Louise, like a goddess in the machine, appears and disappears. She appeared at Schaeftlarn after our hero and heroine had been there for six days, and said that there was a flat, a country flat, belonging to one of her friends, in the village of Ommerbach, five miles the other side of Schloss Wolfratsberg. This flat Johanna and Gilbert might inhabit, free, gratis and for nothing, until August and the summer holidays. It would be much cheaper.
Off set our friends again. They paid their bill and departed from Kloster Schaeftlarn with regret. They had loved it.
Back they went down the railway, to Ommerbach. Ommerbach was the least of villages. It contained exactly seven houses: three farms, the station house, two smaller houses, and then Frau Breitgau’s. It lay in a knot on the high-road that came trailing nakedly, through open spaces, along the valley-side from Munich towards the mountains.
Frau Breitgau’s house was the first in the village — and it was a shop. It was new. On the ground floor was Frau Breitgau’s shop, and Frau Breitgau, like a round, shiny, rosy sausage that has been dipped in hot water, and Herr Breitgau, with a long grey brown-fringed moustache which looked as if it had grown into a long grey weed hanging over the rim of a beer-pot. The second floor we have nothing to do with. The top floor was the flat destined for our pair of finches. It was perched high up. From the sitting-room and from the adjacent bedroom opened the wooden balcony, which looked down over the lost high-road, past the big, broad-spread farm, over the rye-fields and fir-woods down to the river, then at the far- off up-slope. There was besides a little kitchen that looked over the station at the flashing Alps: a spare bedroom, and a water-closet. It was small, rather bare, but complete. There was one big deep sofa, splendid, in the sitting-room: a white bed in the bedroom: copper pots in the kitchen. The two finches whistled with pleasure.
Here they installed themselves, and blessed Louise for a fairy god-mother. And they proceeded to live for nothing. A huge loaf of black bread, almost enough for a week, cost sixpence: and this, eaten with thick firm Alp-grass butter was food for the gods. Ah, how good that black rye-bread is, when it is pure and well-made. The best of bread. A great pound of fresh butter, just made, cost ninepence. For a shilling they had fifteen or eighteen eggs. For threepence a vast jug of milk. For ninepence a pot of farm honey. For sixpence sweet honey-cakes.
Behold then Frau Breitgau beaming in the door with the milk, and Gilbert in pyjamas and Johanna in her blue silk dressing-gown. Behold Gilbert running down to Frau Breitgau’s shop, for liver-sausage, or a cudet of Ripperle, or Schnapps, or whatever it was, and struggling with a conversation in strong Bayrisch, with the happy Frau or the beer- dim Herr. Behold our couple living in a land of milk and honey and joyful abundance, for fifteen shillings a week for the two of them. Oh wonderful days of smiling, careless plenty. Oh days gone by! Oh bitter regret. Why are eggs a shilling each? Why can’t one have honey any more? What has happened to God’s tall rye, that the black bread should taste of the dust-bin?
Lovely material plenty! If one can live for fifteen shillings a week, then one can live for three months on ten pounds. And with a hundred pounds a year one is a lord. Ah days gone by!
The storm was brewing in the soul of man, nevertheless. Johanna and Gilbert perched in their nest and surveyed the long white high-road come winding through the rye, between blasted fruit-trees. Bullock wagons slowly approached — or a great motor van charged out from the city — or peasants passed on foot. And sometimes, in the sweltering days, it was soldiers.
They would hear a far-off jingle and clatter and a fine threshing sound. A cloud of dust far off. And then soldiers on horseback galloping importantly forward, three, two young ones and an old one. The old one trotted up the litde bank to Frau Breitgau’s shop-door, until his horse almost had its nose on the counter. Then there was a loud shouting of commands. Meanwhile a blue lieutenant had reined up under the trees by the farm-door, and was shouting commands also. Then the three fore-runners rode on.
Immediately there was a struggle below: Frau Breitgau and Herr Breitgau tussling with a tub, a wide open tub, which they deposited just by the post where they might one day have a gate. Under the lilac bushes at the farm other great tubs rolled out. Then there was a trotting of farm-hands and of Breitgaus with pails of water, which they poured splashing into the tubs.
Meanwhile the column of dust grew higher, more silvery, between the tall green rye: the sound of innumerable feet filled the valley. So, they hove in sight round the bend. Horsemen — blue horsemen — and then long trains of grey artillery winding round the corner of the tall rye, with a flash of accoutrements and a strange muffled trotting noise that made the heart beat. In the sunshine of the balcony above, Gilbert and Johanna watched in silence.
Back the out-riders went galloping — nearer and nearer came the strange, slow-hasty cavalcade. They were level with the house. There was a wheeling of officers, a flashing of shouts and commands. The artillery had half drawn rein — but forward it went again. Endless threaded the horsemen, and the grey gun-carriages drawn by four or six horses, and the strange, sinister grey wagons. What is more horrible than the neutral grey of war-implements. Ach, for the days of scarlet and silver and black plumes! No more! This hideous neuter, grey neuter of machine mouths.
The fearful ruffling noise went on. Bright horses, brown and chestnut and black — thank god they too are not painted neuter grey — streamed loosely on, their ruddy-faced riders sweating in their dark blue uniforms. Dust rose, wheels rattled, hoofs chattered and chuffled.
Then came a shout, and at last all came to a standstill. In front of the house was a gun with six horses, and a young, strong, handsome fellow riding one of the leaders. He had a spur on one heel, and he rode a bright bay horse. And Gilbert noticed with a start that the belly of the bright bay was wounded with the spur, bloody.
Another shout, and down swung the riders, rushing to the water-tubs. They took off their caps, and their hair was wet with sweat. Gilbert watched his young rider crouch over the tub and put his face in the water and drink. He had a strong body, under the blue cloth, and the back of his neck was ruddy and handsome. He drank, then rose up with his mouth and chin dripping. He wiped himself on his white, blue- bordered handkerchief, rubbed his hair and breathed deep, looking round.
Then he looked at his horse. And suddenly, furtively he ran with water in a dipper, and furtively washed the red wound on the belly, washed it carefully. And he kicked white dust over the blood spots on the road. And he glanced round apprehensively. And the bay horse twitched.
There was a tossing of horses’ heads, a springy, gingerly trotting of officers on horseback, a rubbing of sweat-moist hair, a strange scent of soldiers and horses, a jingle and shuffle and a low run of voices, varied by shouts. And then a wait: a long wait in the hot sun. Three elegant officers were gathered, their horses’ heads together, under a deep green tree by the green farm-railing. Why were they waiting? Why were they waiting? It seemed an eternity before they would ride on and leave the road empty.
But at last came the order. The riders with their strong, heavy-muscled legs swung into the saddle. There was a hitch and strain of harness. Then forward again, with that strange pace of artillery, straining forward, as if with haste, and yet without swiftness. Grey gun-carriages — sweating horses, blue horse-riders, and lastlv curious grey wagons rolled on. Rolled on, and left the empty country behind, the rye gleaming in the sun, the road white, the tubs empty, water splashed around them — and a wet mark in the road where the youth had washed his scored horse.
Gilbert watched the last horse-flanks disappear round the corner of the white, low-roofed farm — and then he stared in silence across the shallow, sun-shimmering valley. And stared with regret — a deep regret. He forgot the woman at his side — and love, and happiness. And his heart burned to be with the men, the strange, dark, heavy soldier, so young and strong with life, reckless and sensual. He wanted it — he wanted it — and not only life with a woman. The thrill of soldiery went heavily through his blood: the glamour of the dark, positive fighting spirit.
So he and Johanna cooked their eggs and their asparagus and ate their Swiss cheese in the clear light in silence. A great silence seemed to have come over him; the deep longing, and the far off desire to be with men, with men alone, active, reckless, dangerous, on the brink of death: to be away from woman, beyond her, on the borders.
But the longing was so deep, it was all indefinite and as yet unconscious, or semi-conscious. Brought up in the great tradition of love and peace, how could he even recognise his own desire for death-struggles and the womanless life? Yet the desire lay at the bottom of it, as of every man.
