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THE WHITE PEACOCK
“Meg never found any pleasure in me as she does in the
kids,” said George bitterly, for himself.
The child, laughing and crowing, caught his hands in Emily’s hair and pulled dark tresses down, while she cried out
in remonstrance, and tried to loosen the small fi sts that were
shut so fast. She took him from the water and rubbed him dry,
with marvellous gentle little rubs, he kicking and expostulating. She brought his fi ne hair into one silken up-springing of
ruddy gold like an aureole. She played with his tiny balls of
toes, like wee pink mushrooms, till at last she dare detain him
no longer, when she put on his fl annel and his night-gown
and gave him to Meg.
Before carrying him to bed Meg took him to feed him. His
mouth was stretched round the nipple as he sucked, his face
was pressed closer and closer to the breast, his fi ngers wandered over the fi ne white globe, blue-veined and heavy, trying
to hold it. Meg looked down upon him with a consuming passion of tenderness, and Emily clasped her hands and leaned
forward to him. Even thus they thought him exquisite.
When the twins were both asleep, I must tiptoe upstairs to
see them. They lay cheek by cheek in the crib next the large
white bed, breathing little, ruffl ing breaths, out of unison, so
small and pathetic with their tiny shut fi ngers. I remembered
the two larks.
From the next room came a heavy sound of the old woman’s breathing. Meg went in to her. As in passing I caught sight
of the large, prone fi gure in the bed, I thought of Guy de Maupassant’s “Toine”, who acted as an incubator.
CHAPTER V
THE DOMINANT MOTIF
OF SUFFERING
The old woman lay still another year, then she suddenly
sank out of life. George ceased to write to me, but I learned his
news elsewhere. He became more and more intimate with the
Mayhews. After old Mayhew’s bankruptcy, the two sons had
remained on in the large dark house that stood off the Nottingham Road in Eberwich. This house had been bequeathed
to the oldest daughter by the mother. Maud Mayhew, who
was married and separated from her husband, kept house for
her brothers. She was a tall, large woman with high cheekbones and oily black hair looped over her ears. Tom Mayhew
was also a handsome man, very dark, and ruddy, with insolent
bright eyes.
The Mayhews’ house was called the “Hollies”. It was a solid
building, of old red brick, standing fi fty yards back from the
Eberwich highroad. Between it and the road was an unkempt
lawn, surrounded by very high black holly trees. The house
seemed to be imprisoned among the bristling hollies. Passing through the large gate, one came immediately upon the
bare side of the house and upon the great range of stables. Old
Mayhew had in his day stabled thirty or more horses there.
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
Now grass was between the red bricks, and all the bleaching
doors were shut, save perhaps two or three which were open
for George’s horses.
The “Hollies” became a kind of club for the disconsolate,
“better-off” men of the district. The large dining-room was
gloomily and sparsely furnished, the drawing-room was a desert, but the smaller morning-room was comfortable enough,
with wicker arm-chairs, heavy curtains, and a large sideboard.
In this room George and the Mayhews met with several men
two or three times a week. There they discussed horses and
made mock of the authority of women. George provided the
whisky, and they all gambled timidly at cards. These bachelor
parties were the source of great annoyance to the wives of the
married men who attended them.
“He’s quite unbearable when he’s been at those Mayhews’,”
said Meg. “I’m sure they do nothing but cry us down.”
Maud Mayhew kept apart from these meetings, watching
over her two children. She had been very unhappily married,
and now was reserved, silent. The women of Eberwich watched
her as she went swiftly along the street in the morning with
her basket, and they gloried a little in her overthrow, because
she was too proud to accept consolation, yet they were sorry in
their hearts for her, and she was never touched with calumny.
George saw her frequently, but she treated him coldy as she
treated the other men, so he was afraid of her.
He had more facilities now for his horse-dealing. When the
grandmother died, in the October two years after the marriage
of George, she left him seven hundred pounds. To Meg she
left the Inn, and the two houses she had built in Newerton,
413
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
together with brewery shares to the value of nearly a thousand
pounds. George and Meg felt themselves to be people of property. The result, however, was only a little further coldness
between them. He was very careful that she had all that was
hers. She said to him once when they were quarrelling, that
he needn’t go feeding the Mayhews on the money that came
out of her business. Thenceforward he kept strict accounts of
all his affairs, and she must audit them, receiving her exact
dues. This was a mortifi cation to her woman’s capricious soul
of generosity and cruelty.
The Christmas after the grandmother’s death another son
was born to them. For the time George and Meg became very
good friends again.
When in the following March I heard he was coming down
to London with Tom Mayhew on business, I wrote and asked
him to stay with me. Meg replied, saying she was so glad I had
asked him: she did not want him going off with that fellow
again; he had been such a lot better lately, and she was sure it
was only those men at Mayhews’ made him what he was.
He consented to stay with me. I wrote and told him Lettie
and Leslie were in London, and that we should dine with them
one evening. I met him at King’s Cross and we all three drove
west. Mayhew was a remarkably handsome, well-built man; he
and George made a notable couple. They were both in breeches and gaiters, but George still looked like a yeoman, while
Mayhew had all the braggadocio of the stable. We made an impossible trio. Mayhew laughed and jested broadly for a short
time, then he grew restless and fi dgety. He felt restrained and
awkward in my presence. Later, he told George I was a damned
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
parson. On the other hand, I was content to look at his rather
vulgar beauty – his teeth were blackened with smoking – and
to listen to his ineffectual talk, but I could fi nd absolutely no
response. George was go-between. To me he was cautious and
rather deferential, to Mayhew he was careless, and his attitude
was tinged with contempt.
When the son of the horse-dealer at last left us to go to
some of his father’s old cronies, we were glad. Very uncertain,
very sensitive and wavering, our old intimacy burned again
like the fragile burning of alcohol. Closed together in the
same blue fl ames, we discovered and watched the pageant of
life in the town revealed wonderfully to us. We laughed at the
tyranny of old romance. We scorned the faded procession of
old years, and made mock of the vast pilgrimage of by-gone
romances travelling farther into the dim distance. Were we
not in the midst of the bewildering pageant of modern life,
with all its confusion of bannerets and colours, with its infi nite inter-weaving of sounds, the screech of the modern toys
of haste striking like keen spray, the heavy boom of busy mankind gathering its bread, earnestly, forming the bed of all other sounds; and between these two the swiftness of songs, the
triumphant tilt of the joy of life, the hoarse oboes of privation,
the shuddering drums of tragedy, and the eternal scraping of
the two deep-toned strings of despair?
We watched the taxi-cabs coursing with their noses down
to the street, we watched the rocking hansoms, and the lumbering stateliness of buses. In the silent green cavern of the
park we stood and listened to the surging of the ocean of life.
We watched a girl with streaming hair go galloping down
415
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
the Row, a dark man, laughing and showing his white teeth,
galloping more heavily at her elbow. We saw a squad of lifeguards enter the gates of the park, erect and glittering with
silver and white and red. They came near to us, and we thrilled
a little as we watched the muscles of their white smooth thighs
answering the movement of the horses, and their cheeks and
their chins bending with proud manliness to the rhythm of
the march. We watched the exquisite rhythm of the body of
men moving in scarlet and silver farther down the leafl ess avenue, like a slightly wavering spark of red life blown along. At
the Marble Arch Corner we listened to a little socialist who
was fl aring fi ercely under a plane tree. The hot stream of his
words fl owed over the old wounds that the knowledge of the
unending miseries of the poor had given me, and I winced.
For him the world was all East End, and all the East End was
as a pool from which the waters are drained off, leaving the
water-things to wrestle in the wet mud under the sun, till
the whole of the city seems a heaving, shuddering struggle of
black-mudded objects deprived of the elements of life. I felt
a great terror of the little man, lest he should make me see
all mud, as I had seen before. Then I felt a breathless pity for
him, that his eyes should be always fi lled with mud, and never
brightened. George listened intently to the speaker, very much
moved by him.
At night, after the theatre, we saw the outcasts sleep in
a rank under the Waterloo bridge, their heads to the wall, their
feet lying out on the pavement: a long, black, ruffl ed heap at
the foot of the wall. All the faces were covered but two, that
of a peaked, pale little man, and that of a brutal woman. Over
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
these two faces, fl oating like uneasy pale dreams on their obscurity, swept now and again the trailing light of the tramcars.
We picked our way past the line of abandoned feet, shrinking
from the sight of the thin bare ankles of a young man, from
the draggled edge of the skirts of a bunched-up woman, from
the pitiable sight of the men who had wrapped their legs in
newspaper for a little warmth, and lay like worthless parcels.
It was raining. Some men stood at the edge of the causeway
fi xed in dreary misery, fi nding no room to sleep. Outside, on
a seat in the blackness and the rain, a woman sat sleeping,
while the water trickled and hung heavily at the ends of her
loosened strands of hair. Her hands were pushed in the bosom
of her jacket. She lurched forward in her sleep, started, and
one of her hands fell out of her bosom. She sank again to sleep.
George gripped my arm.
“Give her something,” he whispered in panic. I was afraid.
