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“NOT I, BUT THE WIND. . .”

 

BY  FRIEDA  LAWRENCE

geb. Freiin von Richthofen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1934

THE VIKING PRESS · NEW YORK

 

 

It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.

Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranches de Taos. A shepherd’s fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence’s big tree with his phœnix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.

This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one’s blood.

But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.

I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the “petit point” canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.

It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.

So here I sit and try to write.

I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? Is it any use, my writing?

Do I want to blow my own trumpet? Yes, I do. But will it have a clear rousing sound or will it be a bit wheezy and out of tune? Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can’t I?

After all, this is my book, that I am writing. Do I understand anything at all or am I only recording unliving dull facts?

Is it a genuine necessity for me to write or has Lawrence said all a million times better than I could? Will this, that costs me so much, be of any use, any pleasure to anybody else? Will others who come after learn from our life, take from it the good and avoid our mistakes? . . . I wonder. . . .

Anyhow, I will try to write as honestly as I can. Lies are all very well in their place but the truth seems to me so much more interesting and proud, but truth is not so easily conquered, there is always more of it, like a bottomless pit is truth. It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills. But a few realities remained, a lasting truth triumphed.

Whatever happened on the surface of everyday life, there blossomed the certainty of the unalterable bond between us, and of the everpresent wonder of all the world around us.

We had so many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters.

There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence’s chief themes. He felt that each should keep intact his own integrity and isolation, yet at the same time preserve a mutual bond like the north and south poles which between them enclose the world.

Then there was the class war. We came from different worlds. We both had to reach beyond our class, to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.

Then beyond class there was the difference in race, to cross over to each other. He, the Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along.

Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.

As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.

I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here’s a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy! Then another day—alas! all is changed: it is chilly and it rains and I wish, how I wish, it were sunny again.

I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.

Life and emotions change in us. We are not pictures, “Patiences on monuments”; anyhow Lawrence wasn’t, nor I either. Ours was not just a love affair, just as his writing was not just writing as a profession.

His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failures and the miseries of my past. He made me new and fresh, that I might live freely and lightly as a bird. He fought for the liberty of my being, and won. Just as in his writings he tried, with his fierce and responsible love for his fellowmen, to free them of the stale old past, and take the load of all the centuries of dead thought and feeling on himself.

Will the world gain from him as I did? I hope so, in the long run.

“Not I, But the Wind. . .”

As I look back now it surprises me that Lawrence could have loved me at first sight as he did. I hardly think I could have been a very lovable woman at the time. I was thirty-one and had three children. My marriage seemed a success. I had all a woman can reasonably ask. Yet there I was, all “smock ravelled,” to use one of Lawrence’s phrases.

I had just met a remarkable disciple of Freud and was full of undigested theories. This friend did a lot for me. I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self.

Being born and reborn is no joke, and being born into your own intrinsic self, that separates and singles you out from all the rest—it’s a painful process.

When people talk about sex, I don’t know what they mean—as if sex hopped about by itself like a frog, as if it had no relation to the rest of living, one’s growth, one’s ripening. What people mean by sex will always remain incomprehensible to me, but I am thankful to say sex is a mystery to me.

Theories applied to life aren’t any use. Fanatically I believed that if only sex were “free” the world would straightaway turn into a paradise. I suffered and struggled at outs with society, and felt absolutely isolated. The process left me unbalanced. I felt alone. What could I do, when there were so many millions who thought differently from me? But I couldn’t give in, I couldn’t submit. It wasn’t that I felt hostile, only different. I could not accept society. And then Lawrence came. It was an April day in 1912. He came for lunch, to see my husband about a lectureship at a German University. Lawrence was also at a critical period of his life just then. The death of his mother had shaken the foundations of his health for a second time. He had given up his post as a schoolmaster at Croydon. He had done with his past life.

I see him before me as he entered the house. A long thin figure, quick straight legs, light, sure movements. He seemed so obviously simple. Yet he arrested my attention. There was something more than met the eye. What kind of a bird was this?

The half-hour before lunch the two of us talked in my room, French windows open, curtains fluttering in the spring wind, my children playing on the lawn.

He said he had finished with his attempts at knowing women. I was amazed at the way he fiercely denounced them. I had never before heard anything like it. I laughed, yet I could tell he had tried very hard, and had cared. We talked about Œdipus and understanding leaped through our words.

After leaving, that night, he walked all the way to his home. It was a walk of at least five hours. Soon afterwards he wrote to me: “You are the most wonderful woman in all England.”

I wrote back: “You don’t know many women in England, how do you know?” He told me, the second time we met: “You are quite unaware of your husband, you take no notice of him.” I disliked the directness of this criticism.

He came on Easter Sunday. It was a bright, sunny day. The children were in the garden hunting for Easter eggs.

The maids were out and I wanted to make some tea. I tried to turn on the gas but didn’t know how. Lawrence became cross at such ignorance. Such a direct critic! It was something my High and Mightiness was very little accustomed to.

Yet Lawrence really understood me. From the first he saw through me like glass, saw how hard I was trying to keep up a cheerful front. I thought it was so despicable and unproud and unclean to be miserable, but he saw through my hard bright shell.

What I cannot understand is how he could have loved me and wanted me at that time. I certainly did have what he called “sex in the head”; a theory of loving men. My real self was frightened and shrank from contact like a wild thing.

So our relationship developed.

One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a long walk through the early-spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will.

We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Then he put daisies in the brook, and they floated down with their upturned faces. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely.

Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me. After that, things happened quickly.

He came to see me one Sunday. My husband was away and I said: “Stay the night with me.” “No, I will not stay in your husband’s house while he is away, but you must tell him the truth and we will go away together, because I love you.”

I was frightened. I knew how terrible such a thing would be for my husband, he had always trusted me. But a force stronger than myself made me deal him the blow. I left the next day. I left my son with his father, my two little girls I took to their grandparents in London. I said good-bye to them on Hampstead Heath, blind and blank with pain, dimly feeling I should never again live with them as I had done.

Lawrence met me at Charing Cross Station, to go away with him, never to leave him again.

He seemed to have lifted me body and soul out of all my past life. This young man of twenty-six had taken all my fate, all my destiny, into his hands. And we had known each other barely for six weeks. There had been nothing else for me to do but submit.

FRIEDA LAWRENCE

We met at Charing Cross and crossed the grey channel sitting on some ropes, full of hope and agony. There was nothing but the grey sea, and the dark sky, and the throbbing of the ship, and ourselves.

We arrived at Metz where my father was having his fifty-years-of-service jubilee. Prewar Germany: the house was full of grandchildren and relatives, and I stayed in a hotel where Lawrence also stayed. It was a hectic time. Bands were playing in honour of my father, telegrams came flying from England. Lawrence was pulling me on one side, my children on the other. My mother wanted me to stay with her. My father, who loved me, said to me in great distress: “My child, what are you doing? I always thought you had so much sense. I know the world.” I answered: “Yes, that may be, but you never knew the best.” I meant to know the best.

There was a fair going on at Metz at the moment. I was walking with my sister Johanna through the booths of Turkish Delight, the serpentmen, the ladies in tights, all the pots and pans.

Johanna, or “Nusch,” as we called her, was at the height of her beauty and elegance, and was the last word in “chic.” Suddenly Lawrence appeared round a corner, looking odd, in a cap and raincoat. What will she think of him, I thought.

He spoke a few words to us and went away. To my surprise, Johanna said: “You can go with him. You can trust him.”

At first nobody knew of Lawrence’s presence except my sisters. One afternoon Lawrence and I were walking in the fortifications of Metz, when a sentinel touched Lawrence on the shoulder, suspecting him of being an English officer. I had to get my father’s help to pull us out of the difficulty. Lo, the cat was out of the bag, and I took Lawrence home to tea.

He met my father only once, at our house. They looked at each other fiercely—my father, the pure aristocrat, Lawrence, the miner’s son. My father, hostile, offered a cigarette to Lawrence. That night I dreamt that they had a fight, and that Lawrence defeated my father.

The strain of Metz proved too great for Lawrence and he left for the Rhineland. I stayed behind in Metz.

Here are some of Lawrence’s letters, which show his side of our story up to that time.

FRIEDA VON RICHTHOFEN

I found these letters by accident in my mother’s writing desk after Lawrence’s death. At the time he wrote them, I was in such a bewildered state of mind, the depth of their feeling did not touch me, all I wanted was to be with him and have peace. I have not found my letters to him.

Last night I looked into the flames that leap in the big adobe fireplace that Lawrence built with the Indians, here at the ranch, in my room. He found an iron hoop to make the large curve of the fireplace. I don’t know how he did it but the chimney draws well, the big logs burn fast.

Those leaping flames seemed he himself flickering in the night. This morning I found the wild red columbines that I had first found with him. There they were at my feet, in the hollow where the workmen have been cutting the logs for the new house. A delicate blaze of startling red and yellow, in front of me, the columbines, like gay small flags.

A rabbit stood still behind an oak shrub and watched me. A humming-bird hummed at me in consternation, as startled at me as I was at him. These things are Lawrence to me.

I shrink from remembering and putting down that almost too great intensity of our life together. I resent committing to paper for others to read what was so magic and new, our first being together. I wanted to keep it secret, all to myself, secretly I wanted to exult in the riches he gave me of himself and me and all the world.

But I owe it to him and to myself to write the truth as well as I can. I laugh at the claims of others that he might have loved them and that he didn’t care for me at all. He cared only too much. I laugh when they write of him as a lonely genius dying alone. It is all my eye. The absolute, simple truth is so very simple.

I laugh when they want to make him out a brutal, ridiculous figure, he who was so tender and generous and fierce.

What does it amount to that he hit out at me in a rage, when I exasperated him, or mostly when the life around him drove him to the end of his patience? I didn’t care very much. I hit back or waited till the storm in him subsided. We fought our battles outright to the bitter end. Then there was peace, such peace.

I preferred it that way. Battles must be. If he had sulked or borne me a grudge, how tedious!

What happened, happened out of the deep necessity of our natures. We were out for more than the obvious or “a little grey home in the West.” Let them jeer at him, those superior people, it will not take away a scrap of his greatness or his genuineness or his love. To understand what happened between us, one must have had the experiences we had, thrown away as much as we did and gained as much, and have known this fulfilment of body and soul. It is not likely that many did.

ᐥᐥᐥ

But here I am far from the little top floor in the Bavarian peasant-house in the Isartal.

Lawrence had met me in Munich.

He had given up the idea of a lectureship at a German University and from now on he lived by his writing. A new phase of life was beginning for both of us. But on me lay still heavily the children I had left behind and could not forget. But we were together, Lawrence and I. A friend had lent us the little top flat with its balcony, three rooms and a little kitchen. The Alps floated above us in palest blue in the early morning. The Isar rushed its glacier waters and hurried the rafts along in the valley below. The great beechwoods stretched for hours behind us, to the Tegernsee.

Here we began our life together. And what a life! We had very little money, about fifteen shillings a week. We lived on black bread that Lawrence loved, fresh eggs, and “ripple”; later we found strawberries, raspberries, and “Heidelbeeren.”

We had lost all ordinary sense of time and place. Those flowers that came new to Lawrence, the fireflies at night and the glow-worms, the first beech leaves spreading on the trees like a delicate veil overhead, and our feet buried in last year’s brown beech leaves, these were our time and our events.

When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being.

I didn’t want people, I didn’t want anything, I only wanted to revel in this new world Lawrence had given me. I had found what I needed, I could now flourish like a trout in a stream or a daisy in the sun. His generosity in giving himself: “Take all you want of me, everything, I am yours”; and I took and gave equally, without thought.

When I asked him: “What do I give you, that you didn’t get from others?” he answered: “You make me sure of myself, whole.”

And he would say: “You are so young, so young!” When I remonstrated: “But I am older than you.”—“Ah, it isn’t years, it’s something else. You don’t understand.”

Anyhow I knew he loved the essence of me as he loved the blueness of the gentians, whatever faults I had. It was life to me.

“You have a genius for living,” he told me.

“Maybe, but you brought it out in me.”

But there were awful nights when he was still ill and feverish and delirious and I was frightened. Death seemed close. But the shadow of sickness soon vanished in the healthy, happy life we lived. He became strong, and full of energy and hope.

He would do nearly all the work of the small flat, bring the breakfast to me with a bunch of flowers that Frau Leitner had left on the milk jug in the early morning.

Frau Leitner had a shop underneath, with shoestrings and sweets, and bacon and brooms and everything under the sun. She gave Lawrence, whom she called “Herr Doktor,” tastes of her “Heidelbeerschnapps,” talking to him in her Bavarian dialect, while I, in a dream of wellbeing, would let time slip by. When I spilt coffee on the pillow I would only turn the pillow over. Nothing mattered except feeling myself live, and him. We talked and argued about everything. Vividly he would present to me all the people he had known in his youth, Walker Street with all its inhabitants, the close intimate life of what, for a better word, I called the common people; his mother, such a queen in her little house, and his father, down at the pit, sharing lunch with the pit-pony. It all seemed romantic to me. And the colliers being drunk on Friday nights and battles going on inevitably, it seemed, every Friday night in nearly all the houses, like a weekly hysteria. I listened enchanted by the hour. But poverty in his home was grievous. Lawrence would never have been so desperately ill if his mother could have given him all the care he needed and the food she could not afford to buy for him with the little money she had.

Bitter it was to him when a friend at the high school who took him home to tea, refused to continue the friendship as soon as he heard Lawrence was a miner’s son. Then I would tell him about my early life in Lorraine. Mine had been a happy childhood. We had a lovely house and gardens outside Metz. I lived through the flowers, as they came: snowdrops, scyllae and crocuses, the enormous oriental poppies in their vivid green leaves so overwhelmingly near one’s small face, the delicate male irises. My father would pick the first asparagus and I would trot behind his bent back. Later in the summer I lived on the fruit trees: cherry, pear, apple, plum, peach trees. I would even go to sleep on them and fall off, sometimes, trying to do my lessons up in them. I did not like school.

First I went to a convent, where I did not learn very much. “Toujours doucement, ma petite Frieda,” they would say to me as I came dashing into class with my Hessian boots. But it was no use; I was a wild child and they could not tame me, those gentle nuns. I was happiest with the soldiers, who had temporary barracks outside our house for years. They invited my sister Johanna and me to their big Christmas tree hung with sausages, cigars, “hearts of gingerbread,” packages from home, and little dolls they had carved for us. And they sang for us accompanied by their mournful harmonicas:

“Wenn ich zu meinem Kinde geh.”

Once my father’s old regiment acted the occasion on which he had received his iron cross in the Franco-Prussian War. It was on the Kaiser’s birthday. After the ceremony the soldiers lifted my father on their shoulders and carried him through the hall. My heart beat to bursting: “What a hero my father is!”

But a few days after one of my special friends, a corporal, told me how he hated being a soldier, how bullied you were, how unjust and stupid it all was, that military life. He stood there talking to me in the garden path, in his bright blue uniform, while he tied some roses. He had a mark over his bed for each day he had still to serve, he told me. A hundred and nineteen more there were, he said. I looked up at him and understood his suffering. After that the flags of the dragoons and the splendid bands of the regiments had no longer the same glamour as they passed along the end of the garden to the Exerzierplatz.

When the regiments were filing past, Johanna and I sat on the garden wall, very grandly. Then we would throw pears and apples into the ranks. Great confusion would arise. An irate major turned toward his men and yelled, we popped quickly out of sight behind the wall, only to reappear and begin anew.

What I loved most of all was playing with my boy friends in the fortifications around Metz, among the huts and trenches the soldiers had built. I always liked being with boys and men. Only they gave me the kind of interest I wanted. Women and girls frightened me. My adolescence and youth puzzled me. Pleasure and social stuff left me unsatisfied. There was something more I wanted, I wanted so much. Where would I get it, and from whom? With Lawrence I found what I wanted. All the exuberance of my childhood came back to me.

ᐥᐥᐥ

One day I bathed in the Isar and a heel came off one of my shoes on the rough shore; so I took both shoes off and threw them into the Isar. Lawrence looked at me in amazement. “He’s shocked, as I must walk home barefoot, but it’s a lonely road, it doesn’t matter,” I thought. But it wasn’t that; he was shocked at my wastefulness.

He lectured me: “A pair of shoes takes a long time to make and you should respect the labour somebody’s put into those shoes.”

To which I answered: “Things are there for me and not I for them, so when they are a nuisance I throw them away.”

I was very untidy and careless, so he took great pains to make me more orderly. “Look, put your woollen things in this drawer, in this one your silk clothes, and here your cotton ones.”

It sounded amusing, so I did it.

When I said: “But I like to be like the lilies in the field, who do not spin.”

“What! Don’t they just work hard, those lilies,” was his reply. “They have to bring up their sap, produce their leaves, flowers and seeds!” That was that. Later on he aroused my self-respect. “You can’t even make a decent cup of coffee. Any common woman can do lots of things that you can’t do.”

“Oh,” I thought, “I’ll show him if I can’t.” But that was later on.

One day, in Munich, seeing all the elegant people in the streets I had an aristocratic fit. I bought some handkerchiefs with an F and a little crown on them. When I brought them home he said: “Now I’ll draw my coat-of-arms.” He drew a pickaxe, a school-board, a fountain-pen with two lions rampant. “When they make me a Lord, which they never will,” he said. Then, half jokingly, but I took it seriously: “Would you like me to become King of England?” I was distressed. “Isn’t he satisfied, the whole universe is ours, does he want to be so dull a thing as a king?” But I never doubted that he might have been a king if he wanted to. Then he would write poems for me, poems I took a little anxiously, seeing he knew me so well.

ᐥᐥᐥ

He would go for walks by himself, and his quick, light feet coming home told me in their footfall how he had enjoyed his adventure.

He would have a large, heroic bunch of flowers, or a tight little posy for me or a bright bird’s feather.

Then the story of his adventure, a deer peeping at him inquisitively from the underbrush, a handsome Bavarian peasant he had spoken to, how raspberries were just coming out, soldiers marching along the road.

Then again we would be thrown out of our paradisial state. Letters would come. The harm we had done; my grief for my children would return red hot.

But Lawrence would console me and say: “Don’t be sad, I’ll make a new heaven and earth for them, don’t cry, you see if I don’t.” I would be consoled yet he was furious when I went on. “You don’t care a damn about those brats really, and they don’t care about you.” I cried and we quarrelled.

“What kind of an unnatural woman would I be if I could forget my children?” Yet my agony over them was my worst crime in his eyes. He seemed to make that agony more acute in me than it need have been. Perhaps he, who had loved his mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children. But I was so sure: “This bond is for ever, nothing in heaven or earth can break it. I must wait, I must wait!”

My father had written: “You travel about the world like a barmaid.” It was a grief to him, who loved me, that I was so poor, and socially impossible.

I only felt wonderfully free, “vogelfrei” indeed. To Lawrence fell the brunt of the fight, and he protected me. “You don’t know how I stand between you and the world,” he said, later on. If I supported him with all my might, the wings of his sure spirit made a shelter for me always.

ᐥᐥᐥ

Now I lie writing by the stream, where it makes a little pool. The bushes all around form an enclosed shelter for bathing, while in front stretches the alfalfa field, then the trees, then the desert, so vast and changing with sun and shadow. Curtains of rain, floating clouds, grey, delicate, thin but to the west today white, large, round, billowing.

