Dear Gilbert was not in one of his brilliant moods. He sat in a third-class carriage gazing vacantly out of the window of the Cologne express, while the peasants eyed him curiously. The ticket collector came slamming the doors. He glared at Gilbert’s ticket — then glared at Gilbert — and broke into a torrent of abuse in a vile Rhenish accent: again, we must say, like the tearing of badly made calico. Snarling and flourishing in the pretty Prussian official manner in front of the offender’s nose, whilst all the others in the carriage looked either virtuous or rebuked! Snarl snarl snarl went the beasdy person — and Gilbert’s brain turned to cork. He heard objectionable noises, but like a drowning man with the roar of eternity in his ears, he made out no earthly sense.
Till at last, funf Mark fiinfzig. Five and sixpence! — the damned fellow wanted five-and-sixpence! Out came the money, scribble went the ticket collector, and pushed a scrap of paper in the offender’s face.
“Ich verstehe gar nicht,” said Gilbert, like a turning worm. “I don’t understand at all.”
The ticket collector looked as if he would eat him in silence.
“Zuschlagen — zuschlagen — ” he snarled — and names of stations — Ehrenbreitstein, Niederlahnstein.
“Was meint zuschlagen?” said our innocent.
The ticket collector turned up his nose as if he meant to take Gilbert’s scalp with it. Then he departed, slamming the door. The peasants made round eyes, and Gilbert tried etymologically to extract some meaning out of the marvellous word zuschlagen.
Since he was destined to live and learn, he learned later that if when changing trains you take a Swift-train, whereas the previous train was but a Hurry-train, then you must present your ticket at the ticket-office of the change station, and zuschlagen — pay the transfer. All of which is system — wonderful system.
We would here offer an address to System, and German system in particular, if it weren’t already a thing of the past. Ah System, thou fallen but not yet shattered god of a mechanical age.
Dear Gilbert mused on the god-almighty ferocity of Prussian officials. Nay, the shabbiest porter was an Olympic — or at least a Wotan God — once he had put his holy cap on. And all the mere civilians grovelled before a peak-official-cap as before some nimbus. What a funny world! They saw in it the symbol of Germanic Over-Allness.
Gazing on the great Rhine — Rhenus Flux — with its castles and its cardboard scenery, our hero thought of Rome and the naked great Germanic tribes: of the amazing Middle Ages: and then of Luther and the Thirty Years War — and then of Frederick and the great Goethe.
Oh Goethe, what a fool you were. If only someone had given you a good kick in your toga-seat, when you were godlifying yourself and olympising yourself and setting up the stunt of German Godlikeness and superhumanness, what a lot it would have saved the world, and Germany in particular. If only Napoleon had not been taken in. If only that usually sensible person had exclaimed, not voila un homme! but voila un dieu gratuitel, and given the gratuitous God-Goethe a good old Napoleonic kick in the rump! Oh weh! Oh woe! When will mankind learn the right use of toe-caps and posteriors! It would save so many cannons later on.
Musing somewhat in this strain, our friend changed once more, and once more got into a simple Hurry-train. It was six o’clock when he changed for the last time, at Hennef. Every time he changed he seemed to metamorphose.
Hennef was a station in the midst of water-meadows. There was a stream of full, swift, silent water, and marsh-plants, and evening beginning to glow over the remote Rhineland.
He sat by the stream under the evening, while some birds swung past, and he felt himself in the middle of nowhere. And a great peace like an annunciation seemed to settle on his soul. He looked at the glowing west, the lush green water- land beneath. And he thought of Johanna, and felt filled with peace and an assurance that surpassed anything he had known: such a lovely sense of fulfilment in the future: peace like a full river flowing, flowing far-off, into the sunset. He sat quite still, near the station, waiting for his connection. And he felt a beautiful calm, a glamorous, holy calm, as if a sacred light were in the evening air.
And when he clambered into the mere Person-train, the Bummelzug that trotted in the open by the road-side, he was quite still and happy. There was the high-road in the twilight — and a stream — and the thick trees of the forest. And a lovely peace and bigness and breathing-room, such as he always imagined in the Middle-Ages: a peace not made up of quietness or of lovey-doveyness, but of room, room to move and breathe.
And now, gentle reader — aha, I feel you shy at those two words. Yes, I admit it, they are my Dilly-Dilly-Dilly, come and be killed. Yes, I am going to apostrophise or moralise: and why shouldn’t I? If you don’t want to read, turn on to page Gentle reader, I am going to let the cat out of the bag. I am going to do so, because I never ask anyone, even the most desirous, to buy a pig in a poke. After this very nice little peace-like-a-river touch, I am going to let the cat out of the bag. For I’m sure if I don’t, you’ll be yelling and saying I promised you two turtle-doves in a cage. Gentle reader, I have not got two turtle-doves in a cage for you. I’m sorry, but I’m not a dove and pigeon merchant.
An anonymous lady — she may even be yourself, gende reader — once wrote to me thus: “You, who can write so beautifully of stars and flowers, why will you grovel in the ditch?” I might answer her — or you, gentle reader — thus: “You, who wear such nice suede shoes, why do you blow your nose?”
However, gentle reader, I must invite you to grovel in the ditch with me. I am not a dove and pigeon merchant. Out of this very promising-looking bag of a story, which I have this minute shown you tied with a pretty blue ribbon of peace, I am going to let out, — what? — the cat! I am going to let the cat out of the bag. Or even two whirling, fur-flying cats, all claws and sparks.
Gentle reader, this peace was not the peace of the amorous coo of the ring-dove. Gentle reader, it was not the silent bliss of two elective affinities who were just about to fuse and make a holy and eternal oneness. It was the bridal peace — surely we are entitled to a little Wagnerian language here: it was the bridal peace of Gilbert and Johanna. It was the grail hovering before our hero, shedding its effulgence upon him.
It was the peace, gentle reader, of one who has found his opposite, his complementary opposite, and his meet adversary. The pleasant darling, he didn’t know it. And he wasn’t going to tumble to it till he’d had so many tumbles he was quite knocked out of his original shape. But whether he knew it or not isn’t the point. I know it, and I’m telling this history. And I like to let my cat out of the bag right off, so that nobody shall think it’s a chaste unicorn or a pair of doves in a cage.
