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THE WHITE PEACOCK
boles. I drank the fresh air, that sparkled with the sound of the
blackbirds and thrushes whistling their strong bright notes.
I strayed round to where the headstones, from their eminence, leaned to look on the Hall below, where great windows
shone yellow light on the fl agged courtyard, and the little
fi sh-pool. A stone staircase descended from the graveyard to
the court, between stone balustrades whose pock-marked grey
columns still swelled gracefully and with dignity, encrusted
with lichens. The staircase was fi lled with ivy and rambling
roses – impassable. Ferns were unrolling round the big square
halting-place, half-way down where the stairs turned.
A peacock, startled from the back premises of the Hall,
came fl apping up the terraces to the churchyard. Then a heavy
footstep crossed the fl ags. It was the keeper. I whistled the
whistle he knew, and he broke his way through the vicious
rose-boughs up the stairs. The peacock fl apped beyond me, on
to the neck of an old bowed angel, rough and dark, an angel
which had long ceased sorrowing for the lost Lucy, and had
died also. The bird bent its voluptuous neck and peered about.
Then it lifted up its head and yelled. The sound tore the dark
sanctuary of twilight. The old grey grass seemed to stir, and
I could fancy the smothered primroses and violets beneath it
waking and gasping for fear.
The keeper looked at me and smiled. He nodded his head
towards the peacock, saying:
“Hark at that damned thing!”
Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at
the same time turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it
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DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
showed us the full wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream
of coloured stars over the sunken face of the angel.
“The proud fool! – look at it! Perched on an angel, too, as if
it were a pedestal for vanity. That’s the soul of a woman – or
it’s the devil.”
He was silent for a time, and we watched the great bird
moving uneasily before us in the twilight.
“That’s the very soul of a lady,” he said, “the very, very soul.
Damn the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to
wring its neck.”
Again the bird screamed, and shifted awkwardly on its legs;
it seemed to stretch its beak at us in derision. Annable picked
up a piece of sod and fl ung it at the bird, saying:
“Get out, you screeching devil! God!” he laughed. “There
must be plenty of hearts twisting under here” – and he
stamped on a grave – “when they hear that row.”
He kicked another sod from a grave and threw at the big
bird. The peacock fl apped away, over the tombs, down the terraces.
“Just look!” he said, “the miserable brute has dirtied that
angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech
and defi lement.”
He sat down on a vault and lit his pipe. But before he had
smoked two minutes, it was out again. I had not seen him in
a state of perturbation before.
“The church,” said I, “is rotten. I suppose they’ll stand all
over the country like this soon – with peacocks trailing the
graveyards.”
“Ay,” he muttered, taking no notice of me.
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
“This stone is cold,” I said, rising.
He got up too, and stretched his arms as if he were tired. It
was quite dark, save for the waxing moon which leaned over
the east.
“It is a very fi ne night,” I said. “Don’t you notice a smell of
violets?”
“Ay! The moon looks like a woman with child. I wonder
what Time’s got in her belly.”
“You?” I said. “You don’t expect anything exciting, do you?”
“Exciting! – No – about as exciting as this rotten old
place – just rot off – Oh, my God! – I’m like a good house,
built and fi nished, and left to tumble down again with nobody
to live in it.”
“Why – what’s up – really?”
He laughed bitterly, saying, “Come and sit down.”
He led me off to a seat by the north door, between two
pews, very black and silent. There we sat, he putting his gun
carefully beside him. He remained perfectly still, thinking.
“Whot’s up?” he said at last. “Why – I’ll tell you. I went to
Cambridge – my father was a big cattle dealer – he died bankrupt while I was in college, and I never took my degree. They
persuaded me to be a parson, and a parson I was.
“I went a curate to a little place in Leicestershire – a bonnie place with not many people, and a fi ne old church, and
a great rich parsonage. I hadn’t overmuch to do, and the rector – he was the son of an earl – was generous. He lent me
a horse and would have me hunt like the rest. I always think
of that place with a smell of honeysuckle while the grass is wet
223
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
in the morning. It was fi ne, and I enjoyed myself, and did the
parish work all right. I believe I was pretty good.
“A cousin of the rector’s used to come in the hunting season – a Lady Crystabel, lady in her own right. The second year
I was there she came in June. There wasn’t much company, so
she used to talk to me – I used to read then – and she used
to pretend to be so childish and unknowing, and would get
me telling her things, and talking to her, and I was hot on
things. We must play tennis together, and ride together, and
I must row her down the river. She said we were in the wilderness and could do as we liked. She made me wear fl annels
and soft clothes. She was very fi ne and frank and unconventional – ripping, I thought her. All the summer she stopped
on. I should meet her in the garden early in the morning when
I came from a swim in the river – it was cleared and deepened
on purpose – and she’d blush and make me talk with her.