It is the end of June. I wonder if the strawberries are ripe, in the hollow by the aqueduct, or if the wild roses are out, the very pink ones, along the stream by the Gallina. Shall I see a wild turkey, if I walk along the path Lawrence took so often, I running behind, to the mouth of the Gallina?

He and Mr. Murry laid the big pipes on pillars of wood to bring the water along. Where tall aspens stand and the Gallina waters come tearing down. Often the pipes had to be fixed, after a cloudburst had broken the whole thing down.

Here at the ranch we are alive and busy, but Lawrence will see it no more.

Last night the coyotes have torn to pieces a young sheep, on the ranch. Poor thing, that looked at me with scared sheep’s eyes, when I drew near. How hateful coyotes are. Mr. Murry tells me they even play with lambs, whisking their tails among them, to get them away more easily. Nature sweet and pure!

This is one of the perfect moments here. The days are swinging their serene hours across the immense skies, the sun sets splendidly, then a star comes, and the young moon in the old moon’s arms. The water sings louder than in the daytime. More and more stars come as the light fades out of the western sky.

But then, in the silence of the beautiful night, the coyotes, a few yards from the house, tore the lamb to pieces. How I wish someone would shoot them all, but they are hard to shoot.

ᐥᐥᐥ

Here I am in the present again, when I want to write of the past. I will go back to Icking, our village in the Isartal, and that young Lawrence who was beginning to spread his wings.

I think of my going into a chapel, in a village near Beuerberg. I looked at the Madonna on the altar; she wasn’t a mater dolorosa, nor of the spiritual sort, she was of the placid peasant type, and I said to her: “Yes, you have a halo round your head, but I feel as if I had a halo around the whole of me, that’s how he makes me feel. You have nothing but a dead son. It doesn’t seem good enough for me. Give me a live man.”

Sitting on a little landing pier, once, by the Kochelsee, dangling our feet in the clear water of the lake, Lawrence was putting the rings of my fingers on my toes to see how they looked in the clear water. Suddenly a shower overtook us. There was a bunch of trees behind, and a road going in both directions. We ran for shelter and must have run in opposite ways. I looked all around but Lawrence was not there. A great fear came over me. I had lost him, perhaps he was drowned, slipped into the lake. I called, I went to look, somehow he had dissolved into the air. I should never see him again. There was always this “not of the earth” quality about him.

By the time I saw him coming down the road, an hour later, I was almost in hysterics. “Brother Moonshine” I called him, as in the German fairytale. He didn’t like that.

Then he would sit in a corner, so quietly and absorbedly, to write. The words seemed to pour out of his hand onto the paper, unconsciously, naturally and without effort, as flowers bloom and birds fly past.

His was a strange concentration, he seemed transferred into another world, the world of creation.

He’d have quick changes of mood and thought. This puzzled me. “But Lawrence, last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.”

“And why shouldn’t I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn’t I?”

We talked about style in writing, about the new style Americans had evolved—cinematographic, he called it.

All this idea of style and form puzzled Lawrence.

For my part, I felt certain that a genuine creation would take its own form inevitably, the way every living thing does.

All those phrases “Art for art’s sake,” “Le style c’est l’homme,” are all very well but they aren’t creation. But Lawrence had to be quite sure in everything.

On some evenings he would be so gay and act a whole revival meeting for me, as in the chapel of his home town.

There was the revivalist parson. He would work his congregation up to a frenzy; then, licking his finger to turn the imaginary pages of the book of Judgment and suddenly darting a finger at some sinner in the congregation: “Is your name written in the book?” he would shout.

A collier’s wife in a little sailor straw hat, in a frenzy of repentance, would clatter down the aisle, throw herself on her knees in front of the altar, and pray: “O Lord, our Henry, he would ’ave come too, only he dursn’t, O Lord, so I come as well for him, O Lord!” It was a marvellous scene! First as the parson then as the collier’s wife Lawrence made me shake with laughter. He told me how desperately ill he had been at sixteen, with inflammation of the lungs, how he was almost dead but fought his way back to life with the fierce courage and vitality that was his. It made me long to make him strong and healthy.

Healthy in soul he always was. He may have been cross and irritable sometimes but he was never sorry for himself and all he suffered.

This poem was written in the Isartal:

LAWRENCE [THE SMALLEST OF THE BOYS]
AND HIS FAMILY

FRIEDA IN BAVARIAN COSTUME

It is five o’clock in the morning. The air is fresh after last night’s heavy rain. There is a slight mist, but the sun from the desert is driving it away.

Suddenly it comes over me so strongly that Lawrence is dead, really dead. The grief for his loss will be my steady companion for the rest of my life. Sometimes it will be a friend, consoling me, putting everything in proper proportion. And sometimes this grief will follow me, dogging my footsteps like a hyena, not wanting me to live. Never will anything matter so desperately any more.

I remember Lawrence saying to me: “You always identify yourself with life, why do you?”

I answered: “Because I feel like it.”

I know now how completely he trusted his life to me, he in whom death was always so near.

I hated that death and I fought against it like a demon, unconsciously on my own. I did not know he was consumptive till years later when the doctor in Mexico told me. All my life with him there was this secret fear that I could not share with him. I had to bear it alone. Then in the end I knew, and it was an awful knowledge, that I could do no more. Death was stronger than I. His life hung by a thread and one day that thread would break. He would die before his time.

This true mountain morning takes me back to our journey across the Alps.

It was in the middle of August that we set out gaily. Neither of us knew Italy at the time, it was a great adventure for both. We packed up our few possessions, three trunks went ahead of us to the Lago di Garda. We set off on foot, with a rucksack each and a Burberry. In the rucksack was a little spirit lamp, we were going to cook our food by the roadside for cheapness.

We started on a misty morning very thrilled. The trees were dripping along the road, but we were happy in our adventure, free, going to unknown parts. We walked along the solid green of the valley of the Isar, we climbed up hills and went down again. One of my desires, to sleep in haylofts, was fulfilled. But sleeping in haylofts is uncomfortable, really. It rained so much and we were soaked. And the wind blows through haylofts and if you cover yourself with a ton of hay you still can’t get warm. Lawrence has described the crucifixes we passed, the lovely chapel he found high up in the mountains. He lit the candles on the altar, for it was evening, read all the exvotos and forgot how tired and hungry he was.

Here are some poems he wrote about this time:

ALL OF ROSES

Lawrence’s birthday came as we were crossing the Alps. I had no present to give him but some edelweiss. That evening we danced and drank beer with the peasants in the Gasthaus of the village we were passing through. His first birthday together. It was all very wonderful. New things happened all the time.

Here is a poem Lawrence wrote:

How I want to recapture the gaiety of that adventurous walk into Italy, romantic Italy, with all its glamour and sunshine.

We arrived at Trento, but alas for the glamour! We could only afford a very cheap hotel and the marks on the walls, the doubtful sheets, and worst of all the W.C.’s were too much for me.

The people were strangers, I could not speak Italian, then.

So, one morning, much to Lawrence’s dismay, he found me sitting on a bench under the statue of Dante, weeping bitterly. He had seen me walk barefoot over icy stubble, laughing at wet and hunger and cold; it had all seemed only fun to me, and here I was crying because of the city-uncleanness and the W.C.’s. It had taken us about six weeks to get there.

We took the train to Riva on the Lago di Garda. It was an Austrian garrison town at that time. Elegant officers in biscuit-coloured trousers and pale-blue jackets walked about with equally elegant ladies. For the first time I looked at Lawrence and myself; two tramps with rucksacks! Lawrence’s trousers were frayed, Miriam’s trousers we called them, for he had bought them with “Miriam.” I had a reddish cotton crêpe dress all uneven waves at the skirt; the colour of the red velvet ribbon had run into my panama hat. I was grateful to the three ladies who took us into their pensione and, instead of fearing the worst for their silver, sent us yellow and blue figs and grapes to our room, where we cooked our meals on the spirit lamp for economy, in fear and trembling of the housemaid. Then we got our trunks.

My sister Johanna had sent me lovely clothes and hats, some “Paquins,” much too elegant for our circumstances; but we dressed up proudly and set forth in triumph.

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At Gargnano we found Villa Igea to spend the winter.

Lawrence for the first time had a place of his own. The first floor of a large villa, our windows looking over the lake, the road running underneath, opposite us the Monte Baldo in rosy sunsets. “Green star Sirius dribbling over the lake,” as Lawrence says in one of his poems.

Here began my first attempt at housekeeping. It was uphill work, in that big bare kitchen with the “fornelli” and the big copper pans. Often the stews and “fritti” had to be rescued, and he would come nobly from his work, never grumbling, when I called: “Lorenzo, the pigeons are burning, what shall I do?”

The first time I washed sheets was a disaster. They were so large and wet, their wetness was overwhelming. The kitchen floor was flooded, the table drenched, I dripped from hair to feet.

When Lawrence found me all misery he called: “The One and Only” (which name stood for the one and only phœnix, when I was uppish) “is drowning, oh, dear!” I was rescued and dried, the kitchen wiped and soon the sheets were hanging to dry in the garden where the “cachi” were hanging red from the trees. One morning he brought me breakfast in bed and in the Italian bedroom there was a spittoon and to my horror a scorpion was on it. To Lawrence’s surprise I said, when he killed it: “Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Ungrateful woman . . . here I am the faithful knight killing the dragons and that’s all I get.”

One of our favourite walks was to Bogliacco, the next village on the Garda, where we drank wine and ate chestnuts with the Bersaglieri who seemed quiet and sad and didn’t say much. My window high up over the road was a joy to me. Bersaglieri came past in their running march with a gay spark of a tenente at their head, singing: “Tripoli sara’ Italiana.” Secretly people did their bargaining under my windows, at night the youths played their guitars; when I peeped Lawrence was cross.

He was then rewriting his “Sons and Lovers,” the first book he wrote with me, and I lived and suffered that book, and wrote bits of it when he would ask me: “What do you think my mother felt like then?” I had to go deeply into the character of Miriam and all the others; when he wrote his mother’s death he was ill and his grief made me ill too, and he said: “If my mother had lived I could never have loved you, she wouldn’t have let me go.” But I think he got over it; only, this fierce and overpowerful love had harmed the boy who was not strong enough to bear it. In after years he said: “I would write a different ‘Sons and Lovers’ now; my mother was wrong, and I thought she was absolutely right.”

I think a man is born twice: first his mother bears him, then he has to be reborn from the woman he loves. Once, sitting on the little steamer on the lake he said: “Look, that little woman is like my mother.” His mother, though dead, seemed so alive and there still to him.

Towards the end of “Sons and Lovers” I got fed up and turned against all this “house of Atreus” feeling, and I wrote a skit called: “Paul Morel, or His Mother’s Darling.” He read it and said, coldly: “This kind of thing isn’t called a skit.”

While we were at Villa Igea Lawrence wrote also “Twilight in Italy,” and most of the poems from “Look! We Have Come Through!”

His courage in facing the dark recesses of his own soul impressed me always, scared me sometimes.

In his heart of hearts I think he always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men. Woman is so absolute and undeniable. Man moves, his spirit flies here and there, but you can’t go beyond a woman. From her man is born and to her he returns for his ultimate need of body and soul. She is like earth and death to which all return.

Here is a poem:

And always again the mail and tragedy. I was so sure I would be able to be with my children but finally my husband wrote: “If you don’t come home the children have no longer any mother, you shall not see them again.” I was almost beside myself with grief. But Lawrence held me, I could not leave him any more, he needed me more than they did.

But I was like a cat without her kittens, and always in my mind was the care, “Now if they came where would I put them to sleep?” I felt the separation physically as if something tore at my navel-string. And Lawrence could not bear it, it was too much for him. And then again I would turn to him and be healed and forget for a while.

Everybody seemed to condemn us and be against us and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how the whole world couldn’t see how right and wonderful it was to live as we did; I just couldn’t. I said: “Lorenzo, why can’t people live as happily and get as much out of life as we do? Everybody could, with the little money we spend.” And he answered: “You forget that I’m a genius,” half in fun and half seriously.

I wasn’t impressed by the genius at that time, making a long nose at him, taking everything like the wind and the rain, but now I know that the glamour of it all was his genius.

He was always absolutely sure of himself, sure that the Lord was with him. Once we had a big storm on our way to Australia and I said, afraid: “Now, if this ship goes down . . .” He answered: “The ship that I am on won’t go down.”

Here follow some letters he wrote to my sister Else:

In the spring I went from the Villa Igea to Baden-Baden and saw my father for the last time; he was ill and broken. “I don’t understand the world any more,” he said.

Lawrence walked over the big St. Bernard with a friend. We met in London after a fortnight to see my children and to arrange about the divorce. We stayed with the Garnetts. One morning I met my children on their way to their school. They danced around me in complete delight. “Mama, you are back, when are you coming home?”

“I can’t come back, you must come to me. We shall have to wait.”

How I suffered not to be able to take them with me! So much of my spontaneous living had gone to them and now this was cut off. When I tried to meet them another morning they had evidently been told that they must not speak to me and only little white faces looked at me as if I were an evil ghost. It was hard to bear, and Lawrence, in his helplessness, was in a rage.

We met Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry at that time. I think theirs was the only spontaneous and jolly friendship that we had. We had tea with Katherine in her flat in London. If I remember rightly her room had only cushions and pouffes and a large aquarium with gold-fish and shells and plants.

I thought her so exquisite and complete, with her fine brown hair, delicate skin, and brown eyes which we later called her “gu-gu” eyes. She was a perfect friend and tried her best to help me with the children. She went to see them, talked to them and took them letters from me. I loved her like a younger sister.

I fell for Katherine and Murry when I saw them quite unexpectedly on the top of a bus, making faces at each other and putting their tongues out.

We also met Cynthia and Herbert Asquith, at Margate. Cynthia seemed to me lovely as Botticelli’s Venus. We also saw Eddie Marsh and Sir Walter Raleigh and Cynthia’s relations at her house, which was an unusual one, made all of ship’s timber. Cynthia was always a loyal friend, even through the war, when friends were rare.

But Lawrence wanted to go away from England, also because the divorce was not finished. Later we returned to Bavaria. There Lawrence wrote “The Prussian Officer.” The strange struggle of those two opposite natures, the officer and his servant, seems to me particularly significant for Lawrence. He wrote it before the war but as if he had sensed it. The unhappy, conscious man, the superior in authority envying the other man his simple, satisfied nature. I felt as if he himself was both these people.

They seemed to represent the split in his soul, the split between the conscious and the unconscious man.

To grow into a complete whole out of the different elements that we are composed of is one of our most elemental tasks. It is a queer story and it frightened me at the time of the dark corners of Lawrence’s soul, the human soul altogether. But his courage in facing the problems and horrors of life always impressed me. Often he was ill when his consciousness tried to penetrate into deeper strata, it was an interplay of body and soul and I in real agony would try to understand what was happening. He demanded so much of me and I had to be there for him so completely. Sometimes it was I who forced him to go deeper and roused his inner conflict. When I went away it was always terrible. He hated me for going away. “You use me as a scientist his ‘dissecting rabbit,’ I am your ‘Versuchs Kaninchen,’ ” I told him.

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We wanted to go to Italy again.

The next winter we found a little cottage, “Fiascherino,” near Lerici—finding a new more southern Italy and settling down for a while like gipsies in their camp; always more adventure.

We had a large piece of land with olive trees and vegetables running down to the little bay where we bathed and kept a flat-bottomed boat, on which Lawrence went out to sea through the surf. I was on the shore watching him like a hen who has hatched a duckling and yelled in a rage: “If you can’t be a real poet, you’ll drown like one, anyhow.”

Shelley was drowned not so far away. I spent lazy days lying in a hammock watching the fishermen with their beautiful red-sailed boats underneath my high rock. I watched the submarines from Spezia bobbing up and down. We had a maid, Elide, who looked after us and loved us, and her mother Felice was mostly there too. “Bocca di mosca!” she would shout at her daughter. They loved us quite ferociously; fought to buy things cheaply for us in the market and felt absolutely responsible for us. One of Elide’s griefs was that Lawrence would go out in his old clothes; she would rush after him with another coat: “Signer Lorenzo, Signor Lorenzo,” and force him to put it on, which is more than I could have done. . . . When I took her along to Spezia for Christmas shopping she behaved as if she were attending the Queen of Italy at least, much to my chagrin. Nothing was too good for “la mia Signora. . . .”

We went once to visit the Waterfields at their lovely old castle, “Aula,” near Sarzana. We slept there in such a terrifically large room that it overwhelmed us, the beds looked so tiny in the vast room that we brought them close together, to make a larger spot in the vastness . . . it was a beautiful place, high up above the Magra, wide river arms underneath . . . there were flowers growing on the wide fortress walls, a dantesque sunrise; we were impressed.

The cottage at Fiascherino had only three small rooms and a kitchen and I tried to make it look as cheerful as possible; it did not matter what I did with them, for we were out of doors most of the day; had our meals outdoors and took long walks, returning only when it grew dark, and built a fire in the downstairs room. I believe the chief tie between Lawrence and me was always the wonder of living . . . every little or big thing that happened carried its glamour with it.

But we also had sordid blows. Mitchell Kennerley of New York had bought copies of “Sons and Lovers” from Duckworth for America and sent a cheque for £25. As I had no money of my own, Lawrence said: “You can spend that for yourself.” I took the cheque to the bank at La Spezia where they told me the date was altered, the cheque must go back to New York. It never returned. For “Sons and Lovers” Lawrence never got any money from America for about twelve years. Meanness made Lawrence always silently angry—it was something not to be thought of, but dismissed, nothing to be done, why waste your energy, then. But I, like a fool, talked furiously when I’d been disappointed. We had many such disappointments later on. With the dangerous quality of his work he accepted his more than doubtful financial position and I think one of my merits in his eyes was my never being eager to be rich or to play a role in the social world. It was hardly merit on my part, I enjoyed being poor and I didn’t want to play a role in the world.

We had met many people who had villas round the bay of La Spezia, English and American. They were friendly, but I said to Lawrence: “I don’t want to be a fraud, let’s tell them that we aren’t married; perhaps they won’t like us any more if they know how it is.”

One charming Miss Huntingdon, who had become a Catholic, was much distressed. “I am fond of you both,” she wrote, “and far be it from me to judge you, but I must tell you that I believe you are wrong, your life together is a mistake, a sin.” Her deep distress made me feel sorry for her, as if she had had to face the same problem and had chosen otherwise. But I was aware of the joyful acceptance and hope in me, that for my part I had chosen what was right. I don’t understand, to this day, what social values really are and what meaning has the whole social game; social standards were never real to me, and the game didn’t ever seem worth the candle. That winter in Fiascherino was a very happy one. He wrote “The Rainbow” there, “The Sisters” it was called at first. When Edward Garnett read it he didn’t like it. This upset Lawrence, that Garnett did not follow his trend. But I said: “You are fighting the old standards, and breaking new ground.” They said I ruined Lawrence’s genius, but I know it is not so.

Lawrence was always busy, he taught me many songs, we sang by the hour in the evenings; he liked my strong voice. He sang with very little voice but, like a real artist that he was, he conveyed the music and the spirit of the song in a marvellous fashion.

We painted together, too. I can see him so absorbed and intent, licking the brush, putting it down on the paper with quick gestures, giving himself completely to everything he was doing and not understanding that I did it all so carelessly and for fun.

I remember the day the piano arrived from Spezia by sea in a little boat and we watched it bobbing round the corner of the foreland, with three Italians, very frightened, fearing to go to the bottom of the sea with it. We felt for them, for it really looked very dangerous. Then at last they pulled up on the shingly beach and it was brought up to our little cottage with terrific shouts of “Avanti, Italiani!”