“They enjoy their soldiering,” he said to Johanna.
“Oh, they hate it. They hate it,” she cried. “How many of them go away because of it!”
“They love it, all the same.”
“How can you say so. Ha, I know what it means! — that horrible, vile discipline, and the agonies they suffer. They used to talk to me when I was a child. Papa used to have soldiers to work in the garden, and they always scolded me for talking to them. And I used to throw fruit to them into the barracks ground from our high wall at the end of the garden, and the officers were furious with me. — And then, when I was a child, I knew. I knew how they suffered under it, what agony it was to their pride.”
“They must want it. They must want even the vile discipline and the humiliation. They must, or they wouldn’t have it. People don’t have things they don’t want.”
“Not at all! Not at all! How can they alter it? How can you say they like it? How do you know. You don’t know.”
“I know what I know.”
“You know what you think you know — rubbish! You talk rubbish sometimes. — You ask them if they like it, and see. They’re all dying to be out of it.”
“They think they are.”
“They are\” she cried. “Why are you such a fool! — Why look — when they meet one another, you can hear them — they say fifty-five! or a hundred and eighty! — or five hundred! — And that means how many day’s service they still have. You can often hear it, in Bavaria.”
“I don’t believe it, for all that,” he said.
“Ah, because you are a conceited ass,” she said angrily, whisking away the plates.
They set off walking in the country. They were out of doors all day, in sunny weather. Sometimes they went through the woods, sometimes they walked to Schloss Wolfratsberg, sometimes they went into the deep tangle of the river-bed. And by the water they would sit and watch the timber rafts come down the pale-green, fizzy river — rafts woven together, floating from the mountains, and steered by two raftsmen with long poles or oars. And again the nostalgia for the man’s life would come over Gilbert — life apart from the woman — life without domesticity or marital implication — the single life of men active together. The raftsmen were blonde, ruddy men with hard muscles, not like the peasants. The peasants were full, muscular men, often handsome too. But the mountain woodsmen were like hawks, with their keen, unseeing faces and their bare, fierce knees under the little, wide leather breeches, like football-breeches.
By the Isar the roses were out, wild roses, but red, almost scarlet red. And columbines and the last lilies still lurked on the steep, moist, hidden banks. The river made many twists — there were many shoals of pink sand and gravel — the stream broke up into various arms. And sometimes the rafts coming sailing down would get caught, and in spite of all efforts the raftsmen would be fast.
In one deep little corner, in an arm of the stream, Gilbert and Johanna would sometimes bathe. The water was cold, but wonderful once one was in. Johanna was a better swimmer than Gilbert — he was no water fowl. But she rocked on the water like a full water lily, her white and gold breasts of a deep-bosomed woman of thirty-two swaying slightly to the stream, her white knees coming up like buds, her face flushed and laughing.
“How lovely! How lovely!” she cried, in the water-ecstasy.
But he was lean and dry-souled, he never could know the water-ecstasy. And as she rolled over in the pallid, pure, bluey-effervescent stream, and he saw her magnificent broad white shoulders and her knot of hair, envy, and an almost hostile desire filled him. She came from the water full-blown like a water-flower, naked and delighted with her element. And she lay spread in the sun on the clean shingle. And he sat in his lean, unyielding nudity upon a great pinkish boulder, and he looked at her, still with the dark eyes of a half-hostile desire and envy. Strange enemies they were, as a white seagull and a gold land-hawk are enemies. And he brooded, looking at her as her strong bosom rose and fell, and the full breasts lay sideways. And with a sort of inward rage he wished he could see her without any darkness of desire disturbing his soul.
Fool that he was. As if there were not sufficient dead eyes of insentience in the world, without his wishing to escape from the sacred magnetism of desire. But it was a chain that held this land-hawk by the leg: as it held that white seagull by the wing. And in their hour they both struggled against the bond.
Ah the history of man and woman: it is a long history of their struggles to be free of one another. Egyptian king-gods, and christian crucifixion, they are only dodges to escape the fatal bond that binds man to woman and woman to man, and makes each the limit of the other. Oh what a limitation is this woman to me! And oh what a limitation am I to her almighty womanliness.
And so it is, the two raging at one another. And sometimes one wins, and the other goes under. And then the battle is reversed. And sometimes the two fly asunder, and men are all soldiers and women all weavers. And sometimes all women become as men, as in England, so that the men need no longer be manly. And sometimes all men become as women, so the women need no longer be womanly. And sometimes — but oh so rarely — man remains man, and woman woman, and in their difference they meet and are very happy.
But man must remain man, and woman woman. There is something manly in the soul of a man which is beyond woman, and in which she has no part. And there is something in woman, particularly in motherhood, in which man has no part, and can have no part. For a woman to trespass into man’s extremity is poison, and for a man to trespass into woman’s final remoteness is misery.
So there we are — the old, the eternal game of man and woman: the time-balancing oscillation of eternity. In this we live, and from this our lives are made. There is a duality in opposition, between man and woman. There is a dual life- polarity. And the one half can never usurp the other half — the one pole can never replace the other. It is the basis of the life- mystery.
The universe swings in a same dual polarity. Let scientists say what they will, the sun is but one pole of our gravitation. There is another: perhaps the moon: perhaps the invisible. But between a dual polarity our round earth swings on her course. If there were but one pole, and that the sun, then she would fall into the sun. Which she does not.
Many times, perhaps most times, Gilbert and Johanna were completely happy. But again, each tugged the leash. He wanted life to be all his life, male; she wanted life to be all her life, female. And sometimes he fell under her tugging, and sometimes she fell under his. And then there was war.
For a woman doesn’t want a man she can conquer: no, though she fight like hell for conquest. And the same with a man. Oh horrible submission, especially in marriage are you the foulest of treacheries! Never submit, never abandon yourself completely. This is the last word to every man and woman.
Ultimately, a woman wants a man who, by entering into complete relationship with her, will keep her in her own polarity and equipoise, true to herself. The man wants the same of a woman. It is the eternal oscillating balance of the universe. It is the timeless inter-related duality of fire and water. Let life overbalance in either direction, and there is a fight, a terrific struggle to get back the balance. And let the mechanistic intervention of some fixed ideal neutralise the incalculable ebb-and-flow of the two principles, and a raging madness will supervene in the world. A madness which is pleasantly accumulating in mankind today.
Gilbert and Johanna were mostly very happy. She was wild with pleasure at release from conventional life. She would dance in her glowing, full bodied nudity round and round the flat, and she made him dance also, in his more intense, white and ruddy-haired nudity. He was stiff and constrained. There was an intense fierce reserve and stiffness in him. His whiteness was very white and hard, his hair was black, but his body hair ruddy-brown. She was full and soft and gold-white, with delicate soft hair.
“Dance,” she said to him. “Dance!”
And with her arms spread on the air, she floated round in triumph. And he, ashamed to be ashamed, danced in correspondence, with a jerky, male stiffness that seemed to her odd and strange. Woosh she went, veering as on a current of water down the passage, looping her soft nudity and her soft, soft-stemmed hands in a loop round the little kitchen, and floating back into the sitting-room, where he was dancing with odd, jerky, nigger-like motions which seemed to her so comical and curious. Why on earth dance like that, when one could swim deliciously on the air! And him, he wondered how one could abandon oneself to swim on the air, when one was sharp and intensely local. So she swam around him, and drooped her soft-stemmed hand over his hard, naked shoulder. And he came with his comical quick motions, and put his thin, hard naked arm round her full soft waist. And she shouted with pleasure and triumph, and his eyes twinkled sardonically.
To be free! To be free, Great God! Not furtive and orgiastic at night, and stiff in a linen collar of correctitude during the day. Whether Gilbert liked it or not, she insisted on floating round in her soft, ambient nudity in the morning or the afternoon, if she felt like it. And she made him float, or paddle likewise. And he, as we said before, was ashamed to be ashamed.