Dear Gilbert, he had found his mate and his match. He had found one who would give him tit for tat, and tittle for tattle. He had found his soul’s affinity, and his body’s mate: a she-cat who would give him claw for claw, a bitch who would give him snarl for snarl, a falcon who would demand an eye for an eye. Here’s to them!
The love of two splendid opposites. My dear — I mean you, gende reader — all life and splendour is made up out of the union of indomitable opposites. We live, all of us balanced delicately on the rainbow, which is born of pure light and pure water. Think, gentle reader: out of the perfect consummating of sun and rain leaps the all-promising rainbow: leap also the yellow-and-white daisies, pink-and-gold roses, good green cabbages, caterpillars, serpents and all the rest. Out of what, gentle reader? The moment’s matching of the two terrible opposites, fire and water. The two eternal, universal enemies, you call them? I call them the man and the woman of the material universe, father and mother of all things. If you don’t believe me, that’s your affair.
Tell me, why are all royal things brindled: the tiger with his pointed flames of black and fire, the eagle with his bars of dusk and glow, the golden lion with his mane of smoke? It is, gentle reader, the eternal opposite elements lying side by side in him, magnificently juxtaposed, royally wedded, as man and woman lie like fire and smoke in the marriage bed, or like dark-rippled water.
Opposites! The magnificence of opposites. Not the horrible sticky merge of like things. The fight, gende reader, the fight! Up boys, and at ‘em! — ’em, of course, meaning the women. Up boys, and at ‘em!
Oh heaven, save me from a morass of people all alike to one another. The sharpest divergencies possible, the most miraculous of superb differences.
Opposition! Wonderful opposition! The whole universe rests on the magical opposition of fire and water, sun and rain. Is not every plant brindled? — dark and damp below earth, sunny above. Do not the watery thread-tender streams run forward to touch the thread-tender fiery beamlets of the sun, in every growing plant and every unfolding flower. Is it not a lion running out of the fiery desert, to meet a lioness of shadow? And is not the mating always half a fight. At least half a fight. Is not the very embrace at least half a fight. At least half a fight. Before a plant adds one new cell to its growing tip, has it not been the living battle field and marriage bed of fire and water: both. Is not the marriage bed a fiery battle field, as well as a perfect communion, both simultaneously. Till we know this, we know nothing. And till we fight our fights like splendid royal tigers, in the wonderful connubial rage, we are nothing. We are at a dead-lock: either water-logged, or gone woody and dry. Water-logged and fat, or woody and dry and sapless.
Beautiful brindled creatures of fire and darkness, sun and smoke. What is your darkness but shadow, and what is your shadow but watery intervention, the cloud in the sun, against the sun. — Beautiful brindled creatures, snakes and tortoises, fish and wild-geese, tigers, wolves, trees. Only men are all white or all black. But then mankind itself is brindled. Never forget it.
Our Gilbert arrived at Wensdorf late at night, and was received and feasted by his friend and his friend’s wife Ulma. Joseph was a small official for the district.
And Gilbert was happy in the little flat over the village street where the oxen-wagons trundled slowly, far away in the Rhenish hinterland. He listened to the bells in the pointed steeple of the Lutheran church playing hard against the bells of the white catholic church. He saw the streams of peasants flowing in opposite directions and turning up their noses at one another. He drank beer in the vaulted chamber, where Joseph smoked his long pipe and talked in dialect and got mellow with the cronies of the inn. It seemed almost like the Middle-Ages: save of course for the recurrent stridency of Deutschland Uber Alles which crept out.
He liked Ulma, and her traditional German housekeeping. He liked the great basket of different breads, white bread and black bread and grey bread and Pommeland bread and Pumpernickel and Kringeln: always a choice of five different sorts of bread. Then the lovely linen and silver in abundance, in the quite small flat.
Then the long walks between the old, ragged, blossoming pear-trees of the unknown high-roads, to villages that never were and never will be known, lost behind great woods or great arable stretches: the sense of being in an upland region, yet having no big hills: the sense of the great lands going on and on, and not coming anywhere: the feeling of the ageless Rhine, some forty miles away. They drove in a little carriage far off: and always the same country. They went to a fair, and drank all manner of Schnapps and bought all manner of wonderful cakes, hearts and houses and horses and angels and children, every imaginable thing in sweet, spicy honey- tasting cakes. On a Sunday they went down to the Rhine and sailed on a steamer and went to some high, famous castle. And Gilbert did not like the Sunday crowd at all.
But he was really happy. So he wrote Johanna rather lofty and sweet letters, saying he would wait till she was ready, and have faith in her. And that when she sent for him he would come. And that he would abide by her decision, and trust her through eternity. And that his life was only a waiting, only a waiting for her. But he would leave her free to bid him stay or come. — And similar things he wrote in answer to the managing Louise, and to the troubled Baroness: very lofty sounding and nice.
Which was all very well for him, while he was having a jolly good time with Joseph and Ulma far away from the scene of battles, in the Rhineland. He managed moreover to get twelve pounds from England.
Meanwhile Johanna was having no such rosy time in Detsch. Her father worried her — though what was the good! The first cris de coeur, and the first volleys of abuse began to arrive from America. There was no light and no clear counsel anywhere, none.
Till Johanna declared she would go mad. And the whole household in Detsch began to go off its head. And so Johanna escaped to Louise in Munich. Where she took to her bed and would not stir for two days.
After which she wired to Gilbert that he should come to Munich. And he wired he would come next week. Next week!
However, till next week he would not come. So Johanna devoured her incertainty. Then next week came. He set his teeth, packed his traps, bade a lingering farewell to the Rhineland, and set off on the twenty-hour journey down to Munich.
He arrived at Munich late at night — there was Johanna shining in the crowd in the darkness.
“You’ve come!” was all she said.
And in the background little Alfred, Johanna’s escort.
“Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” he said, shaking hands with his friend and pupil. “The return of the truant! The return of the Bad Boy! Well I never! Well I nevahl”
And, accompanied by a porter with the luggage, they turned out of the station.
“Goodnight, you two! See you soo-oon!” sang Alfred, suddenly waving his walking-stick and disappearing.
Gilbert looked in surprise, but the little figure was already disappearing under the lamps.
“We’ll stay in an hotel tonight,” said Johanna. “And tomorrow we’ll go out to Louise. Do you want to eat?”
The hotel was near: they were soon installed: and soon launched on the wild seas of the bridal bed. It is usual in books to avoid such topics, so we will merely mention them. We wish to hint that Gilbert, in spite of his various gallant adventures, was but an acolyte at the Dionysic or Priapic altar. He was a raw hand.
Now in no field of human activity is so much rare adjustment and well-balanced niceness required as in the service of the great Priapic god. Your libertine, with his thousand experiences and his many dodges, your Don Juan and Dona Juanita, they are always only apprentices: life-long apprentices. Your Don Juan is a life-long apprentice, who could never master his craft.
Should a man really become a master, then, in the Priapic craft? Ah yes, gentle reader. Ah yes! When all is said and done, the Father of life is a passional begetter, not an ideal. The ideal is but a nice little end in itself. But the creative cycle is one strange, incalculable, passional round, eternal.
Let us confess our belief: our deep, our religious belief. The great eternity of creation does not lie in the spirit, in the ideal. It lies in the everlasting and incalculable throb of passion and desire. The ideal is but the iridescence of the strange flux. Life does not begin in the mind: or in some ideal spirit. Life begins in the deep, the indescribable sensual throb of desire, pre-mental.
What is the soul, gentle reader? What is your soul, what is my soul? It is not some evaporated spirit. Ah no. It is that deep core of individual unity where life itself, the very God, throbs incalculably, whose throbbing unfolds the leaves and stem of the body, and brings forth the flower of the mind and the spirit. But the spirit is not the soul. Ah no. The soul has its deep fibrilled foliage in the damp earth, has its dark leaves in the air, it tosses the flower of the spirit like a bauble, a lovely plaything, on to the winds of time. Man can live without spirit or ideal, as dark pine-trees live without flowers: dark and sap-powerful. But without the deep sensual soul man is even inconceivable. This angel business, this spirit nonsense! Even spirits, such as really exist, are potent sensual entities.
If you would like to get at the secret of tree worship — Druid and Germanic, nay, universal — then realise the dark, sap- powerful, flowerless tree of the mindless, non-spiritual, sensual soul.
Gentle reader, our era has landed in the ail de sac of the spirit and the ideal. And I, poor darling, grope my way back to the tree of life, on which Jesus was crucified. He did so want to be a free, abstract spirit, like a thought. And he was crucified upon the tree of the eternal, primal sensual soul, which is man’s first and greatest being. Now I, gende reader, love my tree. And if my mind, my spirit, my conscious consciousness blossom upon the tree of me for a little while, then sheds its petals and is gone, well, that is its affair. I don’t like dried flowers, immortels. I love my tree. And the tree of life itself never dies, however many blossoms and leaves may fall and turn to dust. I place my immortality in the dark sap of life, stream of eternal blood. And as for my mind and spirit — this book, for example, all my books — I toss them out like so much transient tree-blossom and foliaged leaves, on to the winds of time. The static, written-down eternity is nothing to me: or rather, it is only a lovely side-show, almost a bauble: but lovely. Yes I love it — the spirit, the mind, the ideal. But not primarily. The primal soul I see in the face of the donkey that is tied to my gate, and which shifts its long ears. The dark, sensual soul, and that gorgeous mystery of sensual individuality.
Enough! Basta! Revenons a nos deux moutons. Let us return once more to our two sheep, Mr Gilbert and Mistress Johanna. We left them in the Priapic bed, and there we find them again, you will no doubt be glad to hear.
“Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but as long as time lasts his most excruciating tragedy is, has been, and will be — the tragedy of the bedroom.”
Pray note the inverted commas. I am quoting the great Leo Tolstoi, who, in such matters — matters of didactic judgment, I mean — seems to me a quite comical fool.
Friends, let us put our money on the tragedy of the bedroom. I could do with tragedy if it weren’t so very sorry for itself: if it would only admit how it enjoyed itself in its throes.
To return to our two tragedians. — The Priapic mysteries are not tricks. They can’t be learned with the head, nor dictated from the mind, nor practised by deliberate intent. You can no more bring about, deliberately, a splendid passional sexual storm between yourself and your woman than you can bring about a thunderstorm in the air. All the little tricks, all the intensifications of will remain no more than tricks and will-pressure. You have got to release from mental control the deep springs of passion: and after that there has got to be the leap to polarised adjustment with the woman. And these two things are deep mysteries. It takes us a long time, us, to release the profound desires from all mental control. Even the young animals, it is terrible to them, and difficult. And as for the leaping into the chasm to pure connection with the woman, that needs a basic courage and a strange concerted unison between the two protagonists, which life alone can give. It is absolutely useless going to a prostitute or a libertine. The deep accustomedness of marriage is the only way of preparation. Only those who know one another in the intricate dark ways of physical custom can pass through the seven dark hells and the seven bright heavens of sensual fulfilment. And this is why marriage is sacred. And this is perhaps the secret of the English greatness. The English have gone far into the depths of marriage, far down the sensual avenues of the marriage bed, and they have not so easily, like the French or Germans or other nations, given up and turned to prostitution or chastity or some other pis aller.
But now alas the English adventure has broken down. There is no going on. There is cul de sac and white-livered fawning.
Mr Gilbert, therefore — we will get back to our tragedians — was no very wonderful experience for Johanna, though she was a wonderful experience to him. To tell the truth, Johanna had had far more sensual satisfaction out of her husband, Everard, than out of her other lovers. Everard was a dark- eyed, handsome man, rather stiff and marquis-like, learned and a bit sarcastic. He loved his Johanna violently: and he loved his learning with an almost mediaeval passion.