Christmas came and we had Elide’s relations, about a dozen peasants, in the evening and they sang to us, very much at home with us. Elide’s old mother, Felice, sang: “Da quella parte dove si lev il sol,” and “Di’ a la Marcella che lui sa far l’amor,” with old Pasquale, a duet. The beautiful Luigi was there, who looked so handsome picking olives from the trees; also the Maestro from Telaro, who was in love with Luigi; but she was of higher station and he, alas, wasn’t in love with her. I don’t know if they ever were married or not. But always the tragedy came up . . . it got me from time to time like an illness. We had trespassed the laws of men, if not of God, and you have to pay. Lawrence and I paid in full, and the others, on the contrary, had to pay for want of love and tenderness, and nobody likes to pay. Yet it’s an eternal human law: too much happiness isn’t allowed us mere mortals. And I and Lawrence seemed at times to surpass the measure of human bliss. He could be so deeply and richly happy, that young Lawrence that I have known, before the war crushed so much of his belief in human civilization. . . . His deep, natural love for his fellowmen. . . . The deadness of them, the mechanicalness that triumphed in their souls.

I asked: “What is civilization? What is it, this man-made world that I don’t understand?”

And he said: “It’s like a tree that comes forth out of a race of men, and it grows and flowers, and then it must die.” And sometimes I think that Lawrence was the last green shoot on the tree of English civilization. Anyhow, whether English civilization is dead or not, and I hope it isn’t, Lawrence is the last shoot of it that has grown ahead and pierced the air.

He was always so absolutely, undeniably, something. “They can’t ignore me in the long run,” he would say, with clenched teeth, “they can’t get past me, much as they’d like to.” And I think they can’t.

Life rattles on so mechanically, there is less and less meaning in its motor-hoots and in all the noise, all meaning is drowned. Nobody has delicate courage enough to listen to the things that give us genuine vibrating life. Our feelers for life, just quick life, are atrophied.

When I think that nobody wanted Lawrence’s amazing genius, how he was jeered at, suppressed, turned into nothing, patronized at best, the stupidity of our civilization comes home to me. How necessary he was! How badly needed! Now that he is dead and his great love for his fellowmen is no longer there in the flesh, people sentimentalize over him. . . . Critics indeed! Had they been able to take instead of criticizing, how much richer their own lives might have been!

Those wonderful mornings in our little podere, getting up joyfully to that Mediterranean sun by the sea! And I’d walk through the olive trees to Telaro, for the post. It took me, the northerner, some time to see the beauty of these olive trees, so different at different times; the wind running up them turns them into quicksilver and sometimes they seem quite tired and still and dark. During those early morning walks the sun threw delicate quivering shadows on the stony, mossy path. To my right was the sea. I wouldn’t have been surprised meeting Christ and his disciples—it may be just as well that I didn’t.

Lawrence could well teach people how to live, how to be grateful simply for life itself. He who was always so frail and so much nearer death at every moment than most people, how religiously he appreciated every good moment! Every big and little thing! I hadn’t lived before I lived with Lawrence. It was drudgery, grey tired days with endless efforts, before. With him, being in love and ecstasy was only a small part of the whole, always the whole and we two balanced in it, the universe around us for us to take as much as we could, and we took a lot of it in those eighteen years together.

Of his short life didn’t Lawrence make the most! It was his deep sense of the reality of living. He knew what feeds the life-flame in a creature, it isn’t Rolls-Royces or first-class hotels and cinemas. He wasn’t a high-brow and he wasn’t a low-brow, but with real genius he got out of the quick of living the abiding values and said so in his writing. It is always amazing to me how little people understand him. Misunderstand him, is more like it.

I suppose when you are inside the pale you see only the palings and think they are quite splendid, but once outside, you realize how big the world is and the palings are just palings to you. You look at them in surprise: all these insurmountable obstacles, it was only rather low palings to climb over after all. But for those who feel safe inside, let them, the palings don’t care, neither does the bigger world.

He was quite aware of the hostility to him, but in those days I don’t think we either of us measured the depth of it. Also, as he grew more and more, the antagonism grew. We were too busy living to take much notice. Our own world, so small and poor to others on the outside, what a strong, unconquerable fortress it really was!

Another thing I understood: there was no “God-Almightiness” about him, like the universal “I-am-everlasting” feeling of Goethe, for instance. He knew “I am D. H. Lawrence from my head to my toes, and there I begin and there I end and my soul lives inside me. All else is not me, but I can have a relationship with all that is not me in the world, and the more I realize the otherness of other things around me the richer I am.”

It makes me laugh when I think of that American doctor who “looked at literature” who wrote about Lawrence and saw only a diseased prurient mind in him. I think all he wanted to see was disease. Because Ursula, and Birkin, in “Women in Love,” have a good meal with beetroot and ham and venison pastry, he reads some horror into beetroot and ham and pastry. I think the horror was in the good doctor’s mind, for what horror is there in beetroot or ham or venison pastry? Good to eat they are, that’s all. Lawrence was so direct, such a real puritan! He hated any “haut-goût” or lewdness. Fine underclothing and all the apparatus of the seducing sort were just stupid to him. All tricks; why tricks? Passionate people don’t need tricks.

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In the spring of 1914 Lawrence and I went from Fiascherino to London. We stayed with a friend, Gordon Campbell, whose wife was in Ireland. The house was in Kensington. We saw a good deal of the Murrys and there were long discussions between us all. Katherine was young and yet old, like a precocious child. I never suspected so much sadness in her, then; her relation with Murry seemed so fresh and young.

We had a housekeeper, Mrs. Conybear, who sang “Angels ever bright and fair” from the basement.

Campbell was very much in love with Ireland, “Areland” he called it. At breakfast always sad and cross, about “Areland.”

I remember a ghastly Sunday afternoon when we wanted to amuse ourselves. We went on one of the Thames boats to Richmond—Campbell, Murry, Katherine, Lawrence and I—there were a few seedy people on the boat—a sad object of a man was playing “Lead, Kindly Light” on a harmonium—we got more and more silent with the dreariness of that enjoyment. And then, further along, people threw sixpences from the boat into that centuries-old, awful-looking Thames mud and small boys dived for them—the Thames mud seemed to soak into our very souls and soon we could not stand it any more and left the boat and got a bus to go home. Campbell, a dignified person, trod on the conductor’s toe going on top and the conductor said: “Hallo, clumsy,” to Katherine’s and my joy.

Finally I and Lawrence got married at a registrar’s office in Kensington. Campbell and Murry went with us. On the way there Lawrence dashed out of the cab into a goldsmith’s to buy a new wedding ring. I gave my old one to Katherine and with it she now lies buried in Fontainebleau.

It was quite a simple and not undignified ceremony. I didn’t care whether I was married or not, it didn’t seem to make any difference, but I think Lawrence was glad that we were respectable married people.

On that first visit to London Lawrence’s writings were already a little known and I thought: “What fun it is going to be to know some amusing people.” But then, oh dear, we were asked to lunch by a few lion huntresses and the human being in me felt only insulted. You were fed more or less well, you sat next to somebody whose name had also been printed in the papers, the hostess didn’t know who or what you were, thought you were somebody else, and wanted to shoo you away after you were fed like chickens that had become a nuisance, and that was all. So Lawrence and I hardly went anywhere. What fun people might have had with us they never realized; perhaps they had no fun in themselves. So Lawrence and I were mostly alone.

A friend asked me once: “But wasn’t it very difficult, Lawrence and you coming from a different class, wasn’t the actual contact very difficult, wasn’t your sensitiveness offended?”

I don’t know whether it was the genius in Lawrence or the man from the people in him, but I certainly found him more delicately and sensitively aware of me than I ever imagined anybody would be.

Once I bumped my head against a shutter and was a little stunned and Lawrence was in such an agony of sympathy and tenderness over it. It astonished me; when I had bumped my head before or hurt myself nobody seemed to bother and I didn’t see why they should have done so. To be so enveloped in tenderness was a miracle in itself for me.

And then the war came, quite out of the blue for us both. Lawrence was on a walking tour in the Lakes with two friends and I was in London. After Lawrence came back, I remember our having lunch with Rupert Brooke and Eddie Marsh. I see Rupert Brooke’s strange fair skin, he blushed so easily, the beauty of him was strangely sad. He was coming to stay with us. Even then I thought: “He has had enough of life, it wearies him.” He wasn’t a bit happy or fulfilled. I remember Eddie Marsh saying: “There will be war, we fear, but it may be that the Foreign Office and Earl Grey have averted it today.”

But we couldn’t believe it. . . . War. . . .

But Winston Churchill had only said: “Bloody peace again.”

And then it was declared. At first it seemed only exciting. . . . Exciting indeed! Nobody realized at first what hell, what lowest demons, had been let loose.

We were at Charing Cross station and saw trains of soldiers depart. Their women were there so pale and strained-looking, saying good-bye, trying to be brave and not cry. It made me weep for those unknown women and their sorrow. What did I care whether these boys, boys so many of them, were English or Russian or French. Nationality was just an accident and here was grief. Lawrence was ashamed of my tears.

He himself was bewildered and lost, became abstract and mental, and couldn’t feel any more. I, who had been brought up with all the “big-drumming” of German militarism, I was scared.

Lawrence was not a pacifist, he fought all his life. But that “World War” he condemned with all his might. The inhuman, mechanical, sheer destruction of it! Destruction for what end!

Then when Lloyd George came to power Lawrence lost all hope in the spirit of his native country. Lloyd George, who was so un-English, to stand for English prestige! It seemed incredible.

War, more war! “Dies irae, dies illa,” a monstrous disaster, the collapse of all human decency. Lawrence felt it so. I could feel only fear—all base instincts let loose, all security gone.

We were in a big crowd on Hampstead Heath one evening going home from a friend’s house. In the sky, uncertain and terrible amidst the clouds, hung a Zeppelin. “In that Zeppelin,” I thought, “are perhaps men I have danced with when I was a girl, boys I have played with, and here they come to bring destruction and death. And if this dark crowd knew I was a German they would tear me to pieces in their fear.”

Sadly we went home. So helpless we were, at the power of all horrors. We took a small cottage out in Berkshire. Suspicion was ever present. Even when we were gathering blackberries in the nearby hedges a policeman popped up behind a bush and wanted to know who we were. Lawrence, who comes out in the open so courageously in his writings, why, why, do so many people see a sinister figure in him? The darkness wasn’t in him but in those others. There is a woman even now who boasts that she turned us out of Cornwall as spies.

Our cottage was near the mill of Gilbert and Mary Cannan. And the Murrys were an hour’s walk away in another cottage. We would go over to them in the dark winter nights, through bare woods and fields of dead cabbage stalks, with their smell of rottenness.

Campbell came to spend a weekend with us. He, who in London had been so elegant, with spats and top-hat, now wore an old cap and carried a very heavy stick under his arm. He looked to me like an Irish tramp. He was still weeping over his “Areland.”

Christmas came. We made the cottage splendid with holly and mistletoe, we cooked and boiled, roasted and baked. Campbell and Koteliansky and the Murrys came, and Gertler and the Cannans. We had a gay feast.

We danced on the shaky floor. Gilbert with uplifted head sang: “I feel, I feel like an eagle in the sky.” Koteliansky sang soulfully his Hebrew song: “Ranani Sadekim Badanoi.” Katherine, with a long, ridiculous face, sang this mournful song:

She also sang:

I liked this tune, but when I sang it Lawrence stopped me; it was too “fast” for him. This occasion was the last time for years to come that we were really gay.

In the spring we went to stay with the Meynells in Sussex. We were fond of all the sons and daughters. Monica was our neighbour. We lived in the cottage that Violet had lent us. I only remember Alice Meynell as a vision in the distance, being led by Wilfred Meynell across the lawn like Beatrice being led by Dante.

I heard while there of my father’s death. I did not tell anybody, I kept it to myself. When I told Lawrence he only said: “You didn’t expect to keep your father all your life?” Bertrand Russell invited Lawrence to Cambridge at that time. Lawrence had expected much of this visit. “What did you do there? What did they say?” I asked him, when he came back.

He answered: “Well, in the evening they drank port and they walked up and down the room and talked about the Balkan situation and things like that, and they know nothing about it.”

We had met Lady Ottoline Morrell. She was a great influence in Lawrence’s life. Her profound culture, her beautiful home, “Garsington,” her social power, all meant much to Lawrence.

I felt in those days: “Perhaps I ought to leave Lawrence to her influence; what might they not do together for England? I am powerless, and a Hun, and a nobody.” Garsington was a refuge during the war for many people and stood as a stronghold for freedom in those unfree days.

Later we took a small flat in the Vale of Heath. “The Rainbow” appeared and was suppressed. When it happened I felt as though a murder had been done, murder of a new, free utterance on the face of the earth. I thought the book would be hailed as a joyous relief from the ordinary dull stuff, as a way out into new and unknown regions. With his whole struggling soul Lawrence had written it. Then to have it condemned, nobody standing for it—the bitterness of it! He was sex-mad, they said. Little even now do people realize what men like Lawrence do for the body of life, what he did to rescue the fallen angel of sex. Sex had fallen in the gutter, it had to be pulled out. What agony it was to know the flame in him and see it quenched by his fellowmen! “I’ll never write another word I mean,” he said in his bitterness; “they aren’t fit for it,” and for a time the flame in him was quenched.

It could not be for long; I remember with joy A. S. Frere-Reeves’ words: “Lawrence is like a man so far ahead on the road, that he seems small.” When I think of his critics the words of Heraclitus come into my mind:

“The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads, for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: ‘We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.’ ”

The best were treated so during the war. And in those dark days I had a bad time. Naturally, I came in for all Lawrence’s tortured, irritable moods. His sweetness had disappeared and he turned against me as well as the rest for the time being. It all made him ill. There was not even a little hope or gaiety anywhere. We had a little flat in the Vale of Heath in Hampstead. He didn’t like the Vale of Heath and he didn’t like the little flat and he didn’t like me or anybody else. . . . And the war was everywhere. . . . We were saturated with war.

Cornwall

At Cornwall, near Zennor, we found Tregerthen cottage. As usual we made it out of a granite hole into a livable place. It cost five pounds a year rent. We had made it very charming. We washed the walls very pale pink and the cupboards were painted a bright blue. This was the entrance room; all very small but well proportioned.

There was a charming fireplace on which lived two Staffordshire figures riding to market, “Jasper and Bridget.” On the wall was a beautiful embroidery Lady Ottoline Morrell had embroidered after a drawing by Duncan Grant, a tree with big bright flowers and birds and beasts. Behind the sitting-room was a darkish rough scullery, and upstairs was one big room overlooking the sea, like the big cabin on the upper deck of a ship. And how the winds from that untamed Cornish sea rocked the solid little cottage, and howled at it, and how the rain slashed it, sometimes forcing the door open and pouring into the room.

I see Katherine Mansfield and Murry arriving sitting on a cart, high up on all the goods and chattels, coming down the lane to Tregerthen. Like an emigrant Katherine looked. I loved her little jackets, chiefly the one that was black and gold like bees.

It was great fun buying very nicely made furniture for a few shillings in St. Ives, with the Murrys. The fishermen were selling their nice old belongings to buy modern stuff. Our purchases would arrive tied on a shaky cart with bits of rope, the cart trundling down the uneven road. I think our best buy was a well-proportioned bedstead we got for a shilling. Then in both the Murrys’ neighbouring cottage and our own such a frenzy broke out of painting chairs and polishing brass and mending old clocks, putting plates on the dressers, arranging all the treasures we had bought. After they had settled in their cottage I loved walking with Katherine to Zennor. A high wind she hated and stamped her foot at it. Later we’d sit in the sun under the foxgloves and talk, like two Indian braves, as she said. We enjoyed doing things together. I can see her round eyes when Murry painted all the chairs black with Ripolin and she said: “Look at the funereal procession of chairs.” She told me many things from her life, but she told me them in confidence and trust.

Katherine and Lawrence and Murry had invented a place, a wonderful place where we were all going to live in complete bliss; Rananim it was called.

Lawrence thought of the new spirit of the life we would try to live there. Murry thought of the ship, and its equipment, that would take us to our island of Rananim. Katherine saw all the coloured bundles that we would have to take. By the hour we could talk Rananim.

There in Cornwall I can remember days of complete harmony between the Murrys and us, Katherine coming to our cottage so thrilled at my foxgloves, tall in the small window seat. Since then whenever I see foxgloves I must think of Katherine.

One day we went out on the sea in bright sunshine in a boat, and sang the canon:

I don’t know why even then this canon moved me so. They were so strangely significant, those words. And I was so bad at keeping my part of the song going, to Lawrence’s rage.

So much, so much was still ahead for us all. And all so wonderful. At that time we were so poor, and such nobodies, and yet so rich in dreams and gaiety! But then Lawrence would have his reactions against all this, feel that his dreams were like petty vapourings, that the only real facts were war, and a war of all the lower elements come uppermost, carrying all before them. Grimly his soul would try to understand, but in the end it could only hang on to its faith, to its own, own, unknown God.

He had to go through with it, that I knew; also I knew—however miserable I was, and he made me so—that there was a man who suffered because of his vision.

He wanted people to be as they came out of the hands of the Lord, not to violate them but gently adjust them to life in their own capacity. He didn’t expect me to type, I hated it. Poor as we were he never expected me to do it. “People should do what they enjoy, then they’ll do it well,” he said.

In the first year of the war Cornwall was still not quite engulfed by it; but slowly, like an octopus, with slow but dead-sure tentacles, the war spirit crept up and all around us. Suspicion and fear surrounded us. It was like breathing bad air and walking on a bog.

I remember once sitting on the rocks with Lawrence, by the sea, near our cottage at Tregerthen. I was intoxicated by the air and sun. I had to jump and run, and my white scarf blew in the wind. “Stop it, stop it, you fool, you fool!” Lawrence cried. “Can’t you see they’ll think that you’re signalling to the enemy!”

I had forgotten the war for a moment.

There was an unfortunate policeman from St. Ives. He had to trot up so many times to our cottage to look over and over again Lawrence’s papers, to see if he were really an Englishman and his father without a doubt an Englishman, and if his mother was English. This policeman once said to me: “Oh, ma’am, if I dare only speak my thoughts, but I mustn’t.” But he took the peas and beans I offered him from our field that Lawrence had ploughed with the help of William Henry from the farm, and sown with vegetables. They came up splendidly and lots of people had vegetables from this field during the war.

Our standby and friend was Katie Berryman. Her saffron cake and baked stuffed rabbit were our modest luxuries.

We had so little money, Lawrence not being wanted, nor his work, in those days when profiteers and such men were flourishing and triumphant. I remember his writing to Arnold Bennett and saying: “I hear you think highly of me and my genius, give me some work.”

Arnold Bennett wrote back: “Yes, I do think highly of your genius, but that is no reason why I should give you work.”

The war seemed to drive Lawrence to utter despair. He was called up for inspection and told me about it afterwards. “You have no idea what a pathetic sight all the men were in nothing but their shirts.” How glad he was to come back to his cottage and me!

Lawrence was fond of the people at Tregerthen Farm nearby. Their Celtic natures fascinated him. He could talk by the hour with William Henry, the farmer’s elder son, ruddy and handsome.

In those days Lawrence seemed to turn against me, perhaps on account of the bit of German in me. I felt utterly alone there, on that wild Cornish moor, in the little granite cottage. Often Lawrence would leave me in the evenings, and go over to the farm, where he’d spend his time talking to William Henry and giving French lessons to Stanley, the younger son.