Likewise she insisted on going barefoot, though the roads were stony and painful. So off they trudged, both barefoot, on the roads through the forest, and they got sole-sore and he became cross. And at evening a doe ran across the sky-line, so fleet. And as they came home, the fire-flies were threading in and out of the tall, tall dark rye, carrying their little explosive lanterns in their tails.
“I love you! I love you, you dears, you dears!” she cried to the fire-flies. “I wish I was a fire-fly.”
“Don’t gush,” said he.
“You — who are you?” she cried at him.
“And what are you, for a fire-fly?” he said.
“Go away, you spoil everything. — You dear, you dear fireflies, I love you. I wish I was one of you, to swim through the tops of the rye. Oh, I do! I should love it. I should love to be a fire-fly, and not bother with tiresome men and their pettiness any more.”
“You might be less of a fool, if you were a fire-fly,” he said to her. “You’re too big a fool to be a human being.”
“Oh God! Oh God!” she cried, lifting her hands to the deity. “Why am I persecuted by this person at my side.”
“Because you ask for it,” said he.
“Go away! Go away! I want to be happy. I want to be happy with the lovely fire-flies.”
“Yes, you might ask them first, before you go butting in.”
“They’ll be glad of me,” she said.
“By God, then they’re welcome.”
“Go away! Go home, you hateful thing.”
“Come away, you ass. Don’t slobber any more.”
“Slobber! If you weren’t a dried English stick, you’d know it wasn’t slobber.”
“And being a dried English stick, I just know it is.”
“You would. There isn’t a drop of sap in you.”
“And you’re going squashy and over-ripe.”
“Oh, but isn’t he a devill Now he’s spoiled my fire-flies.”
And she went home in a dudgeon, and spent the rest of the evening making a marvellous painting on brown paper, of fire-flies in the corn. And he stood on the balcony, and looked at the fire-flies drifting in and out of the darkness, weaving and waving in the dark air beneath him. And the night was a great concave of darkness. And the river sounded as in a sea- shell. And an owl flew hooting with a little sob. And the great concave of darkness in front seemed vast, and bristling with fir-trees and mysterious northern, eastern lands.
Again they walked the miles across to the Lake of Starnberg. Ah, how Gilbert loved to emerge from the forests into the wide, half-marshy corn-lands. There lay the broad-roofed farms: there rose a tall white church, black-capped. A hare rushed along the road-side: a deer flashed across out of the tall rye, and ran again into the deep corn. Then she turned, and spread her wide ears, up to the chin in corn, and watched our pair of finches. And her fawn, lost in the high corn of the opposite side of the way, made a great rustling, and whimpered and cried like a child for its mother. The doe flashed back at a tangent, and called to her fawn from the hill crest. Then off they trotted, into the forest edge.
Gilbert and Johanna walked through the shallow lands. A peasant, and his wife in the great blue-cotton trousers of the marsh-women were earning their hay off the hay-sticks in their arms, and loading it on the cart, where their little boy trod it down.
Coming to the village with the trees and the tall black and white church, on the opposite crest, Johanna and Gilbert arrived at an inn, and went into the inn-garden for dinner. They were eating their soup when in chattered a class of school-boys, two by two, with their teacher in attendance. He had the self-important self-conscious look of a teacher. The boys seemed happy, carrying their jackets. After a delay and a flutter and a few reprimands, they were arranged at a long table for dinner, a chattering pleased little crowd.
Gilbert watched them ominously. A sort of horror overcame him. He could not think of his own teaching days now, without horror. To be a school-teacher: he looked at the quite pleasant German specimen. — But the ignominy of it! The horror of the hideous tangled captivity.
Ah liberty, liberty, the sweetest of all things: freedom to possess one’s body and soul, to be master of one’s own days. Not many souls are fit for freedom. Most get bored, or nervous, or foolish. Let them have jobs, let such have their time allotted to them. But for the free soul liberty is essential, and a job is a thing to be contemplated with horror and hatred.
It was full summer-time, and wild strawberries were ripe along the forest hedges. Gilbert and Johanna gathered them in big leaves, and tasted all the fragrance of the wild native world in them, the fierceness of the lost winter.
And again the post arrived from America, and more torrents of abuse, rage, grief, despair and self-pity. Everard wrote also to the Baron, and the family clock began to whirr again. The Baron wrote to Johanna, and added his praise to that of the injured husband. His daughter was ruining the family honor. Marriage was a social institution, and whoever attacked the social fabric deserved to be treated as a criminal and coerced into submission. A private excursion in the fields of adultery- was perhaps to be condoned.
The Baron knew he was on thin ice, on the marriage question. Had he not his own illegitimate menage, under the rose? But he kept his position. The institution was to be supported, the individual might do as he liked — under the rose. “Ach yea!” said Lotte. “If the bed isn’t roses the bedcover is.” So she went in and out among the rose-bushes, and hid, not behind the fig-leaf, but behind this same immortal rose.
Johanna was not hiding: and here came the difficulty. The Baron stormed against the paltry and mischievous Alfred, the intriguing Louise, and the gullible fool of a Johanna. “Do you think any man will marry you again after you have made such an exposure of yourself?” he wrote. And getting hotter, he continued: “But if ever you bring this ill-bred, common, penniless lout to my house, I shall kick him down the stairs.”
“Ach Papa,” wrote Johanna. “Don’t you talk of kicking, with so much gout in your feet.”
Long, sombre, semi-mystical poems arrived from Rudolf. The raven of woe had made off with the pearl of the north, and hidden it in some unclean cranny. But was no falcon on the wing?
No, dear Rudolf, no falcon was on the wing. He sat with his posterior on his chair in his study and wrote inky poems.
And then the Baroness, Johanna’s mother, fluttered near. She arrived in Munich, and descended for the moment on Alfred. Alfred and Louise meanwhile sardonically pulled both ways.
Arrived the Baroness’ letter from Munich, to Gilbert in German. “Think what you do. Think what position you can give my daughter. She has been used to a comfortable and honorable life, and she must not be brought down to degradation. Her father was a cultured nobleman of high family, and how could he bear to think of his daughter going about the country homeless, living on charity, with a strange man, like a tramp. Yes, like a tramp trailing across the country.”
The Baroness had a real style of her own. Gilbert spit on his hands, and tackled the German language. He would answer Dutch with Dutch. “Your daughter wishes to stay with me, I do not detain her against her will. So long as she wishes to stay, I shall never ask her to go away. I am no more master of her actions than is anyone else. I shall stand by her as long as ever she asks for it, or wishes it, or will have it. Her marriage in America is a disaster for her. I want her to stay with me. We are not tramps nor living on charity, since nobody gives us anything. I do what I can do — and it can’t be otherwise.”
And then, lo and behold, Johanna, happening to go into the kitchen one rainy morning just after midday, just after the midday train had gone down the line, saw a figure which surely was familiar coming down the path from the station: a sturdy, even burly figure in a black coat and skirt, and a white chiffon scarf, and an insecure boat-shaped hat, bobbing along under an umbrella.
The Baroness, by all the powers. Johanna rushed into the bedroom, where Gilbert was sitting stark naked, his feet under him, musing on the bed.
“Mama!” said Johanna, flinging off her blue silk wrap and appearing like a Rubens’ Venus.
“What?” said Gilbert.
“Quick! There’s Mama! Coming from the station. Thank the Lord I saw her.”
And Johanna flew into her chemise, whilst Gilbert got into his shirt.
By the time the Baroness had had a word with Frau Breitgau, and had struggled up the stairs, two correct young people were standing on their feet, dressed and ready. But alas, they both, and he in particular, had that soft, vague, warm look in their eyes and in their faces, that tender afterglow of a fierce round of love and passion.
Into this mild, dawn-tender, rosy half-awakenedness came the Baroness, like the black and ponderous blast of Boreas. Gilbert was bewildered at being honored so unexpectedly, but as yet he was unsuspicious. He took the umbrella of the visitor, and gave her a seat on the honorable and comfortable deep sofa. Then he took a chair at the desk, where he had the evening before been working at music.