There you are, then. As a husband he was darkly, furiously sensual — in his hour: and, in his hour, deeply satisfying to the woman. Yet here she was, racing round and looking for sexual love, and taking it from men who could not give her half the passional gratification and fulfilment Everard had given. Which is the perversity of women.
But hold a minute. Women are not so perverse as men would like to find them.
Everard’s nature was basically sensual. But this he hid — though mind you, he was au fond proud of it. Secretly, almost diabolically he flattered himself on his dark, sensual prowess: and not without reason. But he had to keep it lurking in secret. Openly: ah, openly, he was all for the non-existence of such things.
He had a terrible passion for Johanna — and he craved madly that it should remain a tacit secret even between him and her. Let it remain in the dark. He kneeled before her, he kissed her feet in a frenzy of craving sensual desire. If she would give him his tremendous gratification, he would sacrifice his very soul for her. Truly. He would sacrifice his individual male soul for her.
So you see, he did not ask and take his terrific sexual gratification as if it was something natural and true to marriage. He asked for it, he craved for it as if in some way it were a sin. The terrific, the magnificent black sin of sensual marriage: the gorgeous legal sin, which one was proud of, but which one kept dark: which one hated to think of in the open day, but which one lusted for by night.
Ah, he could not bear to be consciously reminded of it. And so he called Johanna his snowflower, his white snowflower. He liked to think of her as an eternal white virgin whom he was almost violating.
So that she should continue in this wise, he kneeled before her, he gave her everything. He gave her all the money he had, and perfect, perfect freedom. Nay, he would gladly have borne that she had lovers, if only she would have pretended it was not so.
This is typical of him. In the daytime, he had no lower man. In the night-time, he had nothing else. He was madly sensitive about this. Though he would read his Rabelais, and make risky jokes, and admire his Maupassant — though he seemed the very freest of the free — yet he had a weak horror of any sensual or really physical reference by day.
For example, a water-closet was a place which really must not exist for him, in his world. There was an end of it. We may well call it Number O, or even doubly nought, Number 00. It is twice nought.
Now Johanna, in her reckless and unEnglish way, instead of with circumspection looking if the coast was clear, would dash off recklessly to this 00, this non-existent place. She would seize the door-handle, and if it would not open, shake the door fiercely. For of course, if one wants to go somewhere, one wants to go. An Italian, finding the non-existent door locked, invariably puts his shoulder to it and proceeds to burst the hinges. But this aside.
There would Johanna seize this nameless door-handle and twist and pull, till from within came the snarl of a wounded and enraged tiger.
“Oh, are you there!” she would exclaim, and stand aside.
And presendy would emerge Everard, handsome and white with rage, trembling with fury.
“Are you mad, woman!” he would snarl as he passed her.
“But why? Are you the only man in the world that never must go to the W?” she would jeer.
He would only grind his teeth. At such moments his hate of her was diabolical, inhuman.
Now perhaps we may judge Everard: the darkly-passionate, upright, unmercenary man, noble enough, whose sensual secrecy and weakness in this direction prevents him from ever being quite loveable. Whatever we are, this we must stand by. If we are sensual, and deeply, utterly so, then let us not be humble about it. Man has his native right to his dark, flaming, sensual fulfilment. It is incumbent upon him, and upon his honour he must get this fulfilment. Shall he creep then for it, and grovel for it: even under the permission of the law? Shall he? If he does, he will pay the price.
For the sensual humbleness in her husband threw Johanna off her balance. It made her distraught, and at last even vindictive. For is it not a maddening thing for a woman to have the deep sensual relation so insulted, written Number O, like a W.C. Johanna turned against her husband, and because he was humble, she trampled on him. It is the fate of slaves. Because he was craving, she flouted him. Yet she feared him, as one fears a lurking beast. She feared him as one fears a cringing beast, that may fly at one’s throat.
Look you then! Everard was a true Englishman. Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, even Tennyson, these are the truly sensual poets of England: great men they are, perhaps the greatest. But they are the great sensual non-admitters. There is a doom on them.
And of such non-admitting, cowering sensualists, Tolstoi is the flagrant example.
There are the other people — the non-sensual, quite spiritual poets like Shelley. These, having nothing much to admit, admit it openly. Even Swinburne. But the true dark ones have much to admit, therefore they are the more convulsive in their retention.
What is to be done? Are we to fly off at the spiritual tangent, like Milton or Tolstoi? or at the intellectual, like Everard and very many more? — or at the romantic and fantastic? — or at the sensuous like Keats? — or at the hopeless tragic, like Hardy. Hardy is the last word, and reaches the verge of the ridiculous, which Conrad passes.
We’ve got to start all afresh, and laugh at the W.C., and give reverence and honorable fear to the passional sensual fulfilment.
Now Johanna, after Everard, was aiming in the Shelley direction, at the mid-heaven spiritual, which is still sexual but quite spiritually so. Sex as open and as common and as simple as any other human conversation. And this, we urge, is a quite logical conclusion of the spiritual programme. If In the beginning was the Word — then sex is a word also. — And we know that the Word is one word for all of us. Therefore why not free sexual love, as free as human speech?
Why not? Because the a priori are all wrong. In the beginning was not the Word, but something from which the Word merely proceeded later on. Let us stick to the first and greatest god, and let the Logos look after itself. The first, great, passionately generating God.
So Gilbert seemed a really lovely and spiritual lover to Johanna. He was really frightened, like Everard. But gathering his courage in both his hands, he managed to look on the naked woman of his desire without starting to grovel. Which, if you have profound desire, isn’t so easy. You either grovel or overween. Or else, grovelling, you overween. To be neither more nor less than just yourself on such an occasion: well, that takes time and a sound heart.
In the morning they were happy. The coffee, the lovely new crisp rolls, the honey, the Alp butter — how good it seemed, all of it. Gilbert was very joyful to be back in Munich. And as they sat at breakfast, they heard the strange, heavy thresh-thresh-thresh of marching soldiers. They went to the window. A squadron of blue Bavarian infantry marching heavily past. Strange and heart-penetrating the sound of their motion — so rhythmic, with a sound like a heavy lash.