Sometimes at night, in the dark, the door would fly open, and it seemed as if the ancient spirits and ghosts of the place blew into my cottage. In the loneliness I seemed to hear the voices of young men crying out to me from the battlefields: “Help us, help us, we are dying, we are dying.” Despair had blown in on the night. I thought how in the past women like Catherine of Siena had influenced events. But now what could any woman do to stem or divert this avalanche?

And then Lawrence would come home and want to quarrel with me, as if he were angry with me because I too felt sad and hopeless and helpless.

It was only at the very last, and out of one’s final despair, that there arose a hope and a belief. But the outer world was viler every day.

I remember coming home from Zennor with a loaf of Katie Berryman’s bread in Lawrence’s rucksack. Coastguards suddenly pounced on us from behind a hedge and said: “Let us look at your rucksack, you have a camera in there.”

I could feel Lawrence swooning with rage. I opened the rucksack and held the loaf of bread under their noses. I had to show my contempt, if they hanged me for it the next moment. I believe they would have liked to.

It was no wonder Lawrence went almost mad at times at the creeping foulness around us; he, who came out so completely in the open. And I knew that he felt so helpless, as if all that he believed in was utterly lost, he who by his genius felt responsible for the spirit of his England, he whose destiny it was to give England a new direction.

If only the war could end! But it went on, was present wherever you went, there was no escaping it. One evening at Cecil Grey’s place, Bosigran Castle, we were sitting after dinner, when there came a knock at the door and four coast-watchers stood there ominously.

“You are showing a light.”

To Grey’s dismay it was true. He had a new housekeeper from London and the light from her bedroom could be seen at sea.

As we stood there I shivered with alarm. I had before this been under suspicion of giving supplies to the German submarine crews. As for the suspicion, we were so poor at the time—a biscuit a day we might have spared for the submarines, but no more.

I took a secret pleasure in the fact that our coast-watchers were all covered with mud. They had fallen into a ditch listening under the windows.

Fortunately Grey had an uncle who was an admiral. That saved him, and us. As for Lawrence, he just looked at those men. What a manly job theirs was, listening under other people’s windows!

A few days later I came home from Bosigran Castle to the cottage. Lawrence was away, had driven to Penzance. In the dusk I entered the cottage alone. Immediately I was inside I knew by instinct something had happened, I felt overwhelming fear. With shaking knees I went to the farm. Yes, I was told, two men had asked for us.

I was full of foreboding, even though Lawrence, coming home later, didn’t share my fear.

But then early next morning there appeared a captain, two detectives, and my friend the policeman. The captain read us a paper that we must leave the county of Cornwall in three days. Lawrence, who lost his temper so easily, was quite calm.

“And what is the reason?” he asked.

“You know better than I do,” answered the captain.

“I don’t know,” said Lawrence.

Then the two awful detectives went through all our cupboards, clothes, beds, etc., while I, like a fool, burst into a rage:

“This is your English liberty, here we live and don’t do anybody any harm, and these creatures have the right to come here and touch our private things.”

“Be quiet,” said Lawrence.

He was so terribly quiet, but the iron of his England had stabbed his soul once more, and I knew he suffered more than I.

In the background stood my friend the policeman, full of sympathy. How sad I was, and desperate. But nothing could be done, so we left Cornwall, like two criminals. When we were turned out of Cornwall something changed in Lawrence for ever.

We went to London where H.D. lent us her flat in Mecklenburg Square. It had a very large room. Richard Aldington was home on leave at the time and in the evening we met and were very gay.

Where did we get the courage to be gay? I don’t know.

Lawrence invented wonderful charades. Once we played the Garden of Eden. Lawrence was the Lord, H.D. was the tree, Richard Aldington waving a large chrysanthemum was Adam, and I was the serpent, and a little scared at my part.

A few days later Cynthia Asquith invited us to the royal box that Lady Cunard had lent her at Covent Garden.

Lawrence trimmed his beard, we made ourselves very fine, and went to listen to “Aïda.”

Very few people wanted to be friendly to us in those days. I was a Hun and Lawrence not wanted.

That was the time of air raids over London, the time there was such a strain on people’s nerves. During the air raids we were supposed to go into the cellar, but Lawrence always refused to go; he stayed in bed. And it certainly was very depressing being in the cellar with all the other gloomy people. So I spent my time during air raids running up and down stairs imploring Lawrence to come to the cellar. But he’d never do it.

We met Gertler in those days and he used to tell us funny stories about his experiences during air raids, especially one sudden one when he lost his head and kept running up and down the stairs of a strange house. Campbell also told about air raid experiences, how once in Hampstead Heath he’d found himself buried under a heap of terrified housemaids coming home from a dinner party.

Yet underneath all this gaiety, we were so dulled and bitter. “Dancing while Rome burns.” But if Nero enjoyed his burning Rome, we did not. And Lawrence’s helplessness to stem this lavaflood of death to all that is best in man made him savage underneath and again I had a bad time. . . . It was torture to live, and to live with him.

I felt helpless and an outcast, and only a burden and a difficulty for Lawrence.

I, the Hunwife in a foreign country!

Then we went to Hermitage in Berkshire. The country there is so quiet and English with its woods. Our simple life in the cottage healed him a lot.

I saw my son, who was in the O.T.C., and it seemed terrible that he would have to fight against his own relations, perhaps, and I said: “Let me hide you somewhere in a cave or in a wood, I don’t want you to go and fight, I don’t want you to be killed in this stupid war.” But he was shocked.

All this time we were followed by detectives. Detectives had even gone to my first husband and asked him if he knew anything against me.

While we were there in Hermitage the armistice came. I nearly said peace came. But it was not peace, it is not peace yet. The war has bred not peace but awful gargoyle children of hate and resentment, and has only left death as the desirable, clean thing, almost.

Lawrence and my mother were fond of one another; she was a wonderful mother to us, her three daughters. We were all three different and yet she helped and understood us, and was there for us in our hours of need—alas, there were plenty of them for the three of us. But she was equal to all the awful situations we found ourselves in. My eldest sister Else wanted to study, when studying for women in Germany was still infra dig; I remember walking through the crowds of men students into a lecture hall at Heidelberg with my sister at sixteen and feeling like a real martyr. My sister Johanna had lovely names for my mother, like “Goldfasanchen,” my little golden pheasant—it was so quaint to hear her, worldly and elegant, being so tender with my mother, and she half loving it and saying: “What do you want now?” She had taught me the love for poetry from early childhood. Especially after the war she and Lawrence became great friends. She lived in her “Stift,” at Baden-Baden, a kind of home for women, mostly widows of distinguished men, Excellencies and so on. It was a very dignified life. We three sisters loved to meet there and stay with my mother. We had to be on our best behaviour, except in my mother’s beautiful rooms, where all the wildness of our childhood came back, especially for my sister Johanna and me. Lawrence sat on the sofa, happily, while my mother tried to give him all the things for tea that he liked—“Pumpernickel” and “Trüffelleberwurst”—and we played wild games of bridge.

Sometimes, when Lawrence wanted to complain about me she would say: “I know her longer than you, I know her.”

He wrote his “Fantasia of the Unconscious” in the woods behind the Altes Schloss. We stayed in a rough little inn at Ebersteinburg. I remember that we had some friends to dinner and a chicken flew into the soup tureen.

Then Lawrence, in the meagre after-the-war days, would scour the country for some cream for her.

She was very happy in Lawrence’s life and mine, it meant so much to her, but she always trembled that the women in the Stift might read his books.

He was so polite to them and they liked him, again he was the Herr Doktor.

At Ebersteinburg he would go out in the morning and take his book and fountain-pen. I would find him later on, leaning against a big pine tree; it was as if the tree itself helped him to write his book, and poured its sap into it.

Then we would go down to Baden to my mother in the afternoon and take her our wildflowers or some honey or fruit or nuts; or we would go for long walks and make the place our own as usual. Looking over the Rheintal or listening to the music in the Kurpark. Baden was no longer the Baden of Turgeniev and archdukes and grand dukes and the Prince of Wales; no, it was after the war, would-be elegant.

Lawrence and my mother in her wisdom and ripeness understood each other so well. She said to me: “It’s strange that an old woman can still be as fond of a man as I am of that Lorenzo.”

Happy was their relationship. Only the last time, when my mother was so frail and old herself, being with Lawrence who was so very ill, they got on each other’s nerves, and when she saw him often so irritable with me, she said: “He isn’t grateful to you for all you do for him.” But I did not feel like that myself; I was glad to do everything for him I possibly could. It seemed little enough.

Then when she and I were going to meet for the first time after his death, we were afraid to meet. She knew what his death meant to me and I what it meant to her. So we avoided our common grief; there was no need of words.

I remember after she had been indoors for weeks, coming to Baden and taking her out on one of those first tender spring days we get in the north, just the first whisper of spring. To feel her respond to this coming renewal of the earth in an almost sacred happiness was very moving to me.

I think after Lawrence’s death her desire to live left her. Less than a year after he died telling me: “You have many friends, you have much to live for yet,” I got a telegram: “Come.”

I went but it was too late. In the train I listened as it were to the sound of the wheels: “Is she still alive? Is she dead?” At the door of the Stift I was told: “The Frau Baronin died two hours ago.”

She lay for the last time in her bedroom, the rocks of the Altes Schloss looking in through the window. “Lawrence is there for me,” she had said. We, her three daughters, stood by her bedside, she for the first time not welcoming me with open arms as always. She lay with her silver hair like thistle-down, in gentle and peaceful death.

She who had sustained our lives for half a century with the strength and harmony of her nature.

I remember my mother saying to me once: “But it’s always you in Lorenzo’s books, all his women are you.” There was an expression on her face I could not get. Is she pleased at this or is she not? My sister Nusch was the only person that ever could take a liberty with him. She could lightly jump on his knee and say in her broken English:

“O Lorenzo, you are so nice, I like your red beard.” He felt happy in the atmosphere of my mother and of us three sisters, so free and open and gay. Only when my sister Nusch and I had our long female talks, he did not like it, he had to be in it.

We spent some weeks at Zell-am-See with Nusch, her husband and children at her villa. We bathed and boated and Lawrence wrote his “Captain’s Doll” there.

One day the peasants from my sister’s shooting-lodge high up in the mountains brought us some honey and left. The honey was found to be full of worms. “Hadu,” said Lawrence, full of rage, to my nephew, “you and I will take this honey back to them.” So up they marched to the lodge, in the heat of the afternoon, Lawrence and Hadu, and arrived at the peasant’s hut to find them in the midst of a meal; in the very middle of the table Lawrence planted the jar of honey and left without a word. The peasants remained petrified. “If honesty, common and garden honesty goes,” Lawrence told me once, “then all is lost, life becomes impossible.”

FRIEDA’S MOTHER

The first snow has fallen, it’s a still, black and white world. All the gold of the autumn has gone. On the mountains it was green-gold where the aspens turned, and the oakbrush was red-gold and there was yellow-gold in the tall sunflowers all along the road to Taos. The sage brush bloomed pale yellow and the fields and openings of the woods were yellow with small sunflowers. The mountains looked like tigers with their stripes of gold and dark pine trees. And the golden autumn sun lit it all. Now it has gone, this golden world: the frost and the snow have taken it away. I am writing in the sun on the snowy hill behind the cabins, where the Indians had their camp; where Lawrence and I slept in the summer, years ago, and again a grey squirrel scolded me for intruding; I wonder if it is the same grey squirrel. The snow drips from the cedar trees that are alive with birds; it is melting fast; in the desert below it has gone. The pinto ponies look bright like painted wooden toys against the snow. The black and white pigs follow me grunting and the black cats look shiny and black on the whiteness, delicately trotting after me. I have seen tracks of wild turkeys, of deer and bears, in the Gallina. I am now leaving that English autumn there in Berkshire, with its blackberry hedges and mushroom fields and pale sunsets behind a filigree of trees.

I am leaving Lawrence behind, who doesn’t want to come to Germany so soon after the war. I go on my journey, a nightmare of muddle, my trunks stolen. I arrive in Baden, so glad to see my sisters and my mother, but, oh, so many, many dead that had been our life and our youth. A sad, different Germany.

We had suffered so much, all of us, lost so much. And money was scarce.

Meanwhile Lawrence had gone to Florence and I went to join him. I arrived at four o’clock in the morning. “You must come for a drive with me,” he said, “I must show you this town.” We went in an open carriage, I saw the pale crouching Duomo and in the thick moonmist the Giotto tower disappeared at the top into the sky. The Palazzo Vecchio with Michelangelo’s David and all the statues of men, we passed. “This is a men’s town,” I said, “not like Paris, where all statues are women.” We went along the Lungarno, we passed the Ponte Vecchio, in that moonlight night, and ever since Florence is the most beautiful town to me, the lilytown, delicate and flowery.

Lawrence was staying at a pensione on the Lungarno with Norman Douglas and Magnus.

The English there in Florence had still a sense of true hospitality, in the grand manner. And yet it struck me all as being like “Cranford” only it was a man’s “Cranford.” And the wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me: I find it dull.

Nobody knows Norman Douglas that doesn’t know him in German. When he talks German you know something about him that you don’t know if you only know him in English. I was thrilled at the fireworks of wit that went off between Lawrence and Douglas. They never quarrelled. I understood that Douglas had to stand up for his friend Magnus and to Lawrence’s logical puritanical mind Magnus presented a problem of human relations. When we had gone to Capri and Magnus was in trouble at Montecassino, Lawrence went there and lent him some money, and yet we had so very little then.

Later Magnus appeared at our Fontana Vecchia at Taormina, having fled from Montecassino. He came almost taking for granted that we would be responsible for him, that it was our duty to keep him. This disturbed Lawrence.

“Is it my duty to look after this man?” he asked me.

To me it was no problem. Had I been fond of Magnus, had he had any meaning, or purpose—but no, he seemed only anti-social, a poor devil without any pride, and he didn’t seem to matter anyhow. With the money Lawrence had lent him, he stayed at the best hotel in Taormina, to my great resentment, we who could not afford to stay even in a second-rate hotel. I felt he made a fool of Lawrence, and afterwards, when we went to Malta, crossing second class from Palermo, whom should I discover gaily swanking and talking to an English Navy officer but Magnus on the first-class deck! The cheek of the man! He had written to Lawrence: “I am sweating blood till I am out of Italy.” I knew his sort, people always sweating blood and always going to shoot themselves. But Magnus, anyhow, did commit suicide at the end. It was a shock, but there was nothing else for him to do. It seemed to me he had put his money on the wrong horse. He thought the splendour of life lay in drinking champagne, having brocade dressing gowns, and that kind of thing. But Lawrence felt deeply disturbed by Magnus and did feel a responsibility for him.

There is a letter from Douglas to Lawrence in which Douglas says: “Go ahead, my boy, do as you like with Magnus’s work.” Lawrence wanted to pay the Maltese young men who had helped Magnus, hence the publication of Magnus’s memoirs with Lawrence’s introduction.

From Florence we went to Capri. I didn’t like Capri; it was so small an island, it seemed hardly capable to contain all the gossip that flourished there. So Lawrence went to Sicily and took Fontana Vecchia for us, outside Taormina.

Living in Sicily after the war years was like coming to life again. Fontana Vecchia was a very simple but big-roomed villa.

Here are letters of Lawrence to my mother:

(Translated from the German)

(Translated from the German)

(Translated from the German)

(Translated from the German)

Fontana Vecchia had a large podere to it. Great “vasche” were on the rocky slope toward the sea, pools of green water to feed the lemon and orange trees. The early almond blossoms pink and white, the asphodels, the wild narcissi and anemones, all these we found during our walks, nothing new would escape Lawrence and we never got tired finding new treasures.

We went on a jolly expedition to Syracuse with Renée and John Juta and Insole. Trains had their own sweet way in Italy then and arrived when they felt like it. I remember being much impressed by how Renée Hansard, with the experience of a true colonial, was fortified with a hamper of food and a spirit lamp so we could have tea at any time.

She pulled out her embroidery with its wools from a neat little bag. She turned the railway car into a live little temporary home. The quarries of Syracuse impressed me much. Here at Syracuse the flower of the Athenian youth had been defeated; in these quarries the Greek men had been put to starve while the ladies of Syracuse took their walks along the top of the quarries to see them slowly die. A sinister dread impression it left in me. I doubt whether centuries can clean a place of such inhumanity, the place will retain and remember such horrors. Syracuse and its splendour have gone. Man is more cruel than nature but whenever he has been so he pays for it.

Of our winter excursion to Sardinia Lawrence has described every minute, it seems to me, with extraordinary accuracy.

Garibaldi, the picturesque, had begun his campaign here in Sicily with his thousand, with his Anita and his South American experience.

Along our rocky road the peasants rode past into the hills on their donkeys, singing loudly, the shepherds drove their goats along, playing their reed pipes as in the days of the Greeks. We had an old Greek temple in the garden; there was the beautiful Greek theatre at Taormina, facing the Etna; what a marvellous stage for a play, not a modern play, alas, but how I longed to see one of the old giants like Sophocles there. How I longed for the old splendour of life to come back to us in those shabby after-the-war days.

“Give me a little splendour, O Lord,” would be my prayer.

There in Taormina, in the whole of Sicily, one could feel the touch of the hands of many civilizations: Greek and Moorish and Norman and beyond into the dim past.

Old Grazia did our shopping and I loved watching Lawrence doing the accounts with her, her sly old Sicilian face spying his, how much she could rook him.

“She can rook me a little, but not too much,” he would say, and he kept a firm hand on her.

The sun rose straight on our beds in the morning, we had roses all winter and we lived the rhythm of a simple life, getting up early, he writing or helping in the house or getting the tangerines from the round little trees in the garden or looking at the goat’s new kids. Eating, washing up, cleaning the floor and getting water from the trough near the wall, where the large yellow snake came to drink and drew itself into its hole in the wall again.

Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. At the Fontana Vecchia we mostly cooked on charcoal fires, but on Sundays he lit the big kitchen stove for me, and I, who had become quite a good cook by now, made cakes and tarts, big and little, sweet pies and meat pies and put them on the side-board in the dining-room and called them Mrs. Beeton’s show.

Once we had lunch with three friends at their villa. It was a jolly lunch. We had had some white wine that seemed innocent, but it was not. When we left, going home, I felt its effects but soon got over it.

“We must hurry, because those two English ladies are coming to tea.”

So we hurried home and unfortunately the white Sicilian wine affected Lawrence later. The very English ladies came and Lawrence was terribly jovial and friendly with them. I tried to pull his sleeve and whispered: “Go away,” but it was no use.

“What are you telling me to go away for?” he said.

I could see the two visitors being very uneasy and wanting to leave.

“No, no, you must have some mimosa, I’ll get you some,” Lawrence insisted. So he went with them through the garden, tried to climb a small mimosa tree and fell.

The ladies hurried away.

Next day Lawrence was chagrined and he met one of the ladies and tried to apologize to her, but she was very stiff with him, so he said: “Let her go to blazes.”

I think from this incident arose the story that Lawrence was a drunkard. Poor Lawrence, he who could not afford wine and didn’t want it, who was so naturally abstemious. I have seen him drunk only twice in all my life with him.

We stayed at Taormina in the heat and I remember when the mulberries were ripe and delicious and he climbed a big mulberry tree in his bathing suit. The mulberries were so juicy and red and they ran down his body so that he looked like one of those very realistic Christs we had seen on our walk across the Alps years ago.