There was a lull. And then suddenly, like a bomb which has been quietly steaming and then goes off, the Baroness went off. She planted her knees square, she pushed the hat off her forehead, she let her white chiffon scarf hang loose. And then, in a child’s high, strange lament voice, she turned to Gilbert and began.
It would be useless to repeat what she said. Poor Gilbert, the dawn-rose going more and more bewildered in his eyes, his mouth coming apart, his face growing pale, seemed to shrink in his chair — and shrank and shrank, as if he would get down between the two legs of the pedestal desk, and there, like an abashed dog retreated in its kennel, bark uncertainly at the intruder.
On and on went the Baroness. It was not abuse — not at all. It was like a child in a dream going on and on, in a high, plaintive, half-distracted voice. She said everything she had said before, and everything that she would inevitably say. She said all the things that had come into her mind, all the things she had put into her letter. She reminded him of poor Johanna’s unhappy future — and of the children. — ”Ja, und Sie wissen nicht was eine Mutter von zwei Kindern ist. Das wissen Sie nicht. — Ja, und ich meine, ihr Vater ist ein adlicher, hochgebildeter Mann — Ja, und wenn Sie Geld hatten — Ja, und ihr Mann ist doch so gut, so gelernt, und so beriihmt dort in Amerika — Ja und was fur ein Leben ist es dann fur Sie. Oh jeh, noch so jung und unerfahren sind Sie — ”
“ — Yes, and you don’t know what a Mother of two children is — Yes, and I must say, her father is a cultured nobleman — Yes, and if you had any money even — Yes, and her husband is really so good, so kind, so learned, and so famous there in America. — Yes, and what kind of life is it for you? Oh dear, you are so young and inexperienced — oh dear, what a sad and heavy fate you take on your young shoulders — Oh, what a sad and heavy fate. Oh dear, it is good you have no mother, for what should she say. — But why will you do this thing? Why will you do it. — And yes, even if Johanna says she is happy now, think in six months! In six months! Oh poor Johanna, my poor Hannele. And her two children. Ach, and she a mother with two children. That you don’t understand. You are young, you don’t understand. No, what a sad life you make for yourself — ah, I cannot think of it — such a sad life for you. — And yes, what will you do when the Herr Doktor wants this house? Oh yea, then you have no roof to your heads! Homeless, like a pair of tramps — like a pair of tramps — and her father is really such a cultured nobleman “
On and on went the Baroness’ voice. She seemed to think of everything, and like a bird flying high against a wind, she rose and sank, rose and sank, and began again, almost breathless, with her — Und ja — Und ja — Und ja!
Our young male finch shrank and shrank behind the pedestal desk, and said never a word, not one single word. When the Baroness said — Do you understand? — he only gazed at her in silence. And Johanna, much more on the spot, gazed on the pair of them in a kind of indignation. She could not forget, not for a second, how the dawn-rose on her morning’s bout of passionate connection was being blotted out, blotted out under the Baronessial Boreas.
“Aber nein Mama! Aber das ist dumm! Aber was meinst du, Mama!” she shouted from time to time. But the Baroness, like a dog that is howling at the moon, only cast a glance at her unheeding out of the farthest corner of her eye, cast an unheeding corner of a glance at the interruption, and went on with her long, long howl at the moon. Which moon was friend Gilbert, who gazed and gaped moon-white and moon-silent, and seemed as if shortly he would sink behind the horizon of the pedestal desk. There was a dark, unseeing, obstinate look in his eye. Johanna would not have been at all surprised if he had started to bark.
And then, almost suddenly, like a sudden wind that drops, the Baroness was silent. There was a painful lull in the room.
“But Mama!” said Johanna. “Why didn’t you say you were coming?”
The question was pointed.
“Ach, I am not staying. I am going to Louise’s,” said the Baroness, catching her chiffon scarf and grasping for her umbrella.
“But won’t you have some lunch?” said Johanna.
“No! No! Thank you! Thank you! I am going.”
And the elderly lady rose to her feet, sturdily.
“But you will eat something?” said Johanna.
“Nein! Nein!”
“Goodbye Mama!” called Johanna cheerfully.
“Ja, goodbye Johanna. — Goodbye Mr Noon. I mean not to be unkind, you know — ” this bit in English.
That long, eternal “you kno-ow” of foreigners. The Baroness wrinkled a distressed face at him, shook hands, and left, obdurately refusing to stay another minute, although her train was not till a quarter to two.
Johanna closed the door behind her mother, and did not go downstairs with her.
“Well, I call that an irruption!” she said.
“So do I,” said Gilbert vaguely.
“Just in our lovely morning “ There was a pause: “But I call it mean. I call it mean to burst on us like that! What right has she?”
And Johanna flounced into the bedroom. Then she flounced back.
“But what do you let it upset you for?” she said. “You look so ridiculous! You shrank and shrank till I thought you’d disappear between the legs of the desk. — And not a word. Not a word did you say! But not a word! Pouf! I think it’s so ridiculous — ”
She went out to the kitchen with a poof! of laughter. Then she called:
“Come and look.”
Gilbert went. Away below they saw the Baroness going sturdily up the incline to the railway, in the rain.
“Look at her! Look at her! How long has she got to wait?”
“An hour,” said Gilbert. “Ought I to go to her?”
“Go to her? What for? She doesn’t want you.”
“She’s had no lunch.”
“Oh well, she’s had her satisfaction schimpfing. I don’t forgive it her. Look at her now! Doesn’t she look a sight in the rain! What right had she to spring on us like that! I call it mean of them — mean! — Now let her stand in the station — And now she’ll go to Louise’s and make more mischief. But I’m on my guard against them in the future. — Mean! And our lovely morning. And you — you. What do you look such a muff for? Why do you look as if you were going to hide in the desk hole? A rare fool you looked too.”
Gilbert did not answer, but his eyes were dark and full of remembrance.
“Ach Mama!” said Johanna, addressing the figure in the rain. “You always were clumsy and ungraceful. And a sight you look, standing on the station. You’ve made a rare angel of yourself this day. And I don’t forgive it you! — And you — ” she turned on Gilbert. “You are worse than she is — shrinking and being such a muff. — Bah, a man! You never said one word!”
“Why should I?”
“Why not? Pouf!” — and again Johanna broke into a mocking laugh. “But I’m going to eat, anyhow. And I’m going to have eggs and bacon. Are you?”
“Yes,” said Gilbert, eyeing with the greatest discomfort the stout black figure on the little railway station. And he had no peace till the train came — when they both ran to the kitchen and watched the Baroness climb in — and watched the train steam off.
“We’ll be on our guards, after this,” said Johanna.
“How?” said Gilbert.
“Yes, that’s just it. Springing upon one — !! — Yah, fools always do rush in! — What does she care, really, about me? Not a rap! She’s only frightened of the world. That’s all she cares. I shan’t forgive it her. — And you’re a fool, I don’t forgive you for taking it so tragically — ”
Johanna was mistaken, however. Gilbert was only deeply bewildered by this bruit pour tine omelette. But she was deeply offended that he had cut such a poor figure. In her own mind, she felt he ought to have risen and said: “Madame la Baronne, this is not to the point. Allow me to offer you a little refreshment.” Instead of which he had sat with a pale face and round eyes and shrinking body. For in Gilbert’s world people did not make speeches. At the bottom of his soul he too was profoundly angry. Johanna was furious because she was humiliated by her own family, and because he allowed her to be humiliated. He was furious because he had, he felt, been wantonly trespassed upon. But this was his private affair.
The next day they went to Schloss Wolfratsberg, to see Louise. Wolfratsberg was a big village, a township. And here the soldiers were quartered. Crossing the wide bridge over the river, he saw the soldiers washing their clothes in the stream, ruddy and laughing. In the town soldiers stood, dark blue, at every corner: the place seemed coloured with them. Even in Louise’s villa two privates were quartered — she would not be bothered with an officer. Gilbert saw them loitering, smoking their pipes, their tunics unbuttoned, in the little plantation behind the house. And he heard them chaffing Marta, and singing risky love-songs to her.