They were not to stay in Munich. Alfred had appearances to consider. Gilbert would not go back to the university. He dropped all that. Johanna had promised to go out with Gilbert to Louise at Schloss Wolfratsberg.
Therefore the two sauntered in Munich till after lunch, then took the train towards the mountains. It was a dull day, rather cold, with some rain.
Louise sat in her rather dark, warm sitting-room, that had grey linen walls, and dark oriental carpets, and dark, shapely furniture, and many of the pale-yellow books that are current in France and Germany. She was writing, but she put away her pen. She seemed to Gilbert like some spider spinning in a jewelled web: or like a dark, magical Lady of Shalott who never looked out of the window, but sat weaving heaven knows what.
“So, you have come back again!” she gave her hand to Gilbert and smiled at him oddly. Beautiful she was. She had lovely white, well-shapen teeth, small and attractive. And in her big, dark-grey eyes a half-laugh, mocking, yet as if misted with tears. In an instant Gilbert fell again under the fascination she had thrown over him before.
“And what will you do? Ach! What will you do-oo?”
She sat down and glanced at him wickedly from under her long lashes — but with a half winsome wickedness, mingled with benevolence and kindliness.
“What shall I do?” said Gilbert, abstract.
The fire went bright in her eyes.
“Ach, you ask me! You ask me! Come, that is strange. How shall I know? — Now you have come back to Johanna — Ah, Johanna, I have a letter for thee — from thine husband — ”
Incredible irony in the last phrase.
“Oh yea!” cried Johanna. “Where is it?”
Louise produced the letter, Johanna went with it to a window. Louise resumed her seat opposite Gilbert. He glanced at the proud figure of Johanna, as she stood in the window-light — then back, abstractedly, at Louise.
“And you will give up your studies?” she said.
“I think so. What good are they?”
“Yes, what good is anything, if you talk so! What good is your coming with Johanna? Much bad, surely: and what good? Yes?”
Gilbert looked back at her. She could not get over a certain distant untouchedness in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “Nothing’s any good unless you feel it is good.”
“But your studies! Do you then feel they are no good?”
“Yes.”
“Ach! But what will your life be?”
“I don’t know.”
“No! You don’t know. You don’t know! — And poor Johanna! I am afraid it will be a tragedy for both of you.”
He seemed to listen to what she said: and then to listen to something inside himself. It was curious, how indifferent he felt about it.
“Oh,” he said, “I’m not tragical. I don’t believe in tragedy.”
“You don’t believe — But that is good! Can there be no tragedy without a belief in tragedy?” She laughed hollowly and ironical.
“Perhaps not,” he said. He had never thought of it.
Johanna came forward with a rather loud sigh.
“Ha-a! Poor Everard! Er ist doch so schwer.”
And she gave the letter to Louise.
“Shall I read?” said Louise, looking up at Johanna. Then she knitted her brows.
“Ach, I remember this writing so well, Hannele: so tidy, so neat and tidy! Is it not good to write so plainly!”
And she curled her voice mockingly. She had hated Everard, fourteen years before.
“Ja, aber er ist dumm — ” she broke out in ejaculations as she read. “That is good! Ha! Ha! But he is so stupid — so stu-upid! One does not write such things to a woman. — What does he mean — when you accost him in Piccadilly he will hand you over to the police? What does he mean — Piccadilly?”
“When I am a prostitute — ” laughed Johanna.
“Ach nein! Ach nein! Das ist Frechheit. The man is impudent. Ach, I have no patience! — But do not trouble, Hannele — it is words, words, words — ! — No, to such a man thou canst not go back. No, that is impossible. No, we must not think of it. Thou canst depend on me. No, to such a person one does not give one’s life. But see what he says — the dustman! The dustman! To his own wife — ”
“But he is mad just now, Louise. We mustn’t mind what he says,” replied Johanna.
“Is he mad? Or is he not only bourgeois? Oh, he is impudent, with his rights of a husband. Ach, you poor Johanna, to give your life to such a man.”
“But poor Everard!” said Johanna. “Think what he must feel.”
“Ach!” cried Louise impatiently. “Is this the letter of a man? Does he call himself man?”
“No, he’s a mad beast just now,” said Johanna.
“Ja, du gute Hannele! A mad beast!” Louise laughed her hollow little laugh. “He is not mad but he makes himself so. Ach, men are not mad, but showing off. Oh yea, all Englishmen are Hamlets, they are so self-conscious over their feelings, and they are therefore so false. Ah, so false! They flatter themselves they feel so much that they are mad. It is a self- flattery, this madness.”
“Not all of it,” said Johanna. “And it is dangerous, I know.”
“Yes — yes! Sometimes! Sometimes! Sometimes they make themselves so mad, in their fine frenzy, that they kill someone. But not often. Not often, you good Hannele. Ach, you are such a good simple soul. — If I have hysterics I am not going to jump in the river. It is too cold. — And these men with their tragical man-hysterics! — ach, es ist so saudumm. — It is words, words, words — ”
She concluded with her hollow, mocking laugh. Gilbert, who was at the book-shelves, looking over the books, listened with one wide ear open. He had found a book of folk-songs, a collection he had never seen. These he was studying. But more, he was attending inwardly to the two women.
“Would you like to read the letter?” said Johanna to him.
“But Johanna! Why will you do such a thing? Why trouble him with such a — such a — ” cried Louise.
But Gilbert had taken the letter. As he read it he turned pale. It was indeed a frenzy, full of abuse, madness, hate, and various other things. “I am going mad, and my children will be left fatherless to a depraved mother.”
His eyes darkened as he read. A certain anger filled his soul.
“He is a fool!” he said bitterly, as he handed back the sheets. But poor Gilbert, he was white to the lips.
“Indeed he is a fool! How can a man write such things — ach! — and post it on a steamer to travel across the many- many miles of sea! — No, I have not patience — ”
Louise made a gesture of dismissal.
“But Louise, think how he must suffer!” said Johanna.
