The Lawrences arrived as planned, and went first to Garland's Hotel for a couple of days. Coming up for a half-day from the country, I saw them there, and arranged that they should have the loan of my younger brother's flat - then unoccupied - in Gower Street. Leaving their luggage at the flat, they would pay a visit to the Midlands, and would return to see a few friends before going to Italy by November. Lawrence did not speak of his health, and, as usual, there was nothing of the invalid about him; but under his big-brimmed Mexican hat his face looked pinched and small, and one easily guessed that he could not face a London winter. Neither could he yet afford the sort of comfortable house somewhere on the South Coast where he might have stayed safely if there had been enough interest or friendship to make England attractive to him. On this occasion he seemed very solitary in London.
This particular solitude was of his own making, as he had told only a few people of his arrival. He came alone, however, to spend the first weekend with us in the country. He said he would spend a day and night with us.
We both met him at High Wycombe station and travelled uphill in the country bus. Why he was by himself I don't remember. Either Frieda had gone before him to the Midlands or - more likely - she was visiting alone elsewhere. But here he was, and not in a cheerful mood, though as always well-disposed towards me. I was not, just then, very cheerful myself. Things had not gone as well as we could wish, and we were poor and anxious.
He was disappointed with the look of the immediate country, which is not particularly attractive, and on Sunday we all four walked under grey skies in the beech woods, while I thought how poor and tame it must seem to him after the pine slopes at Taos. Then, as we sat over a log fire and were near getting to some real talk, unexpected visitors came from London and robbed the occasion of its intimacy.
What with these visitors, my own domestic cares (which just then were pressing), and the sadness I divined in Lawrence, I was in a distracted state, and only two incidents of the visit stand out clearly now in memory. One was pleasant, the other the reverse. While we stood by the garden gate to see the London people off, John Patrick, then aged seven, made some sudden and unsolicited gesture of love towards me, and as quickly broke away again to his play. We continued with our adieux, paying no attention to the child, but I noticed Lawrence looking keenly at him, and later he referred to the boy in a letter in a special way, which I took to be connected with that remembered glance. 'Wait and see,' he wrote, 'this will be ein seltsamer Mensch.'
By the other incident I felt wounded and taken aback. But, as it shows once more how scrupulously Lawrence insisted on paying his way through life, I give it also. As we sat round the tea-table he produced a five-pound note, and in a manner half shy, half careless, threw it across to John Patrick. The child had never seen such a thing before, and did not know what to make of it. Neither did I. I remembered unhappily that it was precisely the sum I had given to Frieda for a travelling coat once when they were leaving England and she badly needed such a thing. Possibly I was wrong, but I don't think so, when, with a pang, I felt that this symbolised the sort of squaring up of accounts that goes with a long farewell. True, we were now rather poorer than Lawrence and with less prospect of growing richer, which he knew. But equally well I knew that he had not any spare five-pound notes to throw across tea-tables. Though he was now fixed up with a new American publisher he was still mainly dependent upon what could be 'squeezed out of the first unlucky one. However, there was nothing for it but to take it, as he would have it so.
From Derbyshire he sent us one of the famous Midland pork pies, with apologies for its not being so big as Midland pies - according to him - ought to be.