Marta appeared, her round head braided with her black plait, her grey eyes full of light, her face warm and dusky with that mediaeval reserve. She glanced a strange flash at Gilbert. And for the moment he wished with all his soul that he was back again among the common people: that he was lounging with his pipe in the plantation with the two privates, and making love to the dark, proud, promising Marta. He felt sick of women who talked and discussed and had privileges, of a theoretic life. Oh if only he was with the common soldiers! — the man’s reckless, manly life of indifference and blood- satisfaction and mental stupidity.
But alas, some invisible pale intervened between him and the lounging, unbuttoned soldiers. He had to go upstairs, to Louise’s room with its grey linen walls and its yellow silk curtains and dark furniture. And he had to listen to these two ladies, Johanna and Louise, in their endless talking-it-out: the reckless voice of Johanna beginning — ”Aber Louise — ” and the musical, sardonic voice of Louise responding: “Ja, Johanna, Ja. Das mein ich auch. Aber “
That terrible aber — that eternal but. Hamlet would really have had some occasion to say Aber mich keiti Abern.
Of course nothing important eventuated at Wolfratsberg. Next morning Gilbert worked at his music. He had found various old books of songs at Louise’s house, and these songs he set about transcribing, translating, and preparing for schools. A certain rather facile inspiration, a little fever of work was upon him, and he got on quite well, and forgot the various other matters. Johanna curled up on the sofa and read book after book, scattering the volumes round her on the floor like bones round the door of a dog’s kennel.
In the afternoon they walked out towards the river woods. They went through the tall, ripening rye. Poppies were out, and magenta corn-cockles, and bits of blue chicory. But Johanna, instead of walking along with him, walked behind, with a curious trailing motion of her feet. At first he did not notice. And then his spine began to creep. He glanced round irritably. And again his spine began to creep, he felt as if someone were going to stick him in the neck. So he waited for her to come up, and passed some casual remark as she joined him.
But when he went forward, he again felt her behind him — she would not keep up. And again the vile feeling went up and down his spine. He felt he would hutch his shoulders, as if really expecting a stab in the neck.
“Why do you walk behind?” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I? I can walk where I like.”
He looked at her. She had an irritating way of trailing one foot out, having her feet wide apart, and one foot on one side. A white anger began to mount his cheek.
“You won’t walk after me like that,” he said. “I won’t have it.”
“Why not? The road is not yours. I can go where I like.”
“Not behind me.”
“Why not!”
And she stood at a distance, eyeing him. He turned on his way. And she followed trailing after him. And rage ran up and down his spine, feeling her as it were jeering and destroying him from behind.
Again he waited.
“Go in front,” he said.
“Why should I?”
“Go in front. Or keep level,” he said.
“No. Why should I? I can go where I like.”
She stood at a little distance, eyeing him. And he hated her. So they both stood on the path, waiting. Still they waited.
After a while he shrugged his shoulders, and walked forward, determined to take no notice. But when he came to the woods, and still she dogged him, at a dozen paces behind, jeering at him malevolently, he felt, then he could stand it no more.
He turned suddenly and went back towards her.
“I’m going home,” he said, striding savagely.
“Goodbye. Enjoy yourself!” she cried jeeringly. And he felt her watching him, jeering, as he went through the rye.
However, he hurried forward towards the house, indifferent to her now. He took a book and sat down at the desk. And after a short time he heard her coming up the stairs. She was always afraid to be alone in the lonely country.
She went straight into the bedroom, without speaking. He glanced from under his brows, hoping she would be softened.
He was terrified lest love should cease to be love. She came back out of the bedroom.
“Shall we have some tea?” she said.
“Yes. Shall I make some?”
“Do.”
He went into the kitchen and made tea. She curled up on the sofa with another book. He hoped it was all going to be cosy again.
They had tea. Evening came — and they talked desultorily. He hoped everything was all right. But she took her book, and he went to his songs. As he was working he suddenly heard her Pouf! of laughter, and glanced up. She was curled on the sofa, her face and eyes were shining curiously, and her head was pressed back as a cobra presses back its head, flattening its neck.
“I must think of you and Mama,” she said. “You looked such a fool.”
He moved the green-shaded reading lamp to one side.
“Why?” he said.
“Shrinking in your chair. Why were you so frightened?”
“Frightened? When was I frightened?”
“You were terrified — of Mama.”
“That’s a lie.”
“No, not at all. I could see you. You looked terrified — and you were.”
“I was not terrified. It’s ridiculous.”
“But why did you go so little? You went so small in your chair, I thought you were going to vanish altogether.”
“What should I do?”
“But why were you so overwhelmed? Why did you shrink so small? I was simply astonished.”
“I didn’t shrink at all. What could I say to a woman with white hair — what could I say? What was the good of saying anything?”
“Yes, but why should you go pale and shrink six sizes smaller than before. It was a sight to see you.”
“You shouldn’t have looked then. You shouldn’t have let me in for it. She’s your damned mother.”
“I let you in for it! I! You let yourself in for it. And then you shrivel up — ” she poufed with laughter.
“Have you said about enough?” he said, leaning forward over the desk, and his eyes beginning to burn.
“What am I saying? I’m just telling you.”
“Have you about finished?”
“No. Not at all. I want to know why you look such a fool.”
A blacker shadow went over his face.
“Because you, blast you, make a fool of me,” he said sullenly.
“You must be a poor creature,” she said, “if an old woman’s schimpfing makes you want to crawl under the desk.” And she laughed unpleasantly. “I thought you were going to bark at her — ” she laughed more — ”bark at her like a dog.”
But he, looking daggers, rose and went to the open door, to look at the night from the balcony. She got down from the sofa and confronted him.
“I thought you were going to crawl under here like a dog in a kennel — ” her head dropped loose with laughter — ”and bark — bark at Mama!” She laughed till she was weak. And he only stood and looked at her with black eyes of fury. Because he was sore with many unalleved humiliations, a little blinded by his own sore head.
“Look!” she cried. “Look!” — and she moved the paper- basket, and crept into the space between the two sides of the desk. He stood stock still, and his cheek went yellow with fury and humiliation. She was so weak with laughter, that her forehead sank to the floor, as she kneeled bunched up under the desk. Then she looked up and barked at him.
“Wuff! Wuff-wuff-wuff! Wuff!”
After which she collapsed with another little shriek of laughter.
He could see it was funny. But like a bear with a sore nose, his soreness was too big for him. He went livid with anger.
“Now stop!” he said. And the sound of his voice startled her. She looked up at him.
“Now stop!” he said.
And his face was transfigured. She did not know it. It was a mask of strange, impersonal, blind fury. She crawled out from under the desk, and rose to her feet.
“Can’t you stand a joke?” she said.
“I’ve had enough!” he answered, and his eyes came upon her with a black leap.
“But why? Are you such a poor thing you can’t stand being laughed at sometimes? You looked a big enough fool!”
But his eyes only watched her from the white blotch of his face. And she winced. It wasn’t a human being looking at her. Out of a ghastly mask a black, horrible force seemed to be streaming. She winced, and was frightened. Oh God, these Englishmen, what depths of horrors had they at the bottom of their souls! She was rather frightened of him, as of a mad thing.
“Can I never laugh at you?” she said.
“Not more than enough,” he said.
She could see his heart beating in his throat. And still the black, impersonal, horrible look lingered on his brow and in his eyes, his face was void.
“And must you say when it’s enough?” she asked, almost submissively. She was afraid of him as she might be of a rock which was just going to fall.
“Yes,” he said. And he looked full into her again. And she was frightened — not of him, personally — but of some powerful impersonal force of which he was only the vehicle: a force which he hardly could contain, and which seemed ready to break horribly out of him.
She became quite still, went and curled up with her book again. He sat motionless at the desk, his heart plunging violently, a sort of semi-conscious swoon drowsing his brain. He had almost forgotten, forgotten these horrible rages. When he was a boy of thirteen his sister could taunt them up in him. And he knew he could have murdered her. But that was long ago, and he had forgotten. Now suddenly the black storm had broken out again. And he was no longer a boy. He was a man now.