“Ach, yes! And think how much, how very much he thinks about his sufferings! So self-conscious and self-pitying! Does he think of you, of his own real self? — or of anything? — only his own foolish feelings.”
“Feelings aren’t so foolish.”
“Yes — yes! Yes — yes! When people have feelings and must think about them — ach, I have not patience to hear another word. Enough! Enough! Basta! Take thy letter and thy husband away. — Mr Noon, what book have you found?”
He brought her the volume of songs.
“I am glad,” she said, glancing at him winsomely and mischievously, “that you are not a tragical man. You have said it. Oh, you must not forget it. Johanna will be so very tragic, if you will let her.”
Poor Gilbert tried to smile — but it was a pale effort. The other man’s letter upset him profoundly.
Louise had decided that the best thing would be for Gilbert and Johanna to go to Kloster Schaeftlarn, some few stations further up the line, and stay there for a while, since they were determined to live openly together. Evening saw them setting off once more. It was raining. They stood with their baggage on the station and waited in the dark and the wet, to carry them to the unknown destination. It was the last train.
When it arrived, it was nearly empty. So they sat in the bare third-class carriage, and Gilbert felt rather wan. They rattled through the night, and arrived at Kloster Schaeftlarn. They descended at a tiny station, in the midst of profound darkness and pouring rain. Complete and staggering darkness enveloped the fragment of a railway-station.
“Where is the village? Where is the Post Hotel?” Johanna asked of the porter.
It was about eight minutes away. There was no such thing as a carriage. If they would wait while he put out the lights and shut the station, he would accompany them and carry the bags.
They waited. Out went the station lights. Bang went the door. And into the night they plunged, in the pouring rain. They walked across a stone-flagged track through deep, dark, wet meadow-land: then past the white gable and black balcony of a farm. Then there was a glimmer of light — and a big building. It was the Inn of the Post — a country public-house.
They found themselves in a big room where peasants sat at the tables with huge mugs of beer. A sort of tramp was devouring food, his head in his plate, in a corner. The landlady was a hard, large, cross woman.
Yes, they could have a bedroom with two beds — yes, for two shillings a night. This was Whitsuntide charge. So Gilbert and Johanna followed up the broad stairs, to a vast, dim passage or upper hall, a great place full of varying smells — straw and beans among them. They were given a large, rather bare room, with huge feather beds that seemed inflated.
And here the newly-wed, if we may use the adjective, couple stood and looked at one another. A big, bare, farm- bedroom. A lurid oleograph of Mary with seven swords in her heart. Darkness and rain outside. And down below, heavy voices of the highland peasants.
“Well, here we are!” said Johanna, not very cheerfully.
“And here we’re going to stop for a time,” he answered, a little gruesomely.
“We may as well change our shoes,” she commented.
They went down and had dinner in the big public-room, that had tables round the walls. Farmers and peasants stared fixedly. Two huge dogs, and one little one, came prancing in and began to mouth Johanna and Gilbert. A boy entered with a lantern. And then a young woman brought a huge tureen of soup, spread a little cloth, and in the near corner of the common room the young couple sat alone and ate their meal, while the great dogs pranced round, and the big men shouted to the creatures, and wiped the beer from their big moustaches with the two front fingers.
Johanna was happy — it was adventure she wanted — and now she had got it. She was free. As she sat in the great, old Gasthaus, the handsome farmer men of Bavaria looking over their pot-lids at her with the half-hostile, challenging mountain stare, and as she heard the uncouth dialect, felt the subdued catholic savageness in the indomitable atmosphere about her, she spread her wings and took a new breath. She had escaped. She had escaped. From Boston and her house and servants, from her husband and his social position, from all the horror of that middle-class milieu, she had broken free, and she sat in a big, common room in a half deserted old inn at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, and breathed the ancient, half-savage tang of snow and passion in the air. The old, catholic, untamed spirit of the Tyrolese! How handsome and how fierce these men could be! She was happy.
She and Gilbert crowded into one of the beds, under one of the great feather overbolsters, which rode upon them like a cumulous cloud. The darkness was intensely dark. There was a wild, strange scent in the air, a strange thrill. They held fast together like children in the darkness, and spent part of the night capturing the cumulous cloud, which showed a disposition to float away and leave some portion either of her or of him exposed to the cool air.
The morning was a dream of beauty. If you do not know the Tyrol in Spring, gentle reader, you don’t, and there’s an end of it. But Gilbert and Johanna stood at their window in the early morning and looked out in bliss. The mountains in the distance sparkled blue with snow and ice. The foot-hills were green-golden, and the wonderful meadows, a sea of blue and yellow flowers, surged nearer in the pure, transcendent light. The magic of it! A few great trees by the road, and two farm-houses with enormous sweeping roofs, white gables and black balconies! And then a pond, and a bridge downhill, and most lovely birch-trees standing translucent and gleaming along the wet, white way between the river-meadows. And everything crystal-pure, having the magic of snow-Alpine perfection. The crystal, paradisal calm of everything on such a morning is such as only the great snow-radiant north can offer: the sheer heavenliness that is in gentian flowers and the curve-horned chamois.
Ah the abundance, the wonderful abundance of those days — heaven and earth abundant. The various new little breads that smell so sweet with coffee, the hard clear butter, the mountain honey. For a moment of perfection, give me such a morning, such a world, and my new little breads.
Outside the inn-door was the village green — or village square. There was the high-necked white church, like a bird, with the black cupola in heaven. There was the white convent, where a few nuns still taught the children and young women. There were three or four great farm-houses: and opposite the inn-door, big trees and little wooden tables. It was all uplifted with pure morning-shine, warm, strong sunshine of heaven’s fountain. Three bullock wagons came slowly along the white road through the open square, the drivers cracked long whips, and looked with their sharp blue eyes at the two strangers. Softly swung the necks of the pale cattle. It was morning in the world.
The village was tiny — just a few farms — no shop at all. It was very still, now the convent was suppressed. It had had active mediaeval days.
Gilbert suddenly found himself almost transportedly happy. It was a god-world: but strange northern gods. Nay, it was so wonderful, crystal, high, and gentian-flowered! Was it not almost superhuman? It went to the soul like a god-madness.