I can remember I used to stand and dry myself on the bank
full where she might see me – I was mad on her – and she was
madder on me.
“We went to some caves in Derbyshire once, and she would
wander from the rest, and loiter, and, for a game, we played
a sort of hide and seek with the party. They thought we’d gone,
and they went and locked the door. Then she pretended to be
frightened and clung to me, and said what would they think,
and hid her face in my coat. I took her and kissed her, and we
made it up properly. I found out afterwards – she actually told
me – she’d got the idea from a sloppy French novel – the Romance of a Poor Young Man. I was the Poor Young Man.
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
“We got married. She gave me a living she had in her parsonage, and we went to live at her Hall. She wouldn’t let me
out of her sight. Lord! – we were an infatuated couple – and
she would choose to view me in an aesthetic light. I was Greek
statues for her, bless you: Croton, Hercules, I don’t know what!
She had her own way too much – I let her do as she liked with
me.
“Then gradually she got tired – it took her three years to
be really glutted with me. I had a physique then – for that
matter, I have now.”
He held out his arm to me, and bade me try his muscle.
I was startled. The hard fl esh almost fi lled his sleeve.
“Ah,” he continued, “you don’t know what it is to have the
pride of a body like mine. But she wouldn’t have children – no,
she wouldn’t – said she daren’t. That was the root of the difference at fi rst. But she cooled down, and if you don’t know the
pride of my body you’d never know my humiliation. I tried to
remonstrate – and she looked simply astounded at my cheek.
I never got over that amazement.
“She began to get souly. A poet got hold of her, and she
began to affect Burne-Jones – or Waterhouse – it was Waterhouse – she was a lot like one of his women – Lady of Shalott,
I believe. At any rate, she got souly, and I was her animal – son
animal – son bceuf. I put up with that for above a year. Then
I got some servants’ clothes and went.
“I was seen in France – then in Australia – though I never
left England. I was supposed to have died in the bush. She
married a young fellow. Then I was proved to have died, and
I read a little obituary notice on myself in a woman’s paper
225
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
she subscribed to. She wrote it herself – as a warning to other
young ladies of position not to be seduced by plausible ‘Poor
Young Men’.
“Now she’s dead. They’ve got the paper – her paper – in
the kitchen down there, and it’s full of photographs, even an
old photo of me – ‘an unfortunate misalliance’. I feel, somehow, as if I were at an end too. I thought I’d grown a solid,
middle-aged man, and here I feel sore as I did at twenty-six,
and I talk as I used to.
“One thing – I have got some children, and they’re of
a breed as you’d not meet anywhere. I was a good animal before everything, and I’ve got some children.”
He sat looking up where the big moon swam through the
black branches of the yew.
“So she’s dead – your poor peacock!” I murmured.
He got up, looking always at the sky, and stretched himself
again. He was an impressive fi gure massed in blackness against
the moonlight, with his arms outspread.
“I suppose,” he said, “it wasn’t all her fault.”
“A white peacock, we will say,” I suggested.
He laughed.
“Go home by the top road, will you!” he said. “I believe
there’s something on in the bottom wood.”
“All right,” I answered, with a quiver of apprehension. “Yes,
she was fair enough,” he muttered.
“Ay,” said I, rising. I held out my hand from the shadow.
I was startled myself by the white sympathy it seemed to express, extended towards him in the moonlight. He gripped it,
and cleaved to me for a moment, then he was gone.
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
I went out of the churchyard feeling a sullen resentment
against the tousled graves that lay inanimate across my way.
The air was heavy to breathe, and fearful in the shadow of the
great trees. I was glad when I came out on the bare white road,
and could see the copper lights from the refl ectors of a ponycart’s lamps, and could hear the amiable chat-chat of the hoofs
trotting towards me. I was lonely when they had passed.
Over the hill, the big fl ushed face of the moon poised
just above the tree-tops, very majestic, and far off – yet imminent. I turned with swift sudden friendliness to the net of
elm-boughs spread over my head, dotted with soft clusters
winsomely. I jumped up and pulled the cool soft tufts against
my face for company; and as I passed, still I reached upward
for the touch of this budded gentleness of the trees. The wood
breathed fragrantly, with a subtle sympathy. The fi rs softened
their touch to me, and the larches woke from the barren winter sleep, and put out velvet fi ngers to caress me as I passed.
Only the clean, bare branches of the ash stood emblem of the
discipline of life. I looked down on the blackness where trees
fi lled the quarry and the valley bottoms, and it seemed that the
world, my own home world, was strange again.