He sat with his head dropped — brooding, oblivious in a kind of dark, intense inwardness. There was an unspeakable silence in the room. She glanced at him from time to time. But he was motionless and as if invisible to her.
Rather nervously she slipped from her sofa and came and crouched at his side, and very timidly put her hand on his knee. He did not move. But awful fire of desire went through him at once, so that his limbs felt like molten iron. He could not move.
“Are you cross with me?” she said wistfully. And her hand sank closer on his knee.
He turned and looked down at her. A strange, almost unseeing expansion was in his eyes, as he looked on her. And he saw her face luminous, clear, frail, like a sky after a thunder-rain, shining with tender frail light. And in his breast and in his heart the great throbs of love-passion struck and struck again, till he felt he would die if he did not have her. And yet he did not move.
“Say you’re not cross! Say it!” she murmured. And she put her arms round his hips, as he sat in the chair and she crouched before him. And he took her in his arms — her soft, deep breasts, her soft sides — !
Ah God, the terrible agony and bliss of sheer passion, sheer, surpassing desire. The agony and bliss of such an embrace, the very brink of death, and yet the sheer overwhelming wave of life itself. Ach, how awful and utterly unexpected it is, before it happens: like drowning, or like birth. How fearful, how causeless, how forever voiceless.
Gilbert afterwards lay shattered, his old soul, his old mind and psyche shattered and gone. And he lay prostrate, a new thing, a new creature: a prostrate, naked, new thing.
And he and Johanna slept, with his arm round her, and her breast, one breast, in his hand: the perfect, consummating sleep of true, terrible marriage. As a new-born child sleeps at the breast, so the newly-naked, shattered, new-born couple sleep together upon the heaving wave of the invisible creative life, side by side, two together, enveloped in fruition.
Ah gentle reader, what have we done! What have we done, that sex, and the sacred, awful communion should have become degraded into a thing of shame, excused only by the accident of procreation, or the perversion of spiritual union. It is no spiritual union. It is the living blood-soul in each being palpitating from the shock of a new metamorphosis. What have we done, that men and women should have so far lost themselves, and lost one another, that marriage has become a mere affair of comradeship, “pals,” or brother-and-sister business, or spiritual unison, or prostitution? Ah God, God, why do we always try to run away from our own splendour. Why are we all such Jonahs? And why must I be the whale to swim back to the right shore with you, gentle reader.
Marriage, gentle reader, rests upon the root-quivering of the awful, surpassing sex embrace, full and unspeakable. It is a terrible adjustment of two fearful opposites, their approach to a final crisis of contact, and then the flash and explosion, as when lightning is released. And then, the two, the man and the woman, quiver in a newness. This is the real creation: not the accident of childbirth, but the miracle of man-birth and woman-birth. No matter how many children are born, each one of them has still to be man-born, or woman-born, later on. And failing this second birth, there is no life but bread and butter and machine toys: no living life.
And the man-birth and the woman-birth lasts a life long, and is never finished. Spasm after spasm we are born into manhood and womanhood, and there is no end to the pure creative process. Man is born into further manhood, forever: and woman into further womanhood.
And it is no good trying to force it. It must come of itself. It is no use having ideals — they only hinder. One must have the pride and dignity of one’s own naked, unabateable soul: no more.
Don’t strive after finality. Nothing is final except an idea, or an ideal. That can never grow. But eternity is, livingly, the unceasing creation after creation after creation, and heaven is to live onwards, and hell is to hold back. Ah, how many times have I, myself, been shattered and born again, how many times still do I hope to be shattered and born again, still, while I live. In death I do not know, do not ask. Life is my affair.
“And oh that a man would arise in me That the man I am might cease to be.”
Which is putting it backwards. The shattering comes before the arising. So let us pray for our shattering, gentle reader, if we pray at all. And we, who have paid such exaggerated respect for the Gethsemanes and Whitsuntides of renunciation, let us now proceed to pay a deeper, and at last real respect for the Gethsemanes and Whitsuntides of the life-passion itself, the surging life-passion which we will never, never deny, however many ideal gods may ask it.
The year was passing on. The rye was ripe, and the farmhands were out in a line, mowing with the scythe. The corn was tall, taller than the men who stooped and swayed in a slanting line, downhill towards the wood’s edge. Gilbert would stand a long time on his high balcony, watching them work in the misty morning, watching them come in at noon-day, when the farm-bell rang, watching the dusk gather over them. And always, he wished he were one with them — even with the laborers who worked and whetted their scythes and sat down to rest under the shade of the standing corn. To be at one with men in a physical activity. Why could he not? He had only his life with Johanna, and the bit of work he was doing.
The life with Johanna was his all-in-all: the work was secondary. Work was always a solitary, private business with him. It did not unite him with mankind.
Why could he not really mix and mingle with men? For he could not. He could be free and easy and familiar — but from any sort of actual intimacy or commingling, or even unison, something in his heart held back, tugged him back as by a string round his heart. He had no comrade, no actual friend. Casual friends he had in plenty — and he was quite popular. He had even friends who wrote and said they loved him. But the moment he read the words his heart shut like a trap, and would not open. — As far as men were concerned he was cut off — and more or less he knew it. He could share their company and their casual activities, their evenings and their debates and their excursions, but one with them he was not, ever, and he really knew it. As far as men went, he was a separate, unmixing specimen.
Yet he wanted, wanted to have friends and a common activity. At the bottom of his heart he set an immense value on friendship — eternal, manly friendship. And even he longed for association with other men, in some activity. He had almost envied the soldiers — now he almost envied the mowers. Not quite. Not altogether.
Because, of course, he had mixed hard enough with men all his life. He knew what they were. He knew that they had no wonderful secret — none: rather a wonderful lack of secret. He knew they were like ants, that toil automatically in concert because they have no meaning, singly. Singly, men had no meaning. In their concerted activities, soldier or labor, they had all their significance.
And so Gilbert felt himself cut off from one half of man’s life. With a curious, blank certainty he knew it, as he leaned on the balcony, high up, and watched the men at work. Because he could never be an ant in the colony, or a soldier in the hive, he must stand outside of life, outside the man’s life, the world activity, in a way, divorced.
He must make all his life with Johanna, and with his work. He would finish his book of songs before August. And he had written down a sketch of a symphony which he knew in his heart was genuine from him. So much for that.
And he clung with intensity to Johanna. Since he had been with her, and his old closed heart had broken open, he knew that she and he were fate and life to one another. She was his one connection in the universe. And because he had no other connection, and could have no other, apparently; and also because, since his old, closed, more-or-less self-sufficient heart had been broken open, and set in a pulsing correspondence with the soul of the woman, he could no longer live alone; therefore he grasped at Johanna with a kind of frenzy.
The family was working once more for a reunion with Everard. Everard had written saying that he would allow Johanna to have a flat in New York, with her boys, if she would live there in complete honor, as his wife; personally, he could never return to her, as a husband.
This seemed a very fine offer, and a very satisfactory capitulation, in the eyes of the Baron and family. All pressure was to be brought to bear. Johanna was invited again by Louise to Wolfratsberg. Gilbert accompanied her: and was rather coldly received, and made to feel an interloper.
“Tonight,” said the officious Louise, “Johanna will stay here. Because there is much to talk about, which we must say ALONE.”
Whereupon, it being evening, Gilbert said Goodnight to Johanna, and Johanna said Goodnight to him. She half expected, and wished, that he would command, or at least request her to refuse Louise, and to return to Ommerbach with him. He did neither. It was part of his nature, that, cost what it might, everyone must make his own, or her own decision for herself. So he said Goodnight, and Johanna rather mockingly called Goodnight back again.
“You will come tomorrow?” he said, looking at her.
She always quailed when he looked direct at her, and asked her a stripped question.
“Yes,” she said, a little grudgingly. “I’ll come.”
“In the morning?”
“In the morning or in the afternoon.”
