a message by Frieda that he wanted to speak to me. 'I assure you that it is a great Kompliment!' she said, opening her smiling eyes at me.

What she said was true, and I was flattered. I went upstairs at once. Still I did not really want to talk alone with Lawrence just then, a disinclination I tried to attribute to the fact that Frieda had come in upon me at a busy moment of some domestic sort.

A single bed had been moved into the living-room, and there was Lawrence sitting up all neat and trim and looking every bit as alert as if he were well. I sat down, feeling distrait and uttering platitudes.

He asked me about things. Without, so far as I can remember, putting the question directly, he asked if there was any chance of my coming then or later to New Mexico. I said I was afraid it must be later. 'You see, Lawrence, unless a woman is going to leave her husband and child, she can't go off without them, and I don't think Donald feels like going, anyhow not just now. I'd come, but I can't go without them. It would be no good.' A terrible sadness descended on me and I should like to have left the room. Lawrence quietly admitted the difficulty. 'No, a woman can't choose if she's really married,' he said. And although he had told me more than once that Donald was only a lover, not a husband, he let this pass today. And I knew he was only sounding me. He spoke of how free Dorothy Brett was - 'a real odd man out', he called her with approval. Then he asked if I was writing anything special. 'I could beat you that you don't write,' he said. And why was I pottering about with rubbishy articles for women's papers when I ought to be doing a book either of notes like my Duse note in the Adelphi - a book to be called A Woman Looks at the World -or stories and sketches about the queer lot of people who were sheltering under the roof that covered us? There were at that moment five separate lots of us living in the old rambling house, and to amuse him I had sometimes retailed the gossip concerning them. I could see that he was casting about for the best way to help me, feeling somehow that I needed help.

Partly to fend off anything like a silence, which I could not have borne, I told him of a novel I had in mind to write. The theme had been suggested to me by reading of some savages who took a baby girl, and that they might rear her into a goddess for themselves, brought her up on a covered river boat, tending her in all respects, but never letting her mix with her kind, and leading her to believe that she was herself no mortal, but a goddess.

I was almost taken aback by Lawrence's interest. He was never effusive, and seldom enough really engaged by what one said, but when he was engaged one knew it. I was not to guess, of course, at that time anything about the contents of The Plumed Serpent, or I should have understood his special interest in an allied theme. He would have gone on talking now, but I excused myself and went back to my paltry duty below stairs. As I went, I know that in some essential I had turned away from what I most wanted in life.

It seemed quite a short time after my return downstairs that Lawrence sent Frieda again to fetch me. 'I like that story of yours so much, Catherine,' he said, 'that I've written out a little sketch of how I think it might go. Then, if you like the idea, we might collaborate in the novel. You do the beginning and get the woman character going, and let me have it, and I'll go on and fill in the man. Of course,' he added, 'you may not see it the same way, but I think this would be the easiest way to do it, easier than the way you thought of. Our only trouble will be the end. I'm afraid it can't be a happy ending. But have a look and we'll see.'

Here is what he had written out for me in these few minutes. I began to work upon the beginning in quite the wrong way. Then I saw I was not up to it and lost heart. So it remains as it was:

A woman of about thirty-five, beautiful, a little overwrought, goes into a shipping office in Glasgow to ask about a ship to Canada. She gives her name Olivia Maclure. The clerk asks her if she is not going to accept the Maclure invitation to the feast in the ancestral castle. She laughs - but the days of loneliness in the Glasgow hotel before the ship can sail are too much for her, and she sets off for the Maclure island.

The Maclure, who claims to be chief of the clan and has bought the ancestral castle on his native isle, is a man about forty-five, rather small, dark-eyed, full of energy, but has been a good deal knocked about. He has spent ten years in the USA and twenty years in the silver mines of Mexico, is somewhat grizzled, has a scar on the right temple which tilts up his right eye a little. Chief characteristic his quick, alert brown eyes which seem to sense danger, and the tense energy in his slightly work-twisted body. He has lived entirely apart from civilised women, merely frequented an occasional Indian woman in the hills. Is a bit cranky about his chieftainship.

Olivia arrives a day too soon for the festival, at the patched-up castle. Maclure, in a shapeless worksuit, is running round attending to his house and preparations. He looks like a Cornish miner, always goes at a run, sees everything, has a certain almost womanly quickness of perception, and frequently takes a whisky. He eyes Olivia with the quick Mexican suspicion. She, so distraught, is hardly embarrassed at all. Something weighs on her so much, she doesn't realise she is a day too soon, and when she realises, she doesn't care.

As soon as he has sensed her, he is cordial, generous, but watchful: always on the watch for danger. Soon he is fascinated by her. She, made indifferent to everything by an inward distress, talks to him charmingly, but vaguely: doesn't realise him. He, a man of forty-five, falls for the first time insanely in love. But she is always only half conscious of him.

She spends the night in the mended castle - he most scrupulously sleeps in the cottage below. The next day, she is mistress of the absurd feast. And at evening he begs her not to go away. His frantic, slightly absurd passion penetrates her consciousness. She consents to stay.

After two days of anguished fear lest she should go away, he proposes to her. She looks at him very strangely - he is just strange to her. But she consents. Something in her is always remote, far off-the weight of some previous distress. He feels the distance, but cannot understand. After being in an agony of love with her for six months, he comes home to find her dead, leaving a little baby girl.

Then it seems to him the mother was not mortal. She was a mysterious woman from the faery, and the child, he secretly believes, is one of the Tuatha De Danaan. This idea he gradually inculcates into the people round him, and into the child herself. It steals over them all gradually, almost unawares.

The girl accepts from the start a difference between herself and the rest of people. She does not feel quite mortal. Men are only men to her: she is of another race, the Tuatha De Danaan. She doesn't talk about it: nobody talks about it. But there it is, tacit, accepted.

Her father hires a poor scholar to be her tutor, and she has an ordinary education. But she has no real friends. There is no one of her race. Sometimes she goes to Glasgow, to Edinburgh, to London with her father. The world interests her, but she doesn't belong to it. She is a little afraid of it. It is not of her race.

When she is seventeen her father is suddenly killed, and she is alone, save for her tutor. She has an income of about three hundred a year. She decides to go to London. The war has broken out - she becomes a nurse. She nurses men, and knows their wounds and their necessities. But she tends them as if they were lambs or other delicate and lovable animals. Their blood is not her blood, their needs are not the needs of her race.

Men fall in love with her, and that is terrible to her. She is waiting for one of her own race. Her tutor supports her in the myth. Wait, he says, wait for the Tuatha De Danaan to send you your mate. You can't mate with a man. Wait till you see a demon between his brows.

At last she saw him in the street. She knew him at once, knew the demon between his brows. And she was afraid. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of her own nature, the mystery of herself. Because it seemed to her that her race, the Tuatha, had come back to destroy the race of men. She had come back to destroy the race of men. She was terrified of her own destiny. She wanted never again to see the man with the demon between his brows.

So for a long time she did not see him again. And then her fear that she would never see him any more was deeper than anything else. Whatever she wanted, she wanted her own destiny with him, let happen what might.