Then suddenly getting a fl orin from my pocket, I stiffened my
nerves and slid it into her palm. Her hand was soft, and warm,
and curled in sleep. She started violently, looking up at me,
then down at her hand. I turned my face aside, terrifi ed lest
she should look in my eyes, and full of shame and grief I ran
down the embankment to him. We hurried along under the
plane trees in silence. The shining cars were drawing tall in
the distance over Westminster Bridge, a fainter, yellow light
running with them on the water below. The wet streets were
spilled with golden liquor of light, and on the deep blackness
of the river were the restless yellow slashes of the lamps.
Lettie and Leslie were staying up at Hampstead with
a friend of the Tempests, one of the largest shareholders in the
417
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
fi rm of Tempest, Wharton & Co. The Raphaels had a substantial house, and Lettie preferred to go to them rather than to an
hotel, especially as she had brought with her her infant son,
now ten months old, with his nurse. They invited George and
me to dinner on the Friday evening. The party included Lettie’s host and hostess, and also a Scottish poetess, and an Irish
musician, composer of songs and pianoforte rhapsodies.
Lettie wore a black lace dress in mourning for one of
Leslie’s maternal aunts. This made her look older, otherwise
there seemed to be no change in her. A subtle observer might
have noticed a little hardness about her mouth, and disillusion hanging slightly on her eyes. She was, however, excited
by the company in which she found herself, therefore she
overfl owed with clever speeches and rapid, brilliant observations. Certainly on such occasions she was admirable. The rest
of the company formed, as it were, the orchestra which accompanied her.
George was exceedingly quiet. He spoke a few words now
and then to Mrs Raphael, but on the whole he was altogether
silent, listening.
“Really!” Lettie was saying, “I don’t see that one thing is
worth doing any more than another. It’s like dessert: you are
equally indifferent whether you have grapes, or pears, or pineapple.”
“Have you already dined so far?” sang the Scottish poetess
in her musical, plaintive manner.
“The only thing worth doing is producing,” said Lettie.
“Alas, that is what all the young folk are saying nowadays!”
sighed the Irish musician.
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THE WHITE PEACOCK
“That is the only thing one fi nds any pleasure in-that is to
say, any satisfaction,” continued Lettie, smiling, and turning to
the two artists.
“Do you not think so?” she added.
“You do come to a point at last,” said the Scottish poetess,
“when your work is a real source of satisfaction.”
“Do you write poetry then?” asked George of Lettie.
“I! Oh, dear no! I have tried strenuously to make up a Limerick for a competition, but in vain. So you see, I am a failure
there. Did you know I have a son, though? – A marvellous
little fellow, is he not, Leslie? – He is my work. I am a wonderful mother, am I not, Leslie?”
“Too devoted,” he replied.
“There!” she exclaimed in triumph – “When I have to
sign my name and occupation in a visitor’s book, it will be,
‘ – Mother’. I hope my business will fl ourish,” she concluded,
smiling.
There was a touch of ironical brutality in her now. She
was, at the bottom, quite sincere. Having reached that point
in a woman’s career when most, perhaps all, of the things in
life seem worthless and insipid, she had determined to put up
with it, to ignore her own self, to empty her own potentialities into the vessel of another or others, and to live her life at
secondhand. This peculiar abnegation of self is the resource
of a woman for the escaping of the responsibilities of her own
development. Like a nun, she puts over her living face a veil,
as a sign that the woman no longer exists for herself: she is
the servant of God, of some man, of her children, or maybe
of some cause. As a servant, she is no longer responsible for
419
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
her self, which would make her terrifi ed and lonely. Service is
light and easy. To be responsible for the good progress of one’s
life is terrifying. It is the most insufferable form of loneliness,
and the heaviest of responsibilities. So Lettie indulged her
husband, but did not yield her independence to him; rather
it was she who took much of the responsibility of him into
her hands, and therefore he was so devoted to her. She had,
however, now determined to abandon the charge of herself
to serve her children. When the children grew up, either they
would unconsciously fl ing her away, back upon herself again
in bitterness and loneliness, or they would tenderly cherish
her, chafi ng at her love-bonds occasionally.
George looked and listened to all the fl utter of conversation, and said nothing. It seemed to him like so much unreasonable rustling of pieces of paper, of leaves of books, and so
on. Later in the evening Lettie sang, no longer Italian folk
songs, but the fragmentary utterances of Debussy and Strauss.
These also to George were quite meaningless, and rather wearisome. It made him impatient to see her wasting herself upon
them.
“Do you like those songs?” she asked in the frank, careless
manner she affected.
“Not much,” he replied, ungraciously.
“Don’t you?” she exclaimed, adding with a smile, “Those are
the most wonderful things in the world, those little things” –
she began to hum a Debussy idiom. He could not answer her
on the point, so he sat with the arrow sticking in him, and did
not speak.
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