He wrote “Birds, Beasts and Flowers” and “Sea and Sardinia” at Fontana Vecchia, and also “The Lost Girl.” “Sea and Sardinia” he wrote straightaway when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don’t think he altered a word of it. His other works, especially the novels, he wrote many times, parts of them anyhow. Sometimes I liked the first draft best, but he had his own idea and knew the form he wanted it to take.

One day I found the manuscript of “Sea and Sardinia” in the W.C. at Fontana Vecchia. So I told him: “But why did you put it there, it’s such a pity, it’s so nicely written and tidy.” I had then no idea it might have any value, only regretted the evenly written pages having this ignominious end. But no, he had a passion for destroying his own writing. He hated the personal touch.

“I would like to burn all my writing. Print is different. They can have it in print, my stuff.”

Just as he wanted Lawrence, the private person, separate from Lawrence the writer, the public man. He guarded his privacy ferociously. He liked best to meet people who knew nothing about him. He really disliked talking about his writing. “They don’t like it, anyhow,” he would say. But I read every day what he had written; his writing was the outcome of our daily life.

I had to take in what he had written and had to like it. Then he was satisfied and did not care for the approval of the rest of the world. What he wrote he had lived and was sure of. Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute.

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Then from Fontana Vecchia, we were really leaving Europe for the first time.

We did so much with the little money we had, making homes and unmaking them.

We unmade our beloved Fontana Vecchia and went to Palermo where the “facchini” were so wild and threw themselves on our luggage; I can see Lawrence struggling amongst a great crowd of them, waving his umbrella about, equally wild. It was midnight and I was terrified.

An American friend gave me the side of a Sicilian cart I had always longed for. It had a joust painted on one panel, on the other St. Genevieve. It was very gay and hard in colour. I loved it. Lawrence said: “You don’t mean to travel to Ceylon with this object?”

“Let me, let me,” I implored. So he let me. And off we set for Naples. There we were bounced in the harbour into our P. & O. boat. We arrived nearly too late, the gang-plank was pulled up immediately the minute we got on board. How we enjoyed that trip! Everybody feeling so free and detached, no responsibility for the moment, people going to meet husbands or wives, people going to Australia full of the wonders that were coming to them, and Lawrence being so interested and feeling so well. How tenderly one loves people on boats! They seem to become bosom friends for life. And then we went through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, Arabia Deserta on one side, so very deserta, so terrifying. Then one morning I woke up and I was sure I could smell cinnamon; the ship stopped and we were in Colombo. It struck me: “I know it all, I know it all.” It was just as I expected it. The tropics, so marvellous these black people, this violent quick growth and yet a little terrifying, a little repulsive, as Lawrence would say. We stayed with the Brewsters in a huge bungalow with all those black servants in the background. In the morning the sun rose and we got up and I always felt terrified at the day and its heat. The sun rose higher and the heat would rise. We went for a walk and I saw a large thing coming towards us, large like a house, an elephant holding a large tree with its trunk! Its guide made him salaam to us, the great animal—young natives would come and pay visits to us and the Brewsters, who were interested in Buddhism. Lawrence became so terribly English and snubbed them mostly. Some young Cingalese said I had the face of a saint! Didn’t I make the most of it and didn’t Lawrence get this saint rubbed into him! Then we had the fantastic experience of a Pera-Hera given in honour of the Prince of Wales. Such a contrast was the elegant figure of the Prince sitting on the balcony of the Temple of the Tooth amongst the black seething tropical mass of men. The smell of the torches and the oily scent of dark men. Great elephants at midnight, and the heat in the dark. The noise of the tom-toms that goes right through some dark corner in one’s soul. The night falls so quickly and the tom-toms begin and we could see the native fires on the hills all around. Noises from the jungle; those primeval cries and howls and the brain-fever bird and the sliding noises on the roof and the jumps in the darkness outside! How could one rest under such a darkness that was so terribly alive!

The climate didn’t suit Lawrence and we had to leave. Lawrence was not well and happy in Ceylon. The tropics didn’t suit him.

I was so enthralled with the life around us, it was like living in a fairytale. We would go to Casa Lebbes, a little jewelshop at number 1 Trincomalee Street in Kandy, and look at his jewels. He would pull out a soft leather bundle, undo it, and put before our eyes coloured wonders of sapphires, blue and lovely yellow ones, and rubies and emeralds. Lawrence bought me six blue sapphires and a yellow one: they were round in order to make a brooch in the form of a flower. The yellow one was the centre and the blue petal-shaped ones formed a flower round it. Also he bought me a cinnamon stone and a little box of moonstones. The blue sapphire flower I have lost, as I have lost so many things in my life, and the moonstones have disappeared, only the cinnamon stone remains. I wanted to go to Australia; it attracted me. Off we set again, trunks, Sicilian cart, and all, and went to Perth. Only Englishmen and Australians on the boat and it really felt as if one was going to the end of the earth.

We stayed only a little while near Perth and went a long way into that strange vague bush, everything so vague and dim, as before the days of creation. It wasn’t born yet. Vague, remote, and unborn it made one feel oneself. There we stayed with Miss Skinner, whose manuscript Lawrence was looking over: “The Boy in the Bush.” Later on, as I look back, it’s all vague to me. Then, after a few weeks, we went on to Sydney.

We arrived in Sydney harbour—nice it was not knowing a soul.

A young officer on the boat had told me: “The rain on the tin roofs over the trenches always made me think of home.” Sydney!

And there they were, the tin roofs of Sydney and the beautiful harbour and the lovely Pacific Coast, the air so new and clean. We stayed a day or two in Sydney, two lonely birds resting a little. And then we took a train with all our trunks and said: “We’ll look out of the window and where it looks nice we’ll get out.” It looked very attractive along the coast but also depressing. We were passing deserted homesteads: both in America and Australia, these human abandoned efforts make one very sad. Then we came to Thirroul, we got out at four and by six o’clock we were settled in a beautiful bungalow right on the sea. Lined with jarra the rooms were, and there were great tanks for rain water and a stretch of grass going right down to the Pacific, melting away into a pale-blue and lucid, delicately tinted sky.

But what a state the bungalow was in! A family of twelve children had stayed there before us: beds and dusty rugs all over the place, torn sailing canvases on the porches, paper all over the garden, the beautiful jarra floors grey with dust and sand, the carpet with no colour at all, just a mess, a sordid mess the whole thing. So we set to and cleaned, cleaned and cleaned as we had done so many times before in our many temporary homes! Floors polished, the carpet taken in the garden and scrubbed, the torn canvases removed. But the paper in the garden was the worst; for days and days we kept gathering paper.

But I was happy: only Lawrence and I in this world. He always made a great big world for me, he gave it me whenever it was possible; whenever there was wonder left, we took it, and revelled in it.

The mornings, those sunrises over the Pacific had all the wonder of newness, of an uncreated world. Lawrence began to write “Kangaroo” and the days slipped by like dreams, but real as dreams are when they come true. The everyday life was so easy, the food brought to the house, especially the fish cart was a thrill: it let down a flap at the back and like pearls and jewels inside the cart lay the shiny fishes, all colours, all shapes, and we had to try them all.

We took long walks along the coast, lonely and remote and unborn. The weather was mild and full of life, we never got tired of the shore, finding shells for hours that the Pacific had rolled gently on to the sand.

Lawrence religiously read the “Sydney Bulletin.” He loved it for all its stories of wild animals and people’s living experiences. The only papers Lawrence ever read were the “Corriere della Sera,” in the past, and the “Sydney Bulletin.” I wonder whether this latter has retained the same character it had then; I haven’t seen it since that time. It was our only mental food during that time.

I remember being amazed at the generosity of the people at the farms where we got butter, milk, and eggs: you asked for a pound of butter and you were given a big chunk that was nearly two pounds; you asked for two pints of milk and they gave you three; everything was lavish, like the sky and the sea and the land. We had no human contacts all these months: a strange experience: nobody bothered about us, I think.

At the library, strangely enough, in that little library of Thirroul we found several editions of Lawrence’s condemned “Rainbow.” We bought a copy—the librarian never knew that it was Lawrence’s own book. Australia is like the “Hinterland der Seele.”

Like a fantasy seemed the Pacific, pellucid and radiant, melting into the sky, so fresh and new always; then this primal radiance was gone one day and another primeval sea appeared. A storm was throwing the waves high into the air, they rose on the abrupt shore, high as in an enormous window. I could see strange sea-creatures thrown up from the deep: sword-fish and fantastic phenomena of undreamt deep-sea beasts I saw in those waves, frightening and never to be forgotten.

And then driving out of the tidy little town into the bush with the little pony cart. Into golden woods of mimosa we drove, or wattle, as the Australians call it. Mostly red flowers and yellow mimosa, many varieties, red and gold, met the eye, strange fern-trees, delicately leaved. We came to a wide river and followed it. It became a wide waterfall and then it disappeared into the earth. Disappeared and left us gaping. Why should it have disappeared, where had it gone?

Lawrence went on with “Kangaroo” and wove his deep underneath impressions of Australia into this novel. Thirroul itself was a new little bungalow town and the most elegant thing in it was a German gun that glistened steely and out of place there near the Pacific.

I would have liked to stay in Australia and lose myself, as it were, in this unborn country but Lawrence wanted to go to America. Mabel Dodge had written us that Lawrence must come to Taos in New Mexico, that he must know the Pueblo Indians, that the Indians say that the heart of the world beats there in New Mexico.

This gave us a definite aim and we began to get ready for America, in a few weeks.

(Translated from the German)

(Translated from the German)

We sailed from Sydney for San Francisco. It was a smallish boat with a stout jolly captain. We passed Raratonga and went on to Tahiti, always in perfect weather in the Pacific. Nothing but flying fish, porpoises, sky, the great sea, and our boat. Then Tahiti. It must have been so marvellous in the past, those gentle, too gentle handsome natives, with their huts, the perfection of the island in itself. But the joy of it was gone. The charming native women, who offered me old beads and flowers made me sad in their clumsy Mother Hubbard garments. I know how European diseases were wiping the natives out, the contact with Europe fatal to them. In the evening we saw a cinema in a huge kind of barn; there was a native king, enormous; he was in a box near the stage with several handsome wives. We had travelled with a cinema crowd from Tahiti. Near our cabin two of the young stars had their cabin. They seemed to sleep all day and looked white and tired in the evening. Cases of empty champagne bottles stood outside their cabin in the morning. One of them I had seen flirt quite openly with a passenger but when we arrived in San Francisco I saw her trip so innocently into the arms of a young man who was waiting for her. I remember in San Francisco how the moon at night made such a poor show above all the lights of the town.

We went into a cafeteria and did not know how to behave; how to take our plates and food.

We travelled from San Francisco to Taos in great expectation. It was September and the journey through the inner American desert very hot. We got out at Lamy to be met by Mabel Dodge who had brought us here. And as we looked out we saw Mabel standing there in a turquoise blue dress with much of the silver-and-turquoise Indian jewellery and by her side a handsome Indian in a blanket with a large silver belt going across his chest. I looked at Mabel. “She has eyes one can trust,” I said to myself. And afterwards I always kept to this: people are what they are, whatever they may occasionally do.

When we came to Santa Fe all the hotels were full, so Mabel asked Witter Bynner to take us in. He did: us, the trunks, Sicilian cart and all.

The next morning we drove up through the vast wonderful desert country, with its clear pure air, driving through the Rio Grande canyon deep down by the river and then coming up on to the Taos plateau. Coming out of the canyon to the mesa is an unforgettable experience, with all the deep mountains sitting mysteriously around in a ring, and so much sky.

Mabel had prepared us a house all to ourselves in her “Mabel-town.” The house stood on Indian land and belonged to Tony. It was a charming adobe house, with Mexican blankets and Indian paintings of Indian dances and animals, clean and full of sun.

A new life for us—and we began it straightaway. Out from the pueblo to the east of us, a few miles away, came the feel of the Indians, so different from anything we had ever known. We neither of us wanted to stunt about it, but we were very happy. Tony went for two days with Lawrence to the Navajo country. I spent the days with Mabel and her friend Alice Corbin.

They asked me many questions, which I answered truthfully, giving the show away completely as usual. Then Mabel, with her great energy, took us all over the country: we saw the pueblo, we bathed in a hot radium spring by the Rio Grande. Mabel and Lawrence wanted to write a book together: about Mabel, it was going to be. I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence’s genius as given to me. I felt deeply responsible for what he wrote. And there was a fight between us, Mabel and myself: I think it was a fair fight. One day Mabel came over and told me she didn’t think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: “Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.”

And I was miserable thinking that Lawrence had given her a right to talk like this to me. When Lawrence came in, he saw that I was unhappy, and somebody had told him that Mabel’s son John Evans had said: “My mother is tired of those Lawrences who sponge on her.” This may have been pure malice, but Lawrence was in a fury too; not for nothing was his beard red; and he said: “I will pay the rent of the house and I’ll leave as soon as I can.”

And then he would draw me in a flood of tenderness and love and we would be washed clean of all our apartness and be together again. And Lawrence would rave against Mabel as only he could rave. When I wanted to stick up for her I would get it: “All women are alike, bossy, without any decency; it’s your business to see that other women don’t come too close to me.”

That’s what he said. It was all very well, but I didn’t know how to do it.

We had learned to ride: a long thin Don Quixote of a Mexican had taught us how in a few rides across the open desert. I was terribly happy, feeling the live horse under me. Later on, Azul, my horse, would go like the wind with me and he seemed always aware of me when I was a bit scared.

So we left Mabel’s ambient and went to live at the Del Monte Ranch, under the mountains. We had a log-house, and the Hawks lived at the big house and in the lower log-cabin lived two Danish painters who had come to stay with us; they had come from New York in the most trying old Lizzie that ever went along the road.

She coughed and trembled at the tiniest hill, she stuck and had to be shoved: she was a trial.

It was a real mountain winter. So sharp, knifey cold at night; snow and ice, and the Danes and Lawrence had to chop lots of wood.

We rode into the Lobo Canyon over the logs under the trees and one had to look out for one’s head and knees when the horses tore along under the trees. Lawrence would say later on: “If you were only as nice with me as you are with Azul.”

The friendship and fight with Mabel went on, off and on. She was so admirable in her terrific energy, in her resources and intelligence, but we couldn’t get on, somehow.

I remember riding along in the car, when Lawrence said to her: “Frieda is the freest human being I know.” And I said to him, afterwards: “You needn’t say nice things about me, just to make other people mad.”

Tony would sing his Indian songs when driving. I had told him: “In our country, Tony, one crow means bad luck and two good luck.” So he would watch for crows and say: “Two crows, Frieda.”

ᐥᐥᐥ

In the spring we went to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. After the hard winter, I clamoured for a first-rate hotel in Mexico City. But it wasn’t a success, the first-rate hotel, after all, it seemed dull and a bit unclean; the ladies were so very painted and the men not attractive.

The journey across the lonely desert had been strange. The stations were only a few miserable houses and a big water tank and fine dust blew in at the window of the car, filling one’s eyes and ears and nose, all one’s pores with very fine sand.

Mexico City seemed like a would-be smart and grand lady to me, but she hadn’t quite brought it off. The shabby parts were the most interesting. The Volador Market and all the fascinating baskets and ropes and saddles and belts, pots and dishes and leather-jackets.

One day we were in the cathedral plaza of Mexico City, Bynner and Spud and I, when on the top of the church we saw a red flag being hoisted. A crowd collected, soldiers appeared. Bynner and Spud had dashed into the dark hole of the door of the church tower. It was crowding with people. I stayed in the plaza, watching the tower on which were Bynner and Spud, fearing for their fate. My relief when they appeared after an hour was great.

In the Museum we saw among the Aztec relics coiled snakes and other terrifying stone carvings, Maximilian’s state carriage. That took me back to my childhood. One of the impressive figures of my childhood had been a Graf Geldern, long, lean, sad, and loosely built like a Mexican, in the uniform of a colonel of the “Totenkopfhusaren.” He had been to Mexico with Maximilian. How he afterwards took Prussian service I don’t know. When they shot Maximilian, they played “La Paloma.” He had asked for it.

Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his “Plumed Serpent.” He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. The lake was curious with its white water. My enthusiasm for bathing in it faded considerably when one morning a huge snake rose yards high, it seemed to me, only a few feet away. At the end of the patio we had the family that Lawrence describes in the “Plumed Serpent,” and all the life of Chapala. I tried my one attempt at civilizing those Mexican children, but when they asked me one day: “Do you have lice too, Niña,” I had enough and gave up in a rage. At night I was frightened of bandits and we had one of the sons of the cook sleeping outside our bedroom door with a loaded revolver, but he snored so fiercely that I wasn’t sure whether the fear of bandits wasn’t preferable. We quite sank into the patio life. Bynner and Spud came every afternoon, and I remember Bynner saying to me one day, while he was mixing a cocktail: “If you and Lawrence quarrel, why don’t you hit first?” I took the advice and the next time Lawrence was cross, I rose to the occasion and got out of my Mexican indifference and flew at him.

All that time in Mexico seems to me, now, as if I dreamt it, dreamt it intensely.

We went across the pale Lake of Chapala to a native village where they made serapes; they dyed the wool and wove them on simple looms. Lawrence made some designs and had them woven, as in the “Plumed Serpent.”

Lawrence could only write in places where one’s imagination could have space and free play, where the door was not closed to the future, where one’s vision could people it with new souls to be born, who would live a new life.

I remember the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, that we saw with Spud and Bynner, I hanging around behind. It was getting dusky and suddenly I came on a huge stone snake, coiling green with great turquoise eyes, round the foot of a temple. I ran after the others for all I was worth.

I got a glimpse of old Mexico then, the old sacrifices, hearts still quivering held up to the sun, for the sun to drink the blood: there it had all happened, on the pyramid of the Sun.

And that awful goddess, who, instead of a Raphael bambino, brings forth an obsidian knife. Fear of these people who don’t mind killing and don’t mind dying. And I had seen a huge black Christ, in a church, with a black beard and long woman’s hair and he wore little white, frilly knickers. Death and sacrifice and cruel gods seemed to reign in Mexico under its sunshine and splendour of flowers and lots of birds and fruit and white volcano peaks.

We went into a huge old Noah’s Ark of a boat, called “Esmeralda,” on the Lake of Chapala, with two other friends and Spud. Three Mexicans looked after the boat. They had guitars and sang their melancholy or fierce songs at the end of the boat. In the evening we slowly drifted along the large lake, that was more like a white sea, and, one day, we had no more to eat. So we landed on the island of the scorpions, still crowned by a Mexican empty prison, and only fit for scorpions. There Lawrence bought a live goat, but when we had seen our Mexican boatmen practically tearing the poor beast to pieces, our appetites vanished and we did not want to eat any more.

Lawrence’s visions which he wrote in the “Plumed Serpent” seem so interwoven with everyday life. The everyday and the vision running on together day by day. That autumn we returned to America and spent some time in New Jersey. Lawrence remained in America and went again to Mexico. I went to Europe.

ᐥᐥᐥ

So I went to England alone and had a little flat in Hampstead to see something of my children. It was winter and I wasn’t a bit happy alone there and Lawrence was always cross when I had this longing for the children upon me; but there it was, though now I know he was right: they didn’t want me any more, they were living their own lives. I felt lost without him. Finally he came and wrote this cross and unjust letter to my mother:

(Translated from the German)

But I think he was right; I should have gone to meet him in Mexico, he should not have come to Europe; these are the mistakes we make, sometimes irreparable.