The river flowed full and swift, white-green, hissing from the glaciers. The flat meadows from Schaeftlarn to Maierhof were a miracle: deep, waist-deep in flowers, where the pale- gold spheres of the great ranunculus floated like marvellous bubbles, lovely, heaven-pale globe-flowers. It was hard not to believe in the old, white-skinned muscular gods, whom Wagner travestied. Surely Siegfried tramped through such spring meadows, breaking the god-blond globe-flowers against his fierce, naked knees. Surely for him the birch-trees shook their luminous green fleece in heaven, poised on a trunk- beam of icy light.
How lovely the birch-trees were, on either side the road, and loitering in clusters in the ice-shimmering distance! They cannot be themselves beyond the smell of ice. Here they were glamorous with the heroic light of the sagas, shaking and communing in the magical, north-seeming air, flashing the ice-white brand of their stems.
And then the foot-hills were tangled with bell-flowers, tresses and tresses of myriad weightless blue bell-flowers among the gold and green of the grass, the white and gold of great daisies, the pink of evanescent flowers. Blue, blue, tangled, aerial blue, and white and gold, among an evanescence of liquid green and pink. MacWhirter’s picture in the Tate, of Spring in the Tyrol, would be correct if it had only a little more of the sense of lightness, transfusion of cold luminousness, nothing heavy: ice-colours gleaming in blossom.
Gilbert and Johanna would sit together in the sun, talking, watching the flash of the mountains, hearing the magical tong-tong of the cow-bells, and finding themselves outside the world, in the confines of a northern heaven. Johanna wore a smoke-blue gauze dress and a white hat, and was like the landscape. Gilbert watched and wondered, with his soul unfolded and his mind asleep. A wonderful deep peace flowed underneath his consciousness, like a river.
They would walk far off, sometimes up the hills through the woods, sometimes across the bogs that were full of floating flowers, and cut into dark-brown channels. The peat was stored in long dark heaps. In the distance a broad-roofed farm seemed to settle its wings low over its white walls. Sometimes they went by the river with their backs to the mountains, and sat upon the great heaps of logs that had been floated down, and now were piled beside the living birch- trees.
Returning at evening, the glow-worms were shining in the grass, low-down, their strong, electric-green lights seeming to give off a sudden joyous sound. There was a faint scent of birch-trees, and ice-water, and spring in the dusky air. And everywhere, in the forest-tangle of deep grass, the sudden jewel-lamps of the glow-worms, sending a faint, smoky, witchlike gleam upon the surrounding grass-stems. So that one could easily imagine oneself a tiny gnome, down in a jungle of ferocious tall grass. Gilbert would stoop and watch them, sitting crouched on his heels at the silent road-side, watching the living, entangled stars emit their luminous fume, lighting up a tiny, tiny grass-stemmed world of their own. He watched and watched, and was bewitched. Meanwhile Johanna stood talking behind him, and the night stars came out overhead. A half moon was in the sky.
They went slowly towards the dark, tree-clustered village. At the bend of the road was one of the usual crucifixes, with the Christ spread under the hood. Gilbert glanced up at the Christus. He too was pale, lurking spread-eagled in the crucifix shadow.
“Good-evening, Mister,” said the man on the road, looking up and addressing the Christus in the crucified shadow.
“How are you?”
The air was dark and mountain-horrific around. Gilbert’s voice, addressing the Christ on the Cross, terrified Johanna.
“No don’t!” she cried, catching his arm. “Don’t! It frightens me.
“Why?” he said. “Can’t I have a word with him?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t! I was educated in a convent.”
“And I in a Board school.” He turned again to the Christ. “How are you, Mister? Glad to meet you,” he continued. “Shan’t you come down? Come down a bit. You must be stiff. You give me the arm-ache to look at you. Come down! Come and have a drink. You’ve been up there long enough. Come and have a drop.”
“Heilige Maria!” said Johanna, crossing herself. Then to him: “I won’t hear it. It scares me. No, I’m going.”
And she set off up the dark road.
“What’s the odds!” he said, going after her. “A drop of Dunkels would do him good. He can’t spend all time up there. I don’t begrudge him a century or two — but there’s a time to hang on a cross, and there’s a time to get down and go your ways, it seems to me.”
But Johanna only reiterated:
“It scares me. It scares me. I’m still too catholic.”
At their bedroom window at the Post Johanna stood smoking a cigarette and looking out. The moonlight fell on a great horse-chestnut tree, on its white candles and black, palm- foliage. There was a pond too, with reeds. And the frogs were singing loudly under the great, risen moon. They were whirring and rattling and simmering like a pot on a crackling fire. And Johanna was thinking of her children, as she stood there in her nightdress looking out, and smoking her cigarette. At last Gilbert came and stood by her.
“Think of my little boys!” she said.
“Why think of them!” he said. “They are all right.”
“Are they! Without their mother!”
“But you wouldn’t go back till August, anyhow. You weren’t due to go back till August.”
There was a pleading in his voice. She flung away the end of her cigarette, into the night. The frogs simmered and rattled outside. She turned and threw her arms round his neck, and gave him a hard kiss. And they went to their narrow, passionate bed.
But in the night he woke with a click, to realise she was awake.
“Aren’t you asleep?” he asked, in fear.
“These beds are too small for two,” she answered, in a hard, wounding voice.
“Why, they haven’t been! There’s been room till now.”
“Why should you have everything your way?”
It is amazing how wounding a woman can make her tone, like the cut of a blunt, horrible knife, irrespective of her words.
“My way?” He was a raw hand, and frankly puzzled.
“I can’t stand this,” she said, and with a horrible kick she kicked away the feather overbolster and got out of bed.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To the other bed.”
“But why?”
“Because I want to be alone.”
“Why?”
She vouchsafed no answer, but darted into the other bed and enveloped herself in the overbolster like a viper darting to cover.