Some four or fi ve days after Annable had talked to me in
the churchyard, I went out to fi nd him again. It was Sunday
morning. The larch-wood was afl oat with clear, lyric green,
and some primroses scattered whitely on the edge under the
fringing boughs. It was a clear morning, as when the latent
life of the world begins to vibrate afresh in the air. The smoke
from the cottage rose blue against the trees, and thick yellow
227
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
against the sky. The fi re, it seemed, was only just lighted, and
the wood-smoke poured out.
Sam appeared outside the house, and looked round. Then
he climbed the water-trough for a better survey. Evidently unsatisfi ed, paying slight attention to me, he jumped down and
went running across the hill-side to the wood. “He is going for
his father,” I said to myself, and I left the path to follow him
down hill across the waste meadow, crackling the blanched
stems of last year’s thistles as I went, and stumbling in rabbitholes. He reached the wall that ran along the quarry’s edge,
and was over it in a twinkling.
When I came to the place, I was somewhat nonplussed,
for sheer from the stone fence, the quarry-side dropped for
some twenty or thirty feet, piled up with unmortared stones.
I looked round – there was a plain dark thread down the hillside, which marked a path to this spot, and the wall was scored
with the marks of heavy boots. Then I looked again down the
quarry-side, and I saw – how could I have failed to see? –
stones projecting to make an uneven staircase, such as is often
seen in the Derbyshire fences. I saw this ladder was well used,
so I trusted myself to it, and scrambled down, clinging to the
face of the quarry wall. Once down, I felt pleased with myself
for having discovered and used the unknown access, and I admired the care and ingenuity of the keeper, who had fi tted and
wedged the long stones into the uncertain pile.
It was warm in the quarry: there the sunshine seemed to
thicken and sweeten; there the little mounds of overgrown
waste were aglow with very early dog-violets; there the sparks
were coming out on the bits of gorse, and among the stones
228
THE WHITE PEACOCK
the coltfoot plumes were already silvery. Here was spring sitting just awake, unloosening her glittering hair, and opening
her purple eyes.
I went across the quarry, down to where the brook ran
murmuring a tale to the primroses and the budding trees.
I was startled from my wandering among the fresh things by
a faint clatter of stones.
“What’s that young rascal doing?” I said to myself, setting
forth to see. I came towards the other side of the quarry: on this,
the moister side, the bushes grew up against the wall, which
was higher than on the other side, though piled the same with
old dry stones. As I drew near I could hear the scrape and rattle of stones, and the vigorous grunting of Sam as he laboured
among them. He was hidden by a great bush of sallow catkins,
all yellow, and murmuring with bees, warm with spice. When
he came in view I laughed to see him lugging and grunting
among the great pile of stones that had fallen in a mass from
the quarry-side; a pile of stones and earth and crushed vegetation. There was a great bare gap in the quarry wall. Somehow,
the lad’s labouring earnestness made me anxious, and I hurried up.
He heard me, and glancing round, his face red with exertion, eyes big with terror, he called, commanding me:
“Pull ’em off ’im-pull ’em off!”
Suddenly my heart beating in my throat nearly suffocated
me. I saw the hand of the keeper lying among the stones. I set
to tearing away the stones, and we worked for some time without a word. Then I seized the arm of the keeper and tried to
drag him out. But I could not.
229
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
“Pull it off ’im!” whined the lad, working in a frenzy.
When we got him out I saw at once he was dead, and I sat
down trembling with exertion. There was a great smashed
wound on the side of the head. Sam put his face against his father’s and snuffed round him like a dog, to feel the life in him.
The child looked at me:
“He won’t get up,” he said, and his little voice was hoarse
with fear and anxiety.
I shook my head. Then the boy began to whimper. He tried
to close the lips which were drawn with pain and death, leaving the teeth bare; then his fi ngers hovered round the eyes,
which were wide open, glazed, and I could see he was trembling to touch them into life.
“He’s not asleep,” he said, “because his eyes is open – look!”
I could not bear the child’s questioning terror. I took him up to
carry him away, but he struggled and fought to be free. “Ma’e
’im get up – ma’e ’im get up,” he cried in a frenzy, and I had to
let the boy go.
He ran to the dead man, calling, “Feyther! Feyther!” and
pulling his shoulder; then he sat down, fascinated by the sight
of the wound; he put out his fi nger to touch it, and shivered.
“Come away,” said I.
“Is it that?” he asked, pointing to the wound. I covered the
face with a big silk handkerchief.
“Now,” said I, “he’ll go to sleep if you don’t touch him – so
sit still while I go and fetch somebody. Will you run to the
Hall?”
He shook his head. I knew he would not. So I told him
again not to touch his father, but to let him lie still till I came
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