Finally he came and I was glad. Just before Christmas he came and we had some parties and saw some friends, but we wanted to go back to America in the spring and live at the ranch that Mabel Luhan had given me. She had taken me to the little ranch near Taos and I said: “This is the loveliest place I have ever seen.” And she told me: “I give it you.” But Lawrence said: “We can’t accept such a present from anybody.” I had a letter from my sister that very morning telling me she had sent the manuscript of “Sons and Lovers,” so I told Lawrence: “I will give Mabel the MS. for the ranch.” So I did.

Murry was coming to America too. First we went to Paris, where we stayed as in our own home at the Hôtel de Versailles.

Lawrence wanted me to have some new clothes. Mabel Harrison, who had a large studio opposite the hotel, told us of a good tailor nearby. Lawrence went with me. The stout little tailor draped himself with the cape we bought to show me how to wear it. “Voyez-vous, la ligne, Madame.” He made me some other clothes and Lawrence remarked with wonder: “How is it possible that a man can throw all his enthusiasm into clothes for women?”

We went to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, a strange journey for me, going through French territory that had been German just a few years ago.

In the spring we went to America again and Dorothy Brett came with us. We only stayed a few days in New York and went on to Taos. We stayed with Mabel Luhan but, somehow, we didn’t get on. I was longing to go to the ranch and live there. Lawrence was a bit afraid to tackle the forlorn little ranch. We had some ten or a dozen Indians to build up the tumble-down houses and corrals and everything. Then he loved it. We had to mend the irrigation ditch and we were impressed by the way Mr. Murry dragged huge pipes through the woods, just over no road, to the mouth of the Gallina Canyon of which we had the water rights. And I cooked huge meals for everybody. We all worked so hard. Brett, as everybody called her, straight from her studio life, was amazing for the hard work she would do. One day we cleaned our spring and carried huge stones until we nearly dropped. The spring is in a hollow, and I loved watching the horses play when they came to drink there, shoving each other’s noses away from the water level and then tearing up the bank. We did it all ourselves for very little money for we didn’t have much. We got a cow and had four horses: Azul, Aaron, and two others; and then we got chickens, all white ones, Leghorns. The beautiful cockerel was called Moses and Susan was the cow’s name.

Lawrence got up at five o’clock each morning. With the opera glasses my mother had given him, he looked for Susan, who was an independent creature and loved to hide in the woods. There he would stand, when at last he had found her, and shake his forefinger at her—to my delight—and scold her, the black cow.

I made our own butter in a little glass churn and the chickens flourished on the buttermilk, and so did we in this healthy life. We made our own bread in the Indian oven outside, black bread and white and cakes, and Lawrence was terribly fussy about the bread, which had to be perfect. He made cupboards and chairs and painted doors and windows. He wrote and irrigated and it seems amazing that one single man got so much done. We rode and people stayed with us, and he was always there for everybody as if he did nothing at all. He helped Brett with her pictures and me with my poor attempts.

It was a wonderful summer; there were wild strawberries, that year, and back in the canyon raspberries as big as garden ones, but I was afraid to get them because I had heard that bears love raspberries. Bears won’t do you any harm except when they have young. There were bears in the canyon—that seemed indeed the end of the world! The Brett had a tiny shanty in which she lived. She adored Lawrence and slaved for him.

In the autumn we went again to Mexico City. It was fun and we saw several people. In Mexico you could still feel a little lordly and an individual; Mexico has not yet been made “safe for democracy.”

An amusing thing happened: Lawrence had become a member of the PEN Club and they gave an evening in his honour. It was a men’s affair and he put on his black clothes and set off in the evening, and I, knowing how unused he was to public functions and how he really shrank from being a public figure, wondered in the hotel room how the evening would go off. Soon after ten o’clock he appeared.

“How was it?”

“Well, they read to me bits of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ in Spanish and I had to sit and listen and then they made a speech and I had to answer.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: here we are together, some of us English, some Mexicans and Americans, writers and painters and business men and so on, but before all and above all we are men together tonight. That was about what I said. But a young Mexican jumped up: ‘It’s all very well for an Englishman to say I am a man first and foremost, but a Mexican cannot say so, he must be a Mexican above everything.’ ”

So we laughed, the only speech that Lawrence ever made falling so completely flat. They had missed the whole point, as so often.

Just as it was said of him that he wasn’t patriotic; he who seemed to me England itself, a flower sprung out of its most delicate, courageous tradition, not the little bourgeois England but the old England of Palmerston, whom he admired, when men were still men and not mere social beings.

One day William Somerset Maugham was expected in Mexico City; so Lawrence wrote to him if they could meet. But Maugham’s secretary answered for him, saying: “I hear we are going out to a friend’s to lunch together who lives rather far out; let’s share a taxi.”

Lawrence was angry that Maugham had answered through his secretary and wrote back: “No, I won’t share a car.”

Brett came with us and she had a story from her sister, the Ranee of Sarawak, where Maugham had stayed and he and his secretary had nearly got drowned, shooting some rapids, I think. So there had been feeling there. And our hostess had a grudge against the secretary. Maugham sat next to me and I asked how he liked it here. He answered crossly: “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

I said: “I don’t care what you admire.” And then the lunch was drowned in acidity all around. But after lunch I felt sorry for Maugham: he seemed to me an unhappy and acid man, who got no fun out of living. He seemed to me to have fallen between two stools as so many writers do. He wanted to have his cake and eat it. He could not accept the narrow social world and yet he didn’t believe in a wider human one. Commentators and critics of life and nothing more.

When I met other writers, then I knew without knowing how different altogether Lawrence was. They may have been good writers, but Lawrence was a genius.

The inevitability of what he elementally was and had to say at any price, his knowledge and vision, came to him from deeper secret sources than it is given to others to draw from. When I read Æschylus and Sophocles, then I know Lawrence is great, he is like these—greatest in his work, where human passions heave and sink and mingle and clash. The background of death is always there and the span of life is felt as fierce action. Life is life only when death is part of it. Not like the Christian conception that shuts death away from life and says death comes after: death is always there. I think the great gain of the war is a new reincorporation of death into our lives.

Then we went down to Oaxaca. We had again a house with a patio. There Lawrence wrote “Mornings in Mexico,” with the parrots and Corasmin, the white dog, and the mozo. He rewrote and finished the “Plumed Serpent” there. There was malaria in Oaxaca, it had come with the soldiers, and the climate didn’t suit him.

I went to the market with the mozo and one day he showed me in the square, in one of the bookshops, an undeniable caricature of Lawrence, and he watched my face to see how I would take it. I was thrilled! To find in this wild place, with its Zapotec and undiluted Mexican tribes, anything so civilized as a caricature of Lawrence was fun. I loved the market and it was only distressing to see the boy with his basket so utterly miserable at my paying without bargaining: it was real pain to him. But the lovely flowers and everything seemed so cheap.

Meanwhile Lawrence wrote at home and got run down. The Brett came every day and I thought she was becoming too much part of our lives and I resented it. So I told Lawrence: “I want the Brett to go away,” and he raved at me, said I was a jealous fool. But I insisted and so Brett went up to Mexico City. Then Lawrence finished “The Plumed Serpent,” already very ill, and later on he told me he wished he had finished it differently. Then he was very ill. I had a local native doctor who was scared at having anything to do with a foreigner and he didn’t come. Lawrence was very ill, much more ill than I knew, fortunately. I can never say enough of the handful of English and Americans there: how good they were to us. Helping in every way. I thought these mine-owners and engineers led plucky and terrible lives. Always fever, typhoid, malaria, danger from bandits, never feeling a bit safe with their lives. And so I was amazed at the “Selbstverständlichkeit” with which they helped us. It was so much more than Christian, just natural: a fellow-Englishman in distress: let’s help him. Lawrence himself thought he would die.

“You’ll bury me in this cemetery here,” he would say, grimly.

“No, no,” I laughed, “it’s such an ugly cemetery, don’t you think of it.”

And that night he said to me: “But if I die, nothing has mattered but you, nothing at all.” I was almost scared to hear him say it, that, with all his genius, I should have mattered so much. It seemed incredible.

I got him better by putting hot sandbags on him, that seemed to comfort his tortured inside.

One day we had met a missionary and his wife, who lived right in the hills with the most uncivilized tribe of Indians. He didn’t look like a missionary but like a soldier. He told me he had been an airman, and there far away in Oaxaca he told me how he was there when Manfred Richthofen was brought down behind the trenches and in the evening at mess one of the officers rose and said: “Let’s drink to our noble and generous enemy.”

For me to be told of this noble gesture made in that awful war was a great thing.

Then I remember the wife appeared with a very good bowl of soup when Lawrence was at his worst, and then prayed for him by his bedside in that big bare room. I was half afraid and wondered how Lawrence would feel. But he took it gently and I was half laughing, half crying over the soup and the prayer.

While he was so ill an earthquake happened into the bargain, a thunderstorm first, and the air made you gasp. I felt ill and feverish and Lawrence so ill in the next room—dogs howled and asses and horses and cats were scared in the night—and to my horror I saw the beams of my roof move in and out of their sheaves.

“Let’s get under the bed if the roof falls!” I cried.

At last, slowly, slowly, he got a little better. I packed up to go to Mexico City. This was a crucifixion of a journey for me. We travelled through the tropics. Lawrence in the heat so weak and ill and then the night we stayed halfway to Mexico City in a hotel. There, after the great strain of his illness, something broke in me. “He will never be quite well again, he is ill, he is doomed. All my love, all my strength, will never make him whole again.” I cried like a maniac the whole night. And he disliked me for it. But we arrived in Mexico City. I had Dr. Uhlfelder come and see him. One morning I had gone out and when I came back the analyst doctor was there and said, rather brutally, when I came into Lawrence’s room: “Mr. Lawrence has tuberculosis.” And Lawrence looked at me with such unforgettable eyes.

“What will she say and feel?” And I said: “Now we know, we can tackle it. That’s nothing. Lots of people have that.” And he got slowly better and could go to lunch with friends. But they, the doctors, told me:

“Take him to the ranch; it’s his only chance. He has T.B. in the third degree. A year or two at the most.”

With this bitter knowledge in my heart I had to be cheerful and strong. Then we travelled back to the ranch and were tortured by immigration officials, who made all the difficulties in the ugliest fashion to prevent us from entering the States. If the American Embassy in Mexico hadn’t helped we would not have been able to go to the ranch that was going to do Lawrence so much good.

Slowly at the ranch he got better. The high clear air, short sunbaths, our watching and care, and the spring brought life back into him. As he got better he began writing his play “David,” lying outside his little room on the porch in the sun.

I think in that play he worked off his struggle for life. Old Saul and the young David—old Samuel’s prayer is peculiarly moving in its hopeless love for Saul—so many different motifs, giant motifs, in that play.

Mabel took us to a cave along the road near Arroyo Seco and he used it for his story “The Woman Who Rode Away.”

Brett was always with us. I liked her in many ways; she was so much her own self.

I said to her: “Brett, I’ll give you half a crown if you contradict Lawrence,” but she never did. Her blind adoration for him, her hero-worship for him was touching, but naturally it was balanced by a preconceived critical attitude towards me. He was perfect and I always wrong, in her eyes.

When the Brett came with us Lawrence said to me: “You know, it will be good for us to have the Brett with us, she will stand between us and people and the world.” I did not really want her with us, and had a suspicion that she might not want to stand between us and the world, but between him and me. But no, I thought, I won’t be so narrow-gutted, one of Lawrence’s words, I will try.

So I looked after Brett and was grateful for her actual help. She did her share of the work. I yelled down her ear-trumpet, her Toby, when people were there, that she should not feel out of it. But as time went on she seemed always to be there, my privacy that I cherished so much was gone. Like the eye of the Lord, she was; when I washed, when I lay under a bush with a book, her eyes seemed to be there, only I hope the eye of the Lord looks on me more kindly. Then I detested her, poor Brett, when she seemed deaf and dumb and blind to everything quick and alive. Her adoration for Lawrence seemed a silly old habit. “Brett,” I said, “I detest your adoration for Lawrence, only one thing I would detest more, and that is if you adored me.”

When I finally told Lawrence in Oaxaca: “I don’t want Brett such a part of our life, I just don’t want her,” he was cross at first, but then greatly relieved.

How thrilling it was to feel the inrush of new vitality in him; it was like a living miracle. A wonder before one’s eyes. How grateful he was inside him! “I can do things again. I can live and do as I like, no longer held down by the devouring illness.” How he loved every minute of life at the ranch. The morning, the squirrels, every flower that came in its turn, the big trees, chopping the wood, the chickens, making bread, all our hard work, and the people and all assumed the radiance of new life.

He worked hard as a relaxation and wrote for hard work.

LAWRENCE AND FRIEDA IN MEXICO

LAWRENCE IN MEXICO

(Translated from the German)

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[A letter to Lawrence from his mother-in-law]

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LAWRENCE IN MEXICO

FRIEDA LAWRENCE ON AZUL

THE LAWRENCES’ RANCH ON THE LOBO,
SAN CRISTOBAL, N. M.

At the end of the summer he became restless again and wanted to go to Europe. To the Mediterranean he wished to go. So on the coast, not far from Genoa, we found Spotorno, that Martin Secker had told us was not overrun with foreigners. Under the ruined castle I saw a pink villa that had a friendly look and I wondered if we could have it. We found the peasant Giovanni who looked after it. Yes, he thought we could. It belonged to a Tenente dei Bersaglieri in Savona. We were staying at the little inn by the sea, when the bersaglieri asked for us. Lawrence went and returned. “You must come and look at him, he is so smart.” So I went and found a figure in uniform with gay plumes and blue sash, as it was the Queen’s birthday. We took the Bernarda and the tenente became a friend of ours. Lawrence taught him English on Sundays, but they never got very far.

My daughter Barbara, now grown up, was coming to stay with me. She was coming for the first time. I was beside myself with joy to have her. I had not waited in vain for so many years and longed for these children. But Lawrence did not share my joy. One day at our evening meal came the outburst: “Don’t you imagine your mother loves you,” he said to Barby; “she doesn’t love anybody, look at her false face.” And he flung half a glass of red wine in my face. Barby, who besides my mother and myself was the only one not to be scared of him, sprang up. “My mother is too good for you,” she blazed at him, “much too good; it’s like pearls thrown to the swine.” Then we both began to cry. I went to my room offended.

“What happened after I went?” I asked Barby later on.

“I said to him: ‘Do you care for her?’ ‘It’s indecent to ask,’ he answered; ‘haven’t I just helped her with her rotten painting?’ ” Which again puzzled me because he would gladly help anybody. It did not seem a sign of love to me. Then my daughter Else came too. But evidently to counterbalance my show Lawrence had asked his sister Ada and a friend to come and stay, so there were two hostile camps. Ada arrived and above me, in Lawrence’s room with the balcony, I could hear him complaining to her about me. I could not hear the words but by the tone of their voices I knew.

His sister Ada felt he belonged to her and the past, the past with all its sad memories. Of course it had been necessary for him to get out of his past and I had, of equal necessity, to fight that past, though I liked Ada for herself.

Lawrence was ill with all this hostility. I was grieved for him. So one evening I went up to his room and he was so glad I came. I thought all was well between us. In the morning Ada and I had bitter words. “I hate you from the bottom of my heart,” she told me. So another night I went up to Lawrence’s room and found it locked and Ada had the key. It was the only time he had really hurt me; so I was quite still. “Now I don’t care,” I said to myself.

He went away with Ada and her friend, hoping at the last I would say some kind word, but I could not. Lawrence went to Capri to stay with the Brewsters.

But I was happy with the two children. The spring came with its almond blossoms and sprouting fig-trees. Barby rushed up the hills with her paint box, her long legs carrying her like a deer. We lay in the sun and I rejoiced in her youthful bloom. Then a picture arrived from Lawrence. There was Jonah on it, just going to be swallowed by the whale. Lawrence had written underneath: “Who is going to swallow whom?”

But I was still angry.

Finally Lawrence came from Capri, wanting to be back. The children tried like wise elders to talk me round. “Now Mrs. L.” (so they called me) “be reasonable, you have married him, now you must stick to him.”

So Lawrence came back. “Make yourself look nice to meet him,” the children said. We met him at the station all dressed up. Then we all four had peace. He was charming with Else and Barby, trying to help them live their difficult young lives. “Else is not one of those to put the bed on fire, because there is a flea in it,” Lawrence said of her.

But for his sister Ada he never felt the same again.

(Translated from the German)

VILLA BERNARDA, SPOTORNO

(Translated from the German)

Lawrence wanted to go further into the heart of Italy. The Etruscan tombs and remains interested him. But the ranch too called him.

However the idea of having to struggle with immigration officials, thinking of his tuberculosis, scared him. So he went to Florence, with Else and Barby. After a short time they went back to England.

Friends told us of a villa to let in the country about Florence. So we took a car and went out by the Porta Federicana through dreary suburban parts till we came to the end of the tramline.

It was April, the young beans were green and the wheat and the peas up, and we drove into the old Tuscan landscape, that perfect harmony of what nature did and man made. It is quite unspoiled there still. Beyond Scandicci we passed two cypresses and went to the left on a small, little used road. On the top of one of those Tuscan little hills stood a villa. My heart went out to it. I wanted that villa. It was rather large, but so perfectly placed, with a panorama of the Valdarno in front, Florence on the left, and the umbrella-pine woods behind.

“I do hope it is this one that’s to let,” I said to Lawrence, and my wish was fulfilled; we could have the villa, we could live in the Mirenda. We were thrilled by the peasants who belonged to the podere . . . the Orsini, Bandelli, and Pini. The Orsini had a wild feud with the Bandelli. The Bandelli fascinated me; a loosely built, untamed father and easy-going mother, and two beautiful wild girls, Tosca and Lila, and three beautiful boys. . . . My special favourite was Dino, who was so gently grey-eyed and angelic, but you knew perfectly well how he would laugh at you behind your back. So polite he was, carrying parcels for me, such exquisite manners at ten years old! Then I discovered that he looked very pale and ill at times and they told me that he had a rupture, and, with the brutality of boys, he told me the boys at school jeered at him for it. So I went with him to Doctor Giglioli in Florence and poor Dino was to have an operation. His sisters and I took him to the hospital, first decking him out with new shirts and vests. He was miserable, but chiefly miserable because they had put him among the women, him, a maschio. He was put to bed and, when we left him there, he crept under the sheets and shook with misery. Alas, next day, who appeared at home? Dino! He had crept about the place, seen a man under an anæsthetic, and fled. It was like putting a wild creature into a hospital. Then we persuaded him to go back, chiefly by telling him that, once operated, no one could laugh at him any more. So back he went, this time he had made up his mind. He was a plucky boy, and afterwards they told me at the hospital how they had never had a better, braver patient. It was a jolly hospital, this Florence one, so human and friendly, not at all prisonlike or too much white starch of nurses, white tiles, whitewash, white paint about, that one’s very blood turns white. No, there your friends came to see you, everybody took a friendly interest in everybody else; well, such is life, here we are ever so ill, one day, then we get ever so well again, and then we die; “Ah, signora, cosí é la vita.” And after the operation Dino was a prouder and more important person than he had ever been in his life, with his chicken-broth and good foods, and his new vests and shirts and socks, and two hankies, and actually some eau de Cologne. And proudly he told his sisters, in superior knowledge, when they asked for the W.C.: “There is a thing, and you pull, you must pull, see?” They not having seen such an arrangement before!