He was now hard awake. The moon had set, and it was dark. It was very dark, so dark that he could not even see the window. He knew the direction of the other bed, where Johanna had gone. And from this direction he felt strange, terrible currents of malevolent force vibrating out on the intense darkness. The room was so dark, he felt it must be some dungeon, some awful prison. And the darkness seemed imprisoned and horrific, like being buried alive. He knew it was no use speaking to Johanna. She was as it were the spider at the core of the horror. Sometimes the darkness in the room bristled like a black wolf’s hide. He lay in horror. Then he became semi-conscious.
Then again he woke with horror. There was a pallor — something horrible was coming. Something pallid and fearful was coming from the distance. He lay staring, while his heart felt ruptured; staring, staring at the pallid presence.
Then enough day-consciousness returned, and he sort of realised that it was dawn at the window. A strange, seething blister upon the darkness. Dawn at the window. A big, white, horrible, intensifying blotch on the darkness. Dawn at the window. Dawn at the window. Seething, seething — he could almost hear it! — seething with a pale, maleficent, leprous sound. But dawn! Dawn at the window. Could he make out the window-frame? Could he distinguish the centre-bar? Light seething like some fatal steam on the black solidity of the darkness: seething, seething its way in, like a disease.
Thus within him the normal day-consciousness fought with the awful night consciousness, which sees the invisible forces. He watched as from the depths of a cavern the light gather at the window. But himself he lay far back, still night-logged, and his heart seemed ruptured. He had once had a bad rheumatic fever, and his heart was not so strong.
Gradually, gradually day came. And with it the night consciousness faded. With day, a certain normality re-established itself again. But he did not forget. He never forgot again. It was as if this night a breach was made in the walls of his house of life, so that he looked out on the prowling winds of chaos and horror. And somehow, Johanna had done it. But probably it was his own fault. Johanna could be horrible like some were-wolf that ate men’s hearts: only their hearts. His heart still pained him in his left breast. — But probably, probably he had brought it to pass upon himself. There can be no were-wolf unless men loose it upon themselves. He must have wanted it.
It was full daylight. He saw Johanna sleeping, curled on her pillow. Everything seemed natural. His torn, ruptured consciousness relaxed. And soon he went to sleep, and slept deeply. And when he awoke, he had forgotten.
He had forgotten, she had forgotten. They had breakfast out of doors under the big trees. The table-cloth was of yellow and white checks. Chaffinches came hopping on the table, almost on to their plates.
“Aren’t they awfully nice!” said Johanna. “You know that when the Lord was painting the birds, He had no colour left for the chaffinch. So He just wiped his brushes on him.”
Chaffinches! Flutter and dabs of yellow and red! And a yellow and white table-cloth! And a sumptuous morning, with the last white clouds walking slowly out of a superb sky, as if loath to go. Gilbert never forgot it.
And a little later, as they sat on one of their favorite benches, on a hill under a wood, beside a white shrine, looking at the perfect heaven-array of mountains drawn up in the morning sunshine, far off, while myriads and myriads of dandelion seed-heads stood in the grass that sloped down from their feet, round globes of mist resting in their myriads, big, fairy worlds of mist in a congregation, his heart reminded him of the night. He and she were hand in hand, in peace.
“The night was a failure,” he said.
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“Well, why not?”
“Ha — I suppose one can’t always be happy,” she sighed. And she sighed rather bitterly, as if against fate.
So there you are, gentle reader. It isn’t my fault if I can’t give you an idyll of coos. It would be a good deal easier for me too. I feel, with Johanna, as if I could sigh against fate.
Not that fate would care. And that’s where it is, gentle reader. It’s no good sighing against the bull Typhon. You’ve got to take him by the horns.
And so, gentle reader — ! But why the devil should I always gentle-reader you. You’ve been gentle reader for this last two hundred years. Time you too had a change. Time you became rampageous reader, ferocious reader, surly, rabid reader, hellcat of a reader, a tartar, a termagant, a tanger. — And so, hellcat of a reader, let me tell you, with a flea in your ear, that all the ring-dove sonata you’ll get out of me you’ve got already, and for the rest you’ve got to hear the howl of tom-cats like myself and she-cats like yourself, going it tooth and nail.
I sometimes wish it weren’t so. I wish we could sing the old, old song.
“List to the sound of coo-oo-oo, of coo-oo-oo, of coooo Sounding for me and you-ou-ou, for me-ee-ee and you-ouu
Whether in storm or cloud you go, or under skies of blueoo Nothing can sever, I will be ever, true to my coo-oo-oooooo!”
But, my dear reader, you’ve sung that song to rags, till there isn’t a coo left in the universe. So now you’ve got to listen to the fire-works, and the fire-and-water fizzing and cat-fight of my precious protagonists.
And remember, gent — damn it all. I’ll begin again. Remember, you girning, snarl-voiced hell-bird of a detestable reader that you are, remember that the fight doesn’t take place because Little Jack Horner ate all the pie, or because Littie Bo-peep didn’t mend Jack’s socks, or didn’t cook his dinner. Remember, you bitch, that the fight is over nothing at all, if it isn’t everything. Remember that Jack and Jill are both decent people, not particularly bad-tempered, and not mean at all.
Therefore you sniffing mongrel bitch of a reader, you can’t sniff out any specific why or any specific wherefore, with your carrion-smelling psycho-analysing nose, because there is no why and wherefore. If fire meets water there’s sure to be a dust. That’s the why and wherefore.
Of course, as I’ve said before, fire and water may meet in sweet lovey-doveyness, as rain and sun in spring meet with a kiss, as earth-water trips forward in a growing plant to embrace the alighting sun-heat in a fecund embrace. But that is only half the show. And unfortunately this half is over, for the moment.
Our fathers and christian forbears have done us in. They have kept the lovey-dovey show going so strong for such a long time, that, like summer in September, it is temporarily played out. Hiss, bang, fizz, the fire and water are having a spell of hard fight, before they can settle down to the next bout of lovey-dovey. All right then, fiery one, spit on your hands and go for him. It will clear the air, consume the flabby masses of humanity, and make way for a splendider time. Make a ring then, readers, round Gilbert and Johanna.