“Yes — yes — she shall come. Do not fear,” laughed Louise rather jeeringly.
Gilbert looked at them both with black eyes, and took his leave. He walked back, up the steep hill through the wood, and along the high Landstrasse by the railway and the rye. Night fell, and a moon hung low down. The road was silent, and strangely foreign to him in the night. It seemed to him that it ran towards Russia — he could feel Russia at the end of the road — and that the century was not his own century. England was all switched off, gone out of connection. One might imagine wolves.
He looked round at the bristling shadows. He saw the white, foreign road. And something in his wrists, and in his heart, seemed to be swollen turgid almost to bursting. In his wrists particularly. He veered slowly right round, in a circle, and felt Europe, strange lands, wheeling slowly round him. And he felt he was mad: like a hub of a wheeling continent. And it seemed the skies would break. And his wrists felt turgid, swollen. And very dim in his consciousness was a thought of Johanna in Wolfratsberg being talked to by that infernal Louise: infernal, that was what she was.
At last he came to the house, and entered the silent, empty, dark flat. He went out on to the balcony and hung over the night, hearing the distant hoarseness of the river, seeing the bristling of fir-trees in the dark, and remaining himself suspended.
When a man’s life has been broken open, and its single flow definitely connected with the life-flow in another being, so that some invisible pulsing life-blood flows between their two selves all the time, some current of invisible vital flow, then it is a horror and a madness to derange this flow. And strange, very strange Gilbert felt that night on the balcony: untellable: deranged in soul, in life-self, not in mind. He knew, with stark, deranged inevitability, that Johanna was his fate, he was to be balanced in changeless vital correspondence with her: or else there was before him a wandering incompleteness like idiocy.
However, he went to bed: and awoke after a short time with agony: and looked at the empty pillow at his side: and for a moment it was as if she was dead.
After which he lay watching for the dawn, and the sound of the farm-bells. And never, in all his life, was he more grateful for any sound than for the sound of the jangle-jangling farm- bell in the whitish dawn. He went out at once on to the road. And there, strange enough, was a hunter or forester, in the first dawn-light, walking with a dead deer slung over his shoulder. It was tied by its four little feet, in a bunch, and its head hung back. It was hard to forget.
Soon the laborers came out of the farm, into the morning- chill, dew-drenched world. And he watched them go down the slope with their scythes. And the sun came up. And he thanked God there was sun, and sweet day, and that his soul’s insanity was soothed.
He hung on during the day. Johanna did not come till four o’clock: and then, with Louise and Professor Sartorius. Gilbert made the tea. The conversation was German and critical — and it turned on Goethe. Gilbert said Goethe was cold, less than human, nasty and functional, scientific in the worst sense: that where man should have a reverent soul, Goethe had only a nasty scientific inspiration. He talked, saying what he really felt. It all arose out of a volume of Goethe’s lyrics which Louise had bestowed on him. He talked as one is used to talk, openly.
He was therefore startled when Professor Sartorius bounced up as if a cracker had gone off in his trouser-seat, said he could hear no more of this from one who knew nothing about the great Goethe, ganz und gar nichts, gabbled Danke schon for the tea, seized his hat and made for the door. There he looked round.
“You are coming?” he said to Louise.
“Ja — Ja — ! — Goodbye — ” said Louise to Gilbert, pursing her mouth. “You see we think very much of Goethe — and perhaps you speak without understanding him at all. Yes? — don’t you think?”
Gilbert did not answer, and they went.
“I said what I think, and I believe it’s true,” he said, looking at Johanna with hot, angry eyes.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said.
And she liked him for raising the professorial dust.
They were silent for some moments.
“Are you glad I’ve come?” she said.
“I knew you’d come,” he answered, speaking more jauntily now she was actually here.
“But did you want me?”
He looked at her, a dark look. He could not bear such questions. He was queer to her — incomprehensible. He did not seem a bit glad. Yet she was awfully glad to be with him again — inexpressibly. Why wasn’t he festive too? Oh she was so glad. She had escaped again. Queer and sombre and inscrutable he was. Why didn’t he say anything.
“You are glad, aren’t you, that I’ve come back to you?” she said, looking round the room with pleasure.
“Why should you ever stay away!” he replied, with a good deal of resentment showing.
“Oh, I should think I can stay away one night,” she replied lightly, flattered.
“But Louise is a treacherous creature, really,” she said.
“Why?”
He still did not believe in the tricks of the other woman.
Johanna was rather piqued that he did not make a fuss of her: did not make love to her. But he didn’t. He was silent, and rather withheld. Inside him his soul was gripped and tense, as from the shock, and from a certain desperate clutching at certainty. He had had a shock: and his soul was desperate. It is a horrible thing for a man to realise, not so much in his mind as in his soul, that his very life, his very being depends upon his connection with another being. It is a terrible thing to realise that our soul’s sanity and integrity depends upon the adjustment of another individual to ourself: that if this individual, wantonly or by urgency break the adjustment and depart, the soul must bleed to death, not whole, and not quite sane.
This pretty piece of knowledge Gilbert realised in his clairvoyant depths. And it shook him profoundly at the time, so that he could not gather himself together, or come forth, or be free. He could not finally trust Johanna: there was some strain of volition in his heart. So his love-making was gripped and intense and almost cruel.
Two nights after this he awoke again with a start. He felt at once that Johanna was not at his side. In the same instant he heard a low, muffled sound that seemed to shatter his heart.
He sat up. There was a white blotch beneath the low window. It was Johanna crouching there, sobbing.
“What is it? Why are you there?”
“Nothing,” she sobbed.
“Why have you got up? You’ll be cold.”
“Oh no — oh no — ” she sobbed.
“But what’s the matter? Come back to bed.”
“No — No — no-o!” she sobbed madly.
The night and the dark room seemed to bristle with the sound.
“What is the matter? Is anything wrong?” he said. At last he was perhaps full awake: if man is ever full awake in the middle of the sleep-night.
“No — no! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” she sobbed in a wild despair.
He rose in pure bewilderment, and went to her.
“But what is it,” he said, taking her gently in his arms as he crouched beside her. “Tell me what it is.”
“Oh, you are cruel to me, you are cruel to me, you are — ” she sobbed, with the strange, irrational continuance of a child.
“I? Why? How? How am I cruel to you?”
“You are! You torture me. You torture me — yes — you do!”
“But how? How? I don’t torture you. — You are cold. You are quite cold. Come to bed. You are cold.”
“No. No. You don’t love me. You are cruel to me. Oh, you are cruel to me, you are.”
“But come to bed — you are so cold — come to bed and tell me how. Come to bed and tell me how — come and be warm.”
“You’ll torture me. You’ll torture me.”
“No no! I’ll only make you warm. Come. Come.”
At last, still sobbing in the curious abandon, she let herself be led back to the bed. He took her in his arms, and wrapped the bedclothes round her closely, and wrapped her with himself drawing her in to his breast, and putting his cheek down upon her round, soft head, so that he seemed to have folded her all together.
“You are cruel! You are cruel to me,” she sobbed, sobbing more violently, but with the curious heavy remoteness departing from the sound.
“But I’m not!” he said. “I’m not. How am I? I love you. I love you. I only love you. And I love nothing but you in all the world — nothing in all the world. How am I?”
“You are. You don’t really love me.”
“I do. I do nothing else. What have you got in this state for? It’s ridiculous. And you are cold through.”
He gathered her closer and closer. Her sobbing was subsiding.
“Because you don’t love me,” she sobbed, “and it makes you cruel to me. You torture me.”
“I don’t,” he said, clutching her nearer. “Tell me how. — Are you getting warm now?”
“Yes,” she piped faintly.
“And it’s nonsense,” he said. “I do love you, my love. If only I didn’t love you so much. — You’re so cold still. Why are you so silly? Why are you so silly. You startled me horribly.”
“But you don’t know.”
“Yes I do! My love! My pigeon. Be warm, be warm, my love — be warm with me.”
She wriggled and nestled nearer, and gave a little shuddering sound.
“Now you’re getting warm,” he sang softly, in a monotone. “Now you’re getting warm with me. Aren’t you, my love. We’re getting warm, so warm, aren’t we.”
She nestled nearer and nearer in his arms, seeming to get smaller, whilst he seemed to grow bigger in the darkness.
“To say I don’t love you! To say such things!” he whispered into her hair. ‘.’To say I don’t love you — ! when — oh God!” And he clung to her and enfolded her as a tree enfolds a great stone with its roots. And she nestled in silence enveloped by him.
So they were happy again, and restored — but a little more frightened than before. They had both had a lesson — and each began to fear the other, and to fear the inter-relation: perhaps a wholesome fear.
As Johanna sat in bed having her coffee she brooded as her plaits dangled. He sat on a chair by the bed, where he had carried the little table and the tray. He too was quiet. His heart was still again.
“Oh but Louise is wicked!” said Johanna, between the sips of her coffee. “She’s wicked.”
“Why?” he asked. When he was quiet and happy in his heart he did not pay much attention.
“She’s wicked. She’d like to injure us. She’d like to damage our love, now she thinks it is really there. Oh, she’s a wicked one. I shall beware of her in the future.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I shan’t let her play her tricks with me again. She thinks me a fool. But I’ve found her out.”
It was an unwelcome letter which arrived from Everard that morning. This time it was abuse — and warning. “And what kind of life do you hope to have with that lout?” wrote the husband. “He will not treat you as I have done. He will not give you what I have given you. Take care, or before you have finished he will beat you. Men of that sort are not to be trusted.”
Johanna threw these letters aside rather easily. But for Gilbert they were a sore trial. They seemed to insult him in his soul. And he felt in the wrong, confronted with them. For which, once more, he was a fool. But centuries of insistence have contrived to put him in the wrong — and he was a child of the old culture. It took some time for him to roll the centuries and their tablets of stone out of his spirit.
They walked in the woods, where the shade was grateful. The little birds, tree-creepers, ran up and down the trunks of the beeches like odd flies, and squirrels came, with their snaky, undulating leap running from tree to tree, darting up a round trunk, and peeping from the edge at our friends. Gilbert nodded at them, and they chatter-chatter-chattered at him.
Gilbert finished his book of songs, and posted it off to London. The correspondence with Everard continued. August was drawing near — and then Ommerbach was no longer a place of refuge. After two more weeks, what were they to do, he and Johanna? They did not know.
As they were walking homewards in the lovely warm July evening, they heard a motor-car behind them, running out from Munich. They stood aside on the grass to let it pass, when, to their surprise, the face of Louise appeared in the window. She waved to them, and immediately called to the driver to stop.
“Yes,” she said, “from here I will walk on.” She paid the driver, and turned to Gilbert.
“I want,” she said, “to have a talk with you. You will walk with me? — yes?”
She was in her dark-green silk town dress, and was looking very beautiful and rich.
“No,” said Johanna. “He has a cold, and is tired.”
“You are too tired? Yes? Oh, I can walk alone.”
“No, I am not tired,” he said.
“Are you sure?” said Louise.
“He is tired, and he’s got a cold,” said Johanna.
“Oh, Johanna — er ist doch ein Mann — he really is a man, and can speak for himself,” said Louise.
“Will you go?” said Johanna.
“Yes, I will walk along. I shan’t be very long,” he said.
“Goodbye,” cried Johanna. And she went into the house in a fury. Gilbert wondered at her unkindness.
He and Louise continued along the evening road together. And she had a heart to heart with him. She was very nice — very sweet — very kind: and so thoughtful for him, so thoughtful for him. He expanded and opened to her, and spread out his soul for her and his thoughts like a dish of hors d’ceuvres for her. And she tasted these hors d’ceuvres of him, and found them rather piquant, although he was a naive youngling, of course, compared to the all-knowing professors of Germany.
And so she talked seriously to him — about Johanna and his future and her future. And she said she believed that Johanna loved him, but oh, oh it would be so hard, and did he really think love was so important.
And, yes he did, said naive Gilbert. What else mattered. And “Yes. Yes. I know,” replied Louise — but what of all the other difficulties. And Gilbert said they couldn’t be helped. And Louise asked did he want to marry Johanna, if the divorce could be brought about. And he said he did. And she asked him, ah, life was so complicated — might he not change: he was young, he was fresh to life: might he not love some other woman? Johanna was older than he, and mother of two children. Would he not find it a burden, later, and wish to love some young girl, some young creature fresh to life — whom he could make all his own: a little like Marta — came the wicked suggestion. Johanna could never be all his, for had not twelve years of her life belonged to another man! — etc. etc.
To all of which our hero, strutting very heroic and confidential and like a warbling Minnesinger beside the beautiful, expensive woman, along the twilight road, replied in extenso, giving his reasons and his ideas and his deductions, and all he thought upon the matter, all he had thought in the past, all he would think in the future, and he sounded very sweet, a soul of honey and fine steel, of course. And Louise sipped it all, and estimated the honey for what it was worth, and the steel for what it also was worth, and found him a naive babbler, of course, compared to a German professor, but none the less, not unsympathetic to herself.
So they parted at last, at the entrance to Wolfratsberg, both in a whoosh of wonderful sympathetic understanding, after their Rausch of soul-communion. And he walked back the long five miles with a prancing step, fancying himself somewhat, and intensely flattered by the attentive Louise: and she went on to her house, brooding and feeling triumphant that she had still got her finger in Johanna’s pie.
Meanwhile Johanna sat at home gnawing her wrath, her anxiety, and her fingers. When our bright-eyed Gilbert landed back at last, she broke out on him.
“You must have been all the way.”
“To the beginning of the village.”
“The more fool you. You know you are dead tired.”
“No I’m not. And how could I refuse to go with her?”
“Easily enough. She could have gone on in the taxi. But you are a simple fool. Any woman who likes to give you a flattering look, or ask you for something, can dangle you after her at the end of a piece of string. Interfering minx that she is! And you to be taken in, after the other day. I bet you poured yourself out to her.”
“No I didn’t. We only talked.”
“What else should you do! I know what talk means, with folks like you and her. Nasty soul messing, that’s what! What did she want? What had she got up her sleeve?”
“Nothing. She only talked about how we should manage — and what there was to consider.”
“You are a fool — I hate you. Talking it over with her — everything — everything — I know. How much you love me and are ready to sacrifice for me. I hate you. I hate you. You are always ready for a soul mess with one of her sort. Don’t come near me.”
“But it wasn’t a soul mess.”
“It was. I can see it in your face. I hate you when you look like that. And after the other day too. You know what she wants. You know what she’s after. She wants to make mischief between us.”
Gilbert didn’t feel guilty of the mischief part of it — perhaps a little ashamed of the deep, soulful confidence — his dish of hors d’auvres. But in one respect he was not like Johanna. Talk, sympathy, soul-truck had very little influence on his actions. He did not act from the same centres as he talked from, and sympathised from, and soul-communed from. — Whereas Johanna was very risky to meddle with. Set a cycle of ideas and emotions going in her, and heaven knows how fatally logical she might be in her resultant action. Hence his unreasoning horror of her loss the other day. And hence her not unwarranted anxiety this evening. But the same logic did not apply to him as to her.
However, this storm blew over also, though not without a certain damage done.
It was necessary to decide what move to make. Louise had become suddenly quite friendly. She came to tea.
“Have you never been to Italy? Oh but it is lovely! Why not go there? Why not go, and walk some of the distance!”
“But money?” said Gilbert.
“Ach money! Money will come.”
Again she said it. And he was all his life grateful to her for the laconic indifference with which she said it. For some reason, he believed her. “Money will come.”
Then why not go to Italy? Why not act on Louise’s suggestion?
Our pair of finches grew wildly excited, ready for flight.
Money would come. It didn’t mean that Louise, or anyone else, was ready to give it, for all that. However, Gilbert had nine pounds, and Johanna six.
To Italy, then. Why not?
To Italy!