Then Dino came home and he brought me flowers and fruit and we were very fond of each other, although he never felt quite at ease with me.

Our servant was Giulia, from the Pini family. There was the Pini father, a zio, and a poor old zia, who had been buried in an earthquake and occasionally had fits, and Pietro who also helped Giulia about the house, arriving each morning to feed the chickens and goats, and Stellina, the horse. Giulia had to cut the grass every day with a sickle to feed all the animals. In the morning she was barefoot and shabby, but in the afternoon, when she heard a motorcar with visitors, she would appear at the Mirenda in high-heeled shoes and a huge bow in her hair. We loved Giulia . . . never was anything too much for her, gay and amusing and wise, she was.

For the first time, there near Florence, I got the Italian, especially the Tuscan, feel of things. In Florence, the ancient unbroken flower of a culture made its deep mark on me. The Misericordia, how deep it impressed me, the voluntary, immediate effort to help one’s neighbour in distress. And when people pass it the youngest and the oldest take off their hats to it. . . . To me this seems real culture. . . . The Misericordia dates from the twelfth century and was founded by a facchino, an interesting story in itself.

Oh, the strange, almost ferocious intelligence of the Florentines!

What a pleasure it was to walk from the villa Mirenda, and take the tram in Scandicci to Florence! The handsome Tuscan girls with their glossy, neatly done hair in the tram . . . a chicken, sitting, tenderly held by its owner in a red hankie, its destiny either a sick friend or the mercato. Bottles of wine are hidden from the Dazio men, men friends embrace each other, somebody sees a relation and yells something about the “pasta” for midday, and so on, while we sail gaily on for Florence. There we would rush to Orioli’s shop, hear his news and all the news of our friends. We would each dash out and do our exciting shopping. Shopping in Florence was still fun, not the dreary large-store drudgery. . . . There are the paper shops, leather shops, scent shops, stuffs; one glorious shop sells nothing but ribbons, velvet and silk, all colours and sizes, spotted and gold and silver. Another shop, all embroidery silks. Then to have your shoes made is so comfortable . . . the shoemaker feels your foot more important than the measuring. And then the “48” . . . what didn’t we buy at the “48”!

Marionettes and pots and pans, china and glasses and hammers and paints. We would collect our things at Orioli’s and drive home with Pietro and Giulia, furnishing the great kitchen at the Mirenda so conveniently with a few pounds, Lawrence designing a large kitchen table and brackets from which the pots hung. We painted the shutters of the Mirenda, and the chairs, green; we put “stuoie,” thick pale grass matting, on the red-tiled floor in the big sitting-room. We had a few Vallombrosa chairs, a round table, a piano, hired, a couch and an old seat. The walls were syringed white with the syringe one uses to put verderane on the vines . . . that was done fast, and the sun poured into the big room so still and hot. The only noises came from the peasants, calling or singing at their work, or the water being drawn at the well. Or best, and almost too fierce, were the nightingales singing away from early dawn, almost the clock round . . . an hour or two’s rest at midday in the heat. The spring that first year was a revelation in flowers, from the first violets in the woods . . . carpets of them we found, and as usual in our walks we took joyful possession of the unspoiled, almost medieval country around us. By the stream in the valley were tufts of enormous primroses, where the willow trees had been blood red through the winter. On the edge of the umbrella-pine woods, in the fields, were red and purple big anemones, strange, narrow-pointed, red and yellow wild tulips, bee orchids and purple orchids, tufts of tight-scented lavender . . . flowers thick like velvety carpets, like the ground in a Fra Angelico picture.

Our carriage and the Stellina were so small, I felt like sitting in a doll’s perambulator. One day I went shopping with Pietro in Scandicci, when he had tooth-ache; he wore a red hankie round his poor swollen cheek, and on top on the hankie perched a hat, a bit sideways, with the Italian chic in it. He was very sorry for himself, and so was I, but none of the people we passed seemed to think us a funny sight, and we must have been, in that tiny barroccino, Pietro with his tooth-ache and his hankie by my side.

The Italians are so natural, one has tooth-ache and why hide it? Pietro would tell me: “Si, signora, questa sera vado a fare all’amore con la mia fidanzata.” The fidanzata had only one eye, she was pretty, but in a self-conscious way she always kept the side with the eye toward one.

Christmas came and I wanted to make a Christmas tree for all the peasants. I told Pietro: “Buy me a tree in Florence, when you go to market.”

“What,” he said, “buy a tree, signora? Ah, no, one doesn’t buy a tree, I’ll get the signora one from the prete’s wood.”

On Christmas Day, or rather Christmas Eve, at four in the morning I heard a whisper: “Signora! Signora!” under my window. I looked out and there was Pietro with a large beautiful tree. He brought it in and how Lawrence and I and Giulia and Pietro enjoyed trimming that tree. There were pine-cones on it and we put gold and silver paper around these cones and Pietro would yell: “Guarda, guarda, signora, che bellezza!” while Lawrence and I went on trimming the tree with a lot of shiny things bought at the “48”; silver threads that we called “Christ Child hair” when I was small, and also lots and lots of candies. The Christmas tree looked so beautiful in that big white empty room, not a bit Christian, and how the peasant children loved their cheap wooden toys and how carefully they handled them, so precious were they. They had never had toys before. The grown-ups loved it too. We had difficulty in making them all go home again.

Such a sweetness and perfection of successive flowering Florence meant to us. We walked in the afternoons, almost awed through so much unknown, unobtrusive loveliness . . . the white oxen so carefully ploughing, between the cypresses, and flowers in the wheat, and beans and peas and clover! At twilight we would come home and light our stove in the big sitting-room, the stove that had been there for centuries, used as it had been to keep the silkworms warm in the winter . . . now it warmed us. We had no pictures on the walls, but Maria Huxley had left some canvases behind and I said: “Let’s have some pictures.”

Then, mixing his paints himself, boldly and joyfully, Lawrence began to paint. I watched him for hours, absorbed, especially when he began a new one, when he would mix his paints on a piece of glass, paint with a rag and his fingers, and his palm and his brushes. “Try your toes next,” I would say. Occasionally, when I was cooking pigeons that tasted of wine because they had fed on the dregs of grapes from the wine-press, or washing, he would call me, and I would have to hold out an arm or a leg for him to draw, or tell him what I thought of his painting.

He enjoyed his painting . . . with what intensity he went for it! Then he wrote “Lady Chatterley.” After breakfast—we had it at seven or so—he would take his book and pen and a cushion, followed by John the dog, and go into the woods behind the Mirenda and come back to lunch with what he had written. I read it day by day and wondered how his chapters were built up and how it all came to him. I wondered at his courage and daring to face and write these hidden things that people dare not write or say.

For two years “Lady Chatterley” lay in an old chest that Lawrence had painted a greeny yellow with roses on it, and often when I passed that chest, I thought: “Will that book ever come out of there?”

Lawrence asked me: “Shall I publish it, or will it only bring me abuse and hatred again?” I said: “You have written it, you believe in it, all right, then publish it.” So one day we talked it all over with Orioli; we went to a little old-fashioned printer, with a little old printing shop where they had only enough type to do half the book—and “Lady Chatterley” was printed. When it was done, stacks and stacks of “Lady C . . . ,” or Our Lady, as we called it—were sitting on the floor of Orioli’s shop. There seemed such a terrific lot of them that I said in terror: “We shall never sell all these.” A great many were sold before there was a row; first some did not arrive at their destination in America, then there came abuse from England . . . but it was done . . . his last great effort.

He had done it . . . and future generations will benefit, his own race that he loved and his own class, that is less inhibited, for he spoke out of them and for them, there in Tuscany, where the different culture of another race gave the impetus to his work.

One winter we went to Diablerets and stayed in a little chalet. Aldous Huxley and Maria, Julian Huxley and Juliette, and their children shared a big villa nearby. Maria read “Lady C.” there and Juliette was shocked at first. But then it was meant to be a shock. I can see Aldous and Lawrence talking together by the fire. I remember Aldous patiently trying to teach me to ski, but my legs tied themselves into knots with the skis and I seemed to be most of the time sitting in the snow collecting my legs.

We went for picnics in the snow, the Huxleys skiing, Lawrence and I in a sledge. I saw Diablerets again later on in the summer—I didn’t recognize it, so completely different it looked in the snow.

I think the greatest pleasure and satisfaction for a woman is to live with a creative man, when he goes ahead and fights—I found it so. Always when he was in the middle of a novel or writing I felt happy as if something were happening, there was a new thing coming into the world. Often before he conceived a new idea he was irritable and disagreeable, but when it had come, the new vision, he could go ahead, and was eager and absorbed.

We had a very hot summer that year and we wanted to go to the mountains. One hot afternoon Lawrence had gathered peaches in the garden and came in with a basket full of wonderful fruit—he showed them to me—a very little while after he called from his room in a strange, gurgling voice; I ran and found him lying on his bed; he looked at me with shocked eyes while a slow stream of blood came from his mouth. “Be quiet, be still,” I said. I held his head, but slowly and terribly the blood flowed from his mouth. I could do nothing but hold him and try to make him still and calm and send for Doctor Giglioli. He came, and anxious days and nights followed. In this great heat of July nursing was difficult—Giulia, all the peasants—helped in every possible way. The signor was so ill—Giulia got down to Scandicci at four in the morning and brought ice in sawdust in a big handkerchief, and milk, but this, even boiled straightaway, would be sour by midday. The Huxleys came to see him, Maria with a great bunch of fantastically beautiful lotus, and Giglioli every day, and Orioli came and helped. But I nursed him alone night and day for six weeks, till he was strong enough to take the night train to the Tyrol.

This was another inroad his illness made. We both fought hard and won.

People came to see us at the Mirenda. Capitano Ravagli had to come to Florence for a military case—he came to see us and showed Lawrence his military travel-pass. When Lawrence saw on it: Capitano Ravagli deve partire (must leave) at such and such a time . . . he shook his head and said resentfully: “Why must? why must? there shouldn’t be any must. . . .”

One Sunday afternoon Osbert and Edith Sitwell came. They moved us strangely. They seemed so oversensitive, as if something had hurt them too much, as if they had to keep up a brave front to the world, to pretend they didn’t care and yet they only cared much too much. When they left, we went for a long walk, disturbed by them. But how afterwards they could think that “Lady Chatterley” had anything to do with them, is beyond me. “Lady Chatterley” was written and finished before Lawrence ever set eyes on any Sitwell.

That autumn we gave up the Mirenda. Lawrence had been so ill there and wanted the sea. I went to pack up at the Mirenda, it was a grief to me. I had been so very happy there except for Lawrence’s illness. How great the strain was at times, always the strain of his health. The last ounce of my strength seemed to be drained at times but I had my reward. He got better and I always knew however tired I might be he felt worse than ever I could. Making another effort my own strength grew. I never had time to think of my own health, so it looked after itself and it never let me down. The peasants at the Mirenda, the very place itself, the woods with their umbrella-pines, the group of buildings, seemed sad at being left.

The peasants took all the belongings we had collected and carried them away on their backs, like gnomes they crept under their loads down the path. When I gave a last look from the two cypress trees along the road there stood the Mirenda upon its hill in the evening sun, with its shutters closed, old and solid, it seemed as if its eyes had closed for sleep, to dream of the life that had been and gone.

Lawrence had gone to Port-Cros with Richard Aldington, Brigit Patmore, and Dorothy Yorke—Arabella we called her.

I joined them there. Port-Cros seemed an island of mushrooms—I had never seen so many as there on the moist warm ground of the undergrowth. We had a donkey and a man who worked for us and brought up the food from the little harbour below. Lawrence was not well and I remember how we all did our best on the top of that island to help him in every way.

We drank coffee in the inner space of the small fortress we lived in. The donkey looked on and Richard jumped up to play the brave toreador, waving his blue scarf at the donkey. Jasper was its name. Jasper fled into the bushes but its long ears stuck out and he had to peep at Richard—he hadn’t got the bullfight idea, but was intrigued.

Richard was an education in itself to me: he knew so much about Napoleon, for instance, and made me see Napoleon from a different angle, the emotional power he had over his men. Richard told me of his war experiences, death experience and beyond death: it seemed to melt one’s brain away; Richard began writing his “Death of a Hero” there in Port Cros. One day we went bathing in the bluest little bay, when an octopus persecuted Brigit and Richard had to beat it away.

We wanted to go to the mainland, not to be so far away with Lawrence so frail. So we left for Toulon, gay Toulon with its ships and sailors and shops, real sailors’ shops, with boxes adorned with shells, ships made of shells, long knives from Corsica, on which was written: “Che la mia ferita sia mortale.”

Near Toulon, at Bandol, in the hotel Beau Rivage we stayed all winter. A sunny hotel by the sea, friendly and easy as only Provence can be. We seemed to live completely the life of a “petit rentier,” as Rousseau le Douanier has painted it. Lawrence wrote “Pansies” in his room in the morning, then we went to have our apéritif before lunch in a café on the sea-front. There was a small war memorial, a gay young damsel that would please any poilu. We knew all the dogs of the small place, we saw the boats come in, their silvery loads of sardines glittering on the sand of the shores. Lawrence was better that winter in health. He watched the men playing “boccia” on the shore, after lunch. We seemed to share the life of the little town, running along so easily. We went with the bus to Toulon. We saw the coloured soldiers. We went to a beautiful circus. Yes, easy and sunny was this winter in Bandol.

The Huxleys came and later on they found a house across the bay at Sanary. I see us sitting in the sunny dining-room of the Beau Rivage, and Lawrence saying to Maria: “No, Maria, you would not be a bit nice if you were really very rich.”

In the spring we went to Spain from Marseilles—to Barcelona, from there to Mallorca. Mallorca still has a depth to it, a slight flavour of Africa, a distance in its horizon over the sea.

Our hotel was by a small bay. Deliciously hot, the days went by. We went all over the island, always wary not to tire Lawrence. I bathed in the heat of midday and climbed the rocks with the little bay entirely to myself. But one day I looked around and saw a Spanish officer on a splendid horse, looking out towards the sea; I was disturbed in my loneliness and wanted to dash to my bathing cloak and go away. I sprang on to a heap of seaweeds that had a hole underneath it and rocks. Like a gunshot my ankle snapped, I collapsed sick with pain. The officer rode up and offered me his horse that danced about. I thought: what a waste of a romantic situation; the ankle hurts so much, I can’t get on to a prancing horse—if I could only be alone with this pain.

Lawrence appeared, got two young men to take me to the hotel in their car. The ankle did not hurt any more, but it was broken.

Lawrence wanted me to go to London to be there for the exhibition of his paintings. A gay flag with his name was flying outside the Warren Gallery when I went there. His pictures looked a little wild and overwhelming in the elegant, delicate rooms of the galleries. But never could I have dreamed that a few pictures could raise such a storm. I had not realized their potency in the big, bare rooms of the Mirenda, where they had been born so naturally, as if Tuscany had given its life to them. I was astonished. Then the Police came and put them in the cellar of Marlborough Police station to be destroyed. I was worried lest the cellar be damp and so destroy them that way. But no, they were saved; it was a fight, though.

Meanwhile Lawrence was ill in Florence. What with the abuse of “Lady Chatterley” and the disapproval of the pictures, he had become ill. Orioli telegraphed in distress. So off I set on my journey to Florence, my ankle still wobbly and aching and with constant worry in my mind of how I would find Lawrence. Orioli told me that after receiving my telegram saying I was coming, he had said: “What will Frieda say when she arrives?” And Lawrence had answered: “Do you see those peaches in the bowl? She will say, ‘What lovely peaches,’ and she will devour them.” So it was. After my first look at Lawrence, when his eyes had signalled to me their relief, “She is here with me,” I felt my thirst from the long journey and ate the peaches.

He always got better when I was there. But Orioli told me how scared he had been when he had seen Lawrence, his head and arms hanging over the side of the bed, like one dead.

We left the heat of Florence for the Tegernsee to be near Max Mohr. We had a rough peasant-house, it was autumn. Lawrence rested a great deal. My sister Else came to see him, and Alfred Weber. When he was alone with Alfred Weber, he said to him: “Do you see those leaves falling from the apple tree? When the leaves want to fall you must let them fall.” Max Mohr had brought some doctors from Munich, but medicine did not help Lawrence. His organism was too frail and sensitive. I remember some autumn nights when the end seemed to have come. I listened for his breath through the open door, all night long, an owl hooting ominously from the walnut tree outside. In the dim dawn an enormous bunch of gentians I had put on the floor by his bed seemed the only living thing in the room. But he recovered and slowly Max Mohr and I travelled with him south again to Bandol.

After the Mirenda we seemed to live chiefly for his health. Switzerland and the sea one after the other seemed to do him most good. He did not want any doctors or cures. “I know so much better about myself than any doctor,” he would say. His life became a struggle for health. And yet he would rise above it so amazingly and his spirit brought forth immortal flowers right up to the very end. One of his desires was to write a novel about each continent. Africa and Asia still he wanted to do. It was not given to him to do so. As one of my Indian friends here said: “Why didn’t Mr. Lawrence write about the whole world? He knew all about it.” When he had read “The Lost Girl” he said: “What happened to those people afterwards? I want to know their story till they die.”

Here these Indians seem to understand him so immediately—better, I believe, than his white fellowmen.

LAWRENCE AT VILLA BERNARDA IN SPOTORNO

FRIEDA, LAWRENCE, AND HUXLEY AT THE MIRENDA

The Nightingale

by D. H. Lawrence

Tuscany is full of nightingales, and in spring and summer they sing all the time, save in the middle of the night and the middle of the day. In the little leafy woods that hang on the steep of the hill toward the streamlet, as maidenhair hangs on a rock, you hear them piping up in the wanness of dawn, about four o’clock in the morning: Hello! Hello! Hello! It is the brightest sound, perhaps, of all sounds in the world: a nightingale piping up. Every time you hear it, you feel a wonder and, it must be confessed, a thrill, because the sound is so bright, so glittering, and it has such power behind it.

“There goes the nightingale!” you say to yourself: and it is as if the stars were darting up from the little thicket and leaping away into the vast vagueness of the sky, to be hidden and gone. And every single time you hear the nightingale afresh, your second thought is: “Now why do they say he is a sad bird?”

He is the noisiest, most inconsiderate, most obstreperous and jaunty bird in the whole kingdom of birds. How John Keats managed to begin his “Ode to a Nightingale” with “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my senses . . .”—well, I for one don’t know. You can hear the nightingale silverily shouting: “What? What? What, John? Heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains?—tra-la-la!-tri-li-lily-lilyly!”

And why the Greeks said he—or she—was sobbing in a bush for a lost lover, again I don’t know. Jug-jug-jug! say the medieval writers, to represent the rolling of the little balls of lightning in the nightingale’s throat. A wild rich sound, richer than the eyes in a peacock’s tail.

They say, with that jug! jug! jug! that she is sobbing. It really is mysterious, what people hear. You’d think they had their ears on upside down. Anyone who ever heard the nightingale “sobbing” must have quite a different hearing-faculty from the one I’ve got.

Anyhow, it’s a male sound, a most intensely and undilutedly male sound. And pure assertion. There is not a hint nor shadow of echo and hollow recall. Nothing at all like a hollow low bell. Nothing in the world so unforlorn.

Perhaps that is what made Keats straightway feel forlorn.

Perhaps that is the reason of it: why they all hear sobs in the bush, where any really normal listening mortal hears the silver ringing shouts of cherubim. Perhaps because of the discrepancy.

Because, as a matter of fact, the nightingale sings with a ringing, punching vividness and a pristine assertiveness that makes a mere man sit down and consider. It is the kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of glittering exclamation which must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created in brightness, and found themselves able to shout aloud. Then there must have been a nightingaleish to-do! Hello! Hello! Behold! Behold! Behold! It is I! It is I! What a mar-mar-marvellous occurrence! What?

For the pure splendid splendidness of vocal assertion: Lo! It is I! you have to listen to the nightingale. Perhaps for the visual perfection of the same assertion, you have to look at a peacock shaking all his eyes. Among all creatures created in positive splendour, these two are perhaps the most perfect: the one in invisible, triumphing sound, the other in voiceless visibility. The nightingale is a quite undistinguished grey-brown bird, if you do see him: although he’s got that tender, hopping mystery about him, of a thing that is rich alive inside. Just as the peacock, when he does make himself heard, is awful, but still impressive: such a fearful shout from out of the menacing jungle. You can actually see him, in Ceylon, yell from a high bough, then stream away past the monkeys, into the impenetrable jungle that seethes and is dark.

And, perhaps, for this reason—the reason, that is, of pure angel-keen self-assertion—the nightingale makes a man feel sad, and the peacock so often makes him feel angry. Because they are so triumphantly positive in their created selves, eternally new from the hand of the rich bright God, and perfect. The nightingale simply ripples with his own perfection. And the peacock arches all his bronze and purple eyes with assuredness.

This, this rippling assertion of perfection, this emerald shimmer of a perfect self, makes men angry or melancholy, according as it assails the eye or the ear. The ear is much less cunning than the eye. You can say to somebody: I like you awfully: you look so beautiful this morning! and they’ll believe it utterly, though your voice may really be vibrating with mortal hatred. The ear is so stupid, it will accept any amount of false money in words. But let one tiny gleam of the mortal hatred come into your eye, or across your face, and it will be detected instantly. The eye is so shrewd and rapid.

For this reason, we see the peacock at once, in his showy male self-assertion: and we say, rather sneeringly: Fine feathers make fine birds! But when we hear the nightingale, we don’t know what we hear, we only know we feel sad: forlorn! And so we say it is the nightingale that is sad.

The nightingale, let us repeat, is the most unsad thing in the world: even more unsad than the peacock full of gleam. The nightingale has nothing to be sad about. He feels perfect with life. It isn’t conceit. He just feels life perfect, and he trills it out, shouts, jugs, gurgles, calls, declares, asserts, and triumphs, but never reflects. It is pure music, in so far as you could never put words to it. But there are words for the feelings aroused in us by the song. No! even that is not true. There are no words to tell what one really feels, hearing the nightingale. It is something so much more pure than words. But it is some sort of feeling of triumph in one’s own life perfection. Keats feels this all, through his ode.

It is beautiful poetry, of a truthful poet. And Keats keeps it up, in the next stanza, wanting to drink the blushful Hippocrene and fade away with the nightingale into the forest dim.

It is such lovely poetry! But the next line is a bit ridiculous, so I won’t quote it. Yes, I will:

This is Keats, not the nightingale.—But Keats still tries to break away, and get over into the nightingale world.

He doesn’t succeed, however. The viewless wings of Poesy carry him only into the bushes, not into the nightingale world. He is still outside.

I am sure the sound of the nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death—except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive pure self-perfection, in the bird, and the uneasy flame of waning selflessness, for ever reaching out to be something not himself, in the poet!

How astonished the nightingale would be if he could be made to realize what sort of answer the poet was answering to his song! He would fall off the bough with amazement.

Because a nightingale, when you answer him back, only shouts and sings louder. Suppose a few other nightingales pipe up in the neighbouring bushes—as they always do—then the blue-white sparks of sound go dazzling up to heaven. And suppose you, mere mortal, happen to be sitting on the shady bank having an altercation with the mistress of your heart, hammer and tongs, then the chief nightingale swells and goes it like Caruso in the third act, simply a brilliant, bursting frenzy of music, singing you down: till you simply can’t hear yourself speak to quarrel, and you have to laugh.

There was, in fact, something very like a nightingale in Caruso, that bird-like bursting miraculous energy of song and self-utterance, and self-luxuriance.

Not yet in Tuscany, anyhow. They are twenty to the dozen. And the cuckoo seems remote and low-voiced, calling low, half-secretive, even as he flies past.—Perhaps really it is different in England.

I wonder what sort of answer they all made! Diocletian, for instance! And Æsop! And Mademoiselle Ruth! I strongly suspect the last young lady of giving the nightingale occasion to sing, like the nice damsel in the Boccaccio story, who went to sleep with the nightingale in her hand: “tua figliuola é stata si vaga dell’usignolo, che ella l’ha preso e tienlosi in mano.”

And I wonder what the hen nightingale thinks of it all, as she mildly sits upon the eggs and hears milord giving himself forth? Probably she likes it, for she goes on breeding him true to type. Probably she likes it better than if, like the poet, he humbly warbled:

One sympathizes with Keats’s Fanny, and understands why she wasn’t having any. Much she’d have got out of such a midnight! Perhaps, when all’s said and done, the female of the species prefers it when the male of the species is full of his own bright life, and warbles her into the spell of himself. In the end, she gets more out of it that way.

Because, of course, though the nightingale is utterly unconscious of the little dim hen while he sings, she knows well enough that the song is half her; just as the eggs are half his. And just as she doesn’t want him coming and putting a heavy foot down on her little bunch of eggs, he doesn’t want her to go nestling down on his song and smothering it, or muffling it. Every man to his trade, and every woman to hers.

It never was a plaintive anthem, it was Caruso at his best. But don’t argue with a poet.

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LAWRENCE AND ALDOUS HUXLEY

Now I am nearing the end . . . I think of Bandol and our little villa “Beau Soleil” on the sea, the big balcony windows looking toward the sea, another window at the side overlooking a field of yellow narcissus called “soleil” and pine trees beyond and again the sea. I remember sunny days when the waves came flying along with white manes, they looked as if they might come flying right up the terrace into his room. There were plants in his room and they flowered so well and I said to him: “Why, oh why, can’t you flourish like those?” I remember what a beautiful and strange time it was. One day a cat, a big handsome yellow-and-white cat came in; Lawrence chased it away. “We don’t want it. If we go away it’ll be miserable. We don’t want to take the responsibility for it”; but the cat stayed, it insisted on it. Its name was “Micky” and it grew more and more beautiful and never a cat played more intelligently than Micky . . . he played hide-and-go-seek with me, and Lawrence played mouse with him. . . . Lawrence was such a convincing mouse . . . and then he insisted: “You must put this cat out at night or it will become a bourgeois, unbeautiful cat.” So very sadly, at nightfall, in spite of Micky’s remonstrances I put him out into the garden. To Mme. Martens, the cook, Lawrence said: “Vous lui donnez à manger, il dort avec moi, et Madame l’amuse.”

But in the morning at dawn Micky and I appeared in Lawrence’s room . . . Micky took a flying leap on to Lawrence’s bed and began playing with his toes, and I looked at Lawrence to see how he was . . . his worst time was before dawn when he coughed so much, and I knew what he had been through. . . . But then at dawn I believe he felt grateful that another day had been given him. “Come when the sun rises,” he said, and when I came he was glad, so very glad, as if he would say: “See, another day is given me.”

The sun rose magnificently opposite his bed in red and gold across the bay and the fishermen standing up in their boats looked like eternal mythological figures dark and alive against the lit-up splendour of the sea and sky, and when I asked him: “What kind of a night did you have?” to comfort me, he would answer: “Not so bad . . .” but it was bad enough to break one’s heart. . . . And his courage and unflinching spirit, doing their level best to live as long as he possibly could in this world he loved so much, gave me courage too. Never, in all illness and suffering, did he let the days sink to a dreary or dull or sordid level . . . those last months had the glamour of a rosy sunset . . . I can only think with awe of those last days of his, as of the rays of the setting sun . . . and the setting sun obliterates all the sordid details of a landscape. So the dreary passages in our lives were wiped out and he said to me: “Why, oh why did we quarrel so much?” and I could see how it grieved him . . . our terrible quarrels . . . but I answered: “Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?”

One day the charming old mother of Mme. Douillet who was at the Hôtel Beau Rivage brought us two gold-fish in a bowl; “Pour amuser Monsieur,” but, alas, Micky thought it was “pour amuser Monsieur le chat.” With that fixed, incomprehensible cat-stare he watched those red lines moving in the bowl . . . then my life became an anxious one . . . the gold-fish had to go in the bathroom on a little table in the sun. Every morning their water was renewed and I had to let it run for half an hour into the bowl. That was all they got, the gold-fish, no food. And they flourished. . . . “Everything flourishes,” I said to Lawrence imploringly, “plants and cats and gold-fish, why can’t you?” And he said: “I want to, I want to, I wish I could.”

His friend Earl Brewster came and massaged him every day with coconut oil . . . and it grieved me to see Lawrence’s strong, straight, quick legs gone so thin, so thin . . . and one day he said to me: “I could always trust your instinct to know the right thing for me, but now you don’t seem to know any more . . .” I didn’t . . . I didn’t know any more . . .

And one night he asked me: “Sleep with me,” and I did . . . all night I was aware of his aching inflexible chest, and all night he must have been so sadly aware of my healthy body beside him . . . always before, when I slept by the side of him, I could comfort and ease him . . . now no more. . . . He was falling away from life and me, and with all my strength I was helpless. . . .

Micky had his eye on the gold-fish. One sad evening at tea-time the bathroom door was left open. . . . I came and found both gold-fish on the floor, Micky had fished them out of the bowl. I put them in quickly, one revived, a little sadder and less golden for his experience but the other was dead. Lawrence was furious with Micky. “He knew we wanted him to leave those gold-fish alone, he knew it. We feed him, we take care of him, he had no right to do it.”

When I argued that it was the nature of cats and they must follow their instincts he turned on me and said: “It’s your fault, you spoil him, if he wanted to eat me you would let him.” And he wouldn’t let Micky come near him for several days.

I felt: “Now I can do no more for Lawrence, only the sun and the sea and the stars and the moon at night, that’s his portion now. . . .” He never would have the shutters shut or the curtains drawn, so that at night he could see the sky. In those days he wrote his “Apocalypse”; he read it to me, and how strong his voice still was, and I said: “But this is splendid.”

I was reading the New Testament and told Lawrence: “I get such a kick out of it, just the same as when Azul gallops like the wind across the desert with me.”

As he read it to me he got angry with all those mixed-up symbols and impossible pictures.

He said: “In this book I want to go back to old days, pre-Bible days, and pick up for us there what men felt like and lived by then.”

The pure artist in him revolted! His sense of the fitness of things never left him in the lurch! He stuck to his sense of measure and I am often amused at the criticism people bring against him . . . criticisms only reveal the criticizers and their limitations. . . . If the criticizer is an interesting person his criticism will be interesting, if he isn’t then it’s waste of time to listen to him. If he voices a general opinion he is uninteresting too, because we all know the general opinion ad nauseam. “My flesh grows weary on my bones” was one of Lawrence’s expressions when somebody held forth to him, as if one didn’t know beforehand what most people will say!

One day Lawrence said to himself: “I shan’t die . . . a rich man now . . . perhaps it’s just as well, it might have done something to me.” But I doubt whether even a million or two would have changed him!

One day he said: “I can’t die, I can’t die, I hate them too much! I have given too much and what did I get in return?”

It sounded so comical the way he said it, and I ignored the depth of sadness and bitterness of the words and said: “No, Lawrence, you don’t hate them as much as all that.” It seemed to comfort him.

And now I wonder and am grateful for the superhuman strength that was given us both in those days. Deep down I knew “something is going to happen, we are steering towards some end” but every nerve was strained and every thought and every feeling. . . . Life had to be kept going gaily at any price.

Since Doctor Max Mohr had gone, we had no doctor, only Mme. Martens, the cook. She was very good at all kinds of tisanes and inhalations and mustard plasters, and she was a very good cook.

My only grief was that we had no open fireplaces, only central heating and, thank goodness, the sun all day. Lawrence made such wonderful efforts of will to go for walks and the strain of it made him irritable. If I went with him it was pure agony walking to the corner of the little road by the sea, only a few yards! How gallantly he tried to get better and live! He was so very clever with his frail failing body. Again one could learn from him how to handle this complicated body of ours, he knew so well what was good for him, what he needed, by an unfailing instinct, or he would have died many years ago . . . and I wanted to keep him alive at any cost. I had to see him day by day getting nearer to the end, his spirit so alive and powerful that the end and death seemed unthinkable and always will be, for me.

And then Gertler sent a doctor friend to us, and when he saw Lawrence he said the only salvation was a sanatorium higher up. . . .

For the last years I had found that for a time mountain air, and then a change by the sea, seemed to suit Lawrence best. Lawrence had always thought with horror of a sanatorium, we both thought with loathing of it. Freedom that he cherished so much! He never felt like an invalid, I saw to that! Never should he feel a poor sick thing as long as I was there and his spirit! Now we had to give in . . . we were beaten. With a set face Lawrence made me bring all his papers on to his bed and he tore most of them up and made everything tidy and neat and helped to pack his own trunks, and I never cried. . . . His self-discipline kept me up, and my admiration for his unfailing courage. And the day came that the motor stood at the door of our little house, Beau Soleil. . . . Micky the cat had been taken by Achsah Brewster. She came before we started with armfuls of almond blossoms, and Earl Brewster travelled with us. . . . And patiently, with a desperate silence, Lawrence set out on his last journey. At Toulon station he had to walk down and up stairs, wasting strength he could ill afford to waste, and the shaking train and then the long drive from Antibes to the “Ad Astra” at Vence. . . . And again he had to climb stairs. There he lay in a blue room with yellow curtains and great open windows and a balcony looking over the sea. When the doctors examined him and asked him questions about himself he told them: “I have had bronchitis since I was a fortnight old.”

In spite of his thinness and his illness he never lost his dignity, he fought on and he never lost hope. Friends brought flowers, pink and red cyclamen and hyacinths and fruit . . . but he suffered much and when I bade him “good night” he said: “Now I shall have to fight several battles of Waterloo before morning.” I dared not understand to the full the meaning of his words. One day he said to my daughter:

“Your mother does not care for me any more, the death in me is repellent to her.”

But it was the sadness of his suffering . . . and he would not eat and he had much pain . . . and we tried so hard to think of different foods for him. His friends tried to help him, the Di Chiaras and the Brewsters and Aldous and Maria Huxley and Ida Rauh.

Wells came to see him, and the Aga Khan with his charming wife. Jo Davidson did a bust of him.

One night I saw how he did not want me to go away, so I came again after dinner and I said: “I’ll sleep in your room tonight.” His eyes were so grateful and bright, but he turned to my daughter and said: “It isn’t often I want your mother, but I do want her tonight to stay.” I slept on the long chair in his room, and I looked out at the dark night and I wanted one single star to shine and comfort me, but there wasn’t one; it was a dark big sky, and no moon and no stars. I knew how Lawrence suffered and yet I could not help him. So the days went by in agony and the nights too; my legs would hardly carry me, I could not stay away from him, and always the dread, “How shall I find him?” One night I thought of the occasion long ago when I knew I loved him, when a tenderness for him rose in me that I had not known before. He had taken my two little girls and me for a walk in Sherwood Forest, through some fields we walked, and the children ran all over the place, and we came to a brook . . . it ran rather fast under a small stone bridge. The children were thrilled, the brook ran so fast. Lawrence quite forgot me but picked daisies and put them face upwards on one side of the bridge in the water and then said: “Now look, look if they come out on the other side.”

He also made them paper boats and put burning matches into them; “this is the Spanish Armada, and you don’t know what that was.” “Yes, we do,” the older girl said promptly. I can see him now, crouching down, so intent on the game, so young and quick, and the small girls in their pink and white striped Viyella frocks, long-legged like colts, in wild excitement over such a play-fellow. But that was long ago . . . and I thought: “This is the man whom they call sex-obsessed.”

I slept on his cane chair several nights. I heard coughing from many rooms, old coughing and young coughing. Next to his room was a young girl with her mother, and I heard her call out: “Mama, Mama, je souffre tant!” I was glad Lawrence was a little deaf and could not hear it all. One day he tried to console me and said: “You must not feel so sympathetic for people. When people are ill or have lost their eyesight there is always a compensation. The state they are in is different. You needn’t think it’s the same as when you are well.”

After one night when he had suffered so much, I told myself: “It is enough, it is enough; nobody should have to stand this.”

He was very irritable and said: “Your sleeping here does me no good.” I ran away and wept. When I came back he said so tenderly: “Don’t mind, you know I want nothing but you, but sometimes something is stronger in me.”

We prepared to take him out of the nursing home and rented a villa where we took him. . . . It was the only time he allowed me to put on his shoes, everything else he always did for himself. He went in the shaking taxi and he was taken into the house and lay down on the bed on which he was to die, exhausted. I slept on the couch where he could see me. He still ate. The next day was a Sunday. “Don’t leave me,” he said, “don’t go away.” So I sat by his bed and read. He was reading the life of Columbus. After lunch he began to suffer very much and about tea-time he said: “I must have a temperature, I am delirious. Give me the thermometer.” This is the only time, seeing his tortured face, that I cried, and he said: “Don’t cry,” in a quick, compelling voice. So I ceased to cry any more. He called Aldous and Maria Huxley who were there, and for the first time he cried out to them in his agony. “I ought to have some morphine now,” he told me and my daughter, so Aldous went off to find a doctor to give him some. . . . Then he said: “Hold me, hold me, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where my hands are . . . where am I?”

Then the doctor came and gave him a morphine injection. After a little while he said: “I am better now, if I could only sweat I would be better . . .” and then again: “I am better now.” The minutes went by, Maria Huxley was in the room with me. I held his left ankle from time to time, it felt so full of life, all my days I shall hold his ankle in my hand.

He was breathing more peacefully, and then suddenly there were gaps in the breathing. The moment came when the thread of life tore in his heaving chest, his face changed, his cheeks and jaw sank, and death had taken hold of him. . . . Death was there, Lawrence was dead. So simple, so small a change, yet so final, so staggering. Death!

I walked up and down beside his room, by the balcony, and everything looked different, there was a new thing, death, where there had been life, such intense life. The olive trees outside looked so black and close, and the sky so near; I looked into the room, there were his slippers with the shape of his feet standing neatly under the bed, and under the sheet he lay, cold and remote, he whose ankle I had held alive only an hour or so ago. . . . I looked at his face. So proud, manly and splendid he looked, a new face there was. All suffering had been wiped from it, it was as if I had never seen him or known him in all the completeness of his being. I wanted to touch him but dared not, he was no longer in life with me. There had been the change, he belonged somewhere else now, to all the elements; he was the earth and sky, but no longer a living man. Lawrence, my Lorenzo who had loved me and I him . . . he was dead. . . .

Then we buried him, very simply, like a bird we put him away, a few of us who loved him. We put flowers into his grave and all I said was: “Good-bye, Lorenzo,” as his friends and I put lots and lots of mimosa on his coffin. Then he was covered over with earth while the sun came out on to his small grave in the little cemetery of Vence which looks over the Mediterranean that he cared for so much.

Now that I have told my story in such a condensed way, letting blow through my mind anything that wanted to blow, I know how little I have said—how much I could say that perhaps would be more interesting.

But I wrote what rose up, and here it is.

Frieda Lawrence

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of "Not I, but the Wind..." by Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence]