SHORTLANDS
The Brangwens went home to Beldover, the wedding-party gathered at
Shortlands, the Criches’ home. It was a long, low old house, a sort of
manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow
little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow
that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood
here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill
that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite
hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and
picturesque, very peaceful, and the house had a charm of its own.
It was crowded now with the family and the wedding guests. The father,
who was not well, withdrew to rest. Gerald was host. He stood in the
homely entrance hall, friendly and easy, attending to the men. He
seemed to take pleasure in his social functions, he smiled, and was
abundant in hospitality.
The women wandered about in a little confusion, chased hither and
thither by the three married daughters of the house. All the while
there could be heard the characteristic, imperious voice of one Crich
woman or another calling “Helen, come here a minute,” “Marjory, I want
you—here.” “Oh, I say, Mrs Witham—.” There was a great rustling of
skirts, swift glimpses of smartly-dressed women, a child danced through
the hall and back again, a maidservant came and went hurriedly.
Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups, chatting, smoking,
pretending to pay no heed to the rustling animation of the women’s
world. But they could not really talk, because of the glassy ravel of
women’s excited, cold laughter and running voices. They waited, uneasy,
suspended, rather bored. But Gerald remained as if genial and happy,
unaware that he was waiting or unoccupied, knowing himself the very
pivot of the occasion.
Suddenly Mrs Crich came noiselessly into the room, peering about with
her strong, clear face. She was still wearing her hat, and her sac coat
of blue silk.
“What is it, mother?” said Gerald.
“Nothing, nothing!” she answered vaguely. And she went straight towards
Birkin, who was talking to a Crich brother-in-law.
“How do you do, Mr Birkin,” she said, in her low voice, that seemed to
take no count of her guests. She held out her hand to him.
“Oh Mrs Crich,” replied Birkin, in his readily-changing voice, “I
couldn’t come to you before.”
“I don’t know half the people here,” she said, in her low voice. Her
son-in-law moved uneasily away.
“And you don’t like strangers?” laughed Birkin. “I myself can never see
why one should take account of people, just because they happen to be
in the room with one: why _should_ I know they are there?”
“Why indeed, why indeed!” said Mrs Crich, in her low, tense voice.
“Except that they _are_ there. _I_ don’t know people whom I find in the
house. The children introduce them to me—‘Mother, this is Mr
So-and-so.’ I am no further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own
name?—and what have I to do with either him or his name?”
She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was flattered too that
she came to talk to him, for she took hardly any notice of anybody. He
looked down at her tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he
was afraid to look into her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed instead
how her hair looped in slack, slovenly strands over her rather
beautiful ears, which were not quite clean. Neither was her neck
perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her, rather than
to the rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was
always well washed, at any rate at the neck and ears.
He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was tense, feeling
that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like
traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people. He
resembled a deer, that throws one ear back upon the trail behind, and
one ear forward, to know what is ahead.
“People don’t really matter,” he said, rather unwilling to continue.
The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark interrogation, as if
doubting his sincerity.
“How do you mean, _matter?_” she asked sharply.
“Not many people are anything at all,” he answered, forced to go deeper
than he wanted to. “They jingle and giggle. It would be much better if
they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don’t exist, they aren’t
there.”
She watched him steadily while he spoke.
“But we didn’t imagine them,” she said sharply.
“There’s nothing to imagine, that’s why they don’t exist.”
“Well,” she said, “I would hardly go as far as that. There they are,
whether they exist or no. It doesn’t rest with me to decide on their
existence. I only know that I can’t be expected to take count of them
all. You can’t expect me to know them, just because they happen to be
there. As far as _I_ go they might as well not be there.”
“Exactly,” he replied.
“Mightn’t they?” she asked again.
“Just as well,” he repeated. And there was a little pause.
“Except that they _are_ there, and that’s a nuisance,” she said. “There
are my sons-in-law,” she went on, in a sort of monologue. “Now Laura’s
got married, there’s another. And I really don’t know John from James
yet. They come up to me and call me mother. I know what they will
say—‘how are you, mother?’ I ought to say, ‘I am not your mother, in
any sense.’ But what is the use? There they are. I have had children of
my own. I suppose I know them from another woman’s children.”
“One would suppose so,” he said.
She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was
talking to him. And she lost her thread.
She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was
looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons.
“Are my children all there?” she asked him abruptly.
He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps.
“I scarcely know them, except Gerald,” he replied.
“Gerald!” she exclaimed. “He’s the most wanting of them all. You’d
never think it, to look at him now, would you?”
“No,” said Birkin.
The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for
some time.
“Ay,” she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded
profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And
Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned on her traces.
“I should like him to have a friend,” she said. “He has never had a
friend.”
Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue, and watching
heavily. He could not understand them. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he
said to himself, almost flippantly.
Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was Cain’s cry. And
Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he was Cain, either, although he
had slain his brother. There was such a thing as pure accident, and the
consequences did not attach to one, even though one had killed one’s
brother in such wise. Gerald as a boy had accidentally killed his
brother. What then? Why seek to draw a brand and a curse across the
life that had caused the accident? A man can live by accident, and die
by accident. Or can he not? Is every man’s life subject to pure
accident, is it only the race, the genus, the species, that has a
universal reference? Or is this not true, is there no such thing as
pure accident? Has _everything_ that happens a universal significance?
Has it? Birkin, pondering as he stood there, had forgotten Mrs Crich,
as she had forgotten him.
He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident. It all
hung together, in the deepest sense.
Just as he had decided this, one of the Crich daughters came up,
saying:
“Won’t you come and take your hat off, mother dear? We shall be sitting
down to eat in a minute, and it’s a formal occasion, darling, isn’t
it?” She drew her arm through her mother’s, and they went away. Birkin
immediately went to talk to the nearest man.
The gong sounded for the luncheon. The men looked up, but no move was
made to the dining-room. The women of the house seemed not to feel that
the sound had meaning for them. Five minutes passed by. The elderly
manservant, Crowther, appeared in the doorway exasperatedly. He looked
with appeal at Gerald. The latter took up a large, curved conch shell,
that lay on a shelf, and without reference to anybody, blew a
shattering blast. It was a strange rousing noise, that made the heart
beat. The summons was almost magical. Everybody came running, as if at
a signal. And then the crowd in one impulse moved to the dining-room.
Gerald waited a moment, for his sister to play hostess. He knew his
mother would pay no attention to her duties. But his sister merely
crowded to her seat. Therefore the young man, slightly too dictatorial,
directed the guests to their places.
There was a moment’s lull, as everybody looked at the _hors d’oeuvres_
that were being handed round. And out of this lull, a girl of thirteen
or fourteen, with her long hair down her back, said in a calm,
self-possessed voice:
“Gerald, you forget father, when you make that unearthly noise.”
“Do I?” he answered. And then, to the company, “Father is lying down,
he is not quite well.”
“How is he, really?” called one of the married daughters, peeping round
the immense wedding cake that towered up in the middle of the table
shedding its artificial flowers.
“He has no pain, but he feels tired,” replied Winifred, the girl with
the hair down her back.
The wine was filled, and everybody was talking boisterously. At the far
end of the table sat the mother, with her loosely-looped hair. She had
Birkin for a neighbour. Sometimes she glanced fiercely down the rows of
faces, bending forwards and staring unceremoniously. And she would say
in a low voice to Birkin:
“Who is that young man?”
“I don’t know,” Birkin answered discreetly.
“Have I seen him before?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. _I_ haven’t,” he replied. And she was satisfied. Her
eyes closed wearily, a peace came over her face, she looked like a
queen in repose. Then she started, a little social smile came on her
face, for a moment she looked the pleasant hostess. For a moment she
bent graciously, as if everyone were welcome and delightful. And then
immediately the shadow came back, a sullen, eagle look was on her face,
she glanced from under her brows like a sinister creature at bay,
hating them all.
“Mother,” called Diana, a handsome girl a little older than Winifred,
“I may have wine, mayn’t I?”
“Yes, you may have wine,” replied the mother automatically, for she was
perfectly indifferent to the question.
And Diana beckoned to the footman to fill her glass.
“Gerald shouldn’t forbid me,” she said calmly, to the company at large.
“All right, Di,” said her brother amiably. And she glanced challenge at
him as she drank from her glass.
There was a strange freedom, that almost amounted to anarchy, in the
house. It was rather a resistance to authority, than liberty. Gerald
had some command, by mere force of personality, not because of any
granted position. There was a quality in his voice, amiable but
dominant, that cowed the others, who were all younger than he.
Hermione was having a discussion with the bridegroom about nationality.
“No,” she said, “I think that the appeal to patriotism is a mistake. It
is like one house of business rivalling another house of business.”
“Well you can hardly say that, can you?” exclaimed Gerald, who had a
real _passion_ for discussion. “You couldn’t call a race a business
concern, could you?—and nationality roughly corresponds to race, I
think. I think it is _meant_ to.”
There was a moment’s pause. Gerald and Hermione were always strangely
but politely and evenly inimical.
“_Do_ you think race corresponds with nationality?” she asked musingly,
with expressionless indecision.
Birkin knew she was waiting for him to participate. And dutifully he
spoke up.
“I think Gerald is right—race is the essential element in nationality,
in Europe at least,” he said.
Again Hermione paused, as if to allow this statement to cool. Then she
said with strange assumption of authority:
“Yes, but even so, is the patriotic appeal an appeal to the racial
instinct? Is it not rather an appeal to the proprietory instinct, the
_commercial_ instinct? And isn’t this what we mean by nationality?”
“Probably,” said Birkin, who felt that such a discussion was out of
place and out of time.
But Gerald was now on the scent of argument.
“A race may have its commercial aspect,” he said. “In fact it must. It
is like a family. You _must_ make provision. And to make provision you
have got to strive against other families, other nations. I don’t see
why you shouldn’t.”
Again Hermione made a pause, domineering and cold, before she replied:
“Yes, I think it is always wrong to provoke a spirit of rivalry. It
makes bad blood. And bad blood accumulates.”
“But you can’t do away with the spirit of emulation altogether?” said
Gerald. “It is one of the necessary incentives to production and
improvement.”
“Yes,” came Hermione’s sauntering response. “I think you can do away
with it.”
“I must say,” said Birkin, “I detest the spirit of emulation.” Hermione
was biting a piece of bread, pulling it from between her teeth with her
fingers, in a slow, slightly derisive movement. She turned to Birkin.
“You do hate it, yes,” she said, intimate and gratified.
“Detest it,” he repeated.
“Yes,” she murmured, assured and satisfied.
“But,” Gerald insisted, “you don’t allow one man to take away his
neighbour’s living, so why should you allow one nation to take away the
living from another nation?”
There was a long slow murmur from Hermione before she broke into
speech, saying with a laconic indifference:
“It is not always a question of possessions, is it? It is not all a
question of goods?”
Gerald was nettled by this implication of vulgar materialism.
“Yes, more or less,” he retorted. “If I go and take a man’s hat from
off his head, that hat becomes a symbol of that man’s liberty. When he
fights me for his hat, he is fighting me for his liberty.”
Hermione was nonplussed.
“Yes,” she said, irritated. “But that way of arguing by imaginary
instances is not supposed to be genuine, is it? A man does _not_ come
and take my hat from off my head, does he?”
“Only because the law prevents him,” said Gerald.
“Not only,” said Birkin. “Ninety-nine men out of a hundred don’t want
my hat.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Gerald.
“Or the hat,” laughed the bridegroom.
“And if he does want my hat, such as it is,” said Birkin, “why, surely
it is open to me to decide, which is a greater loss to me, my hat, or
my liberty as a free and indifferent man. If I am compelled to offer
fight, I lose the latter. It is a question which is worth more to me,
my pleasant liberty of conduct, or my hat.”
“Yes,” said Hermione, watching Birkin strangely. “Yes.”
“But would you let somebody come and snatch your hat off your head?”
the bride asked of Hermione.
The face of the tall straight woman turned slowly and as if drugged to
this new speaker.
“No,” she replied, in a low inhuman tone, that seemed to contain a
chuckle. “No, I shouldn’t let anybody take my hat off my head.”
“How would you prevent it?” asked Gerald.
“I don’t know,” replied Hermione slowly. “Probably I should kill him.”
There was a strange chuckle in her tone, a dangerous and convincing
humour in her bearing.
“Of course,” said Gerald, “I can see Rupert’s point. It is a question
to him whether his hat or his peace of mind is more important.”
“Peace of body,” said Birkin.
“Well, as you like there,” replied Gerald. “But how are you going to
decide this for a nation?”
“Heaven preserve me,” laughed Birkin.
“Yes, but suppose you have to?” Gerald persisted.
“Then it is the same. If the national crown-piece is an old hat, then
the thieving gent may have it.”
“But _can_ the national or racial hat be an old hat?” insisted Gerald.
“Pretty well bound to be, I believe,” said Birkin.
“I’m not so sure,” said Gerald.
“I don’t agree, Rupert,” said Hermione.
“All right,” said Birkin.
“I’m all for the old national hat,” laughed Gerald.
“And a fool you look in it,” cried Diana, his pert sister who was just
in her teens.
“Oh, we’re quite out of our depths with these old hats,” cried Laura
Crich. “Dry up now, Gerald. We’re going to drink toasts. Let us drink
toasts. Toasts—glasses, glasses—now then, toasts! Speech! Speech!”
Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched his glass being
filled with champagne. The bubbles broke at the rim, the man withdrew,
and feeling a sudden thirst at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin
drank up his glass. A queer little tension in the room roused him. He
felt a sharp constraint.
“Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?” he asked himself. And he
decided that, according to the vulgar phrase, he had done it
“accidentally on purpose.” He looked round at the hired footman. And
the hired footman came, with a silent step of cold servant-like
disapprobation. Birkin decided that he detested toasts, and footmen,
and assemblies, and mankind altogether, in most of its aspects. Then he
rose to make a speech. But he was somehow disgusted.
At length it was over, the meal. Several men strolled out into the
garden. There was a lawn, and flower-beds, and at the boundary an iron
fence shutting off the little field or park. The view was pleasant; a
highroad curving round the edge of a low lake, under the trees. In the
spring air, the water gleamed and the opposite woods were purplish with
new life. Charming Jersey cattle came to the fence, breathing hoarsely
from their velvet muzzles at the human beings, expecting perhaps a
crust.
Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet hotness on his
hand.
“Pretty cattle, very pretty,” said Marshall, one of the
brothers-in-law. “They give the best milk you can have.”
“Yes,” said Birkin.
“Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!” said Marshall, in a queer high
falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of
laughter in his stomach.
“Who won the race, Lupton?” he called to the bridegroom, to hide the
fact that he was laughing.
The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth.
“The race?” he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile came over his face.
He did not want to say anything about the flight to the church door.
“We got there together. At least she touched first, but I had my hand
on her shoulder.”
“What’s this?” asked Gerald.
Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the bridegroom.
“H’m!” said Gerald, in disapproval. “What made you late then?”
“Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,” said Birkin,
“and then he hadn’t got a button-hook.”
“Oh God!” cried Marshall. “The immortality of the soul on your wedding
day! Hadn’t you got anything better to occupy your mind?”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked the bridegroom, a clean-shaven naval man,
flushing sensitively.
“Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. _The
immortality of the soul!_” repeated the brother-in-law, with most
killing emphasis.
But he fell quite flat.
“And what did you decide?” asked Gerald, at once pricking up his ears
at the thought of a metaphysical discussion.
“You don’t want a soul today, my boy,” said Marshall. “It’d be in your
road.”
“Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,” cried Gerald, with
sudden impatience.
“By God, I’m willing,” said Marshall, in a temper. “Too much bloody
soul and talk altogether—”
He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him with angry eyes,
that grew gradually calm and amiable as the stoutly-built form of the
other man passed into the distance.
“There’s one thing, Lupton,” said Gerald, turning suddenly to the
bridegroom. “Laura won’t have brought such a fool into the family as
Lottie did.”
“Comfort yourself with that,” laughed Birkin.
“I take no notice of them,” laughed the bridegroom.
“What about this race then—who began it?” Gerald asked.
“We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard steps when our
cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting towards her. And she fled. But why
do you look so cross? Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?”
“It does, rather,” said Gerald. “If you’re doing a thing, do it
properly, and if you’re not going to do it properly, leave it alone.”
“Very nice aphorism,” said Birkin.
“Don’t you agree?” asked Gerald.
“Quite,” said Birkin. “Only it bores me rather, when you become
aphoristic.”
“Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your own way,” said
Gerald.
“No. I want them out of the way, and you’re always shoving them in it.”
Gerald smiled grimly at this humorism. Then he made a little gesture of
dismissal, with his eyebrows.
“You don’t believe in having any standard of behaviour at all, do you?”
he challenged Birkin, censoriously.
“Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for the common
ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.”
“But what do you mean by being himself?” said Gerald. “Is that an
aphorism or a cliché?”
“I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good
form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a
masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act
spontaneously on one’s impulses—and it’s the only really gentlemanly
thing to do—provided you’re fit to do it.”
“You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?” asked Gerald.
“Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do expect that of.”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations here, at any
rate. You think people should just do as they like.”
“I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely
individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And
they only like to do the collective thing.”
“And I,” said Gerald grimly, “shouldn’t like to be in a world of people
who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should
have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.”
“That means _you_ would like to be cutting everybody’s throat,” said
Birkin.
“How does that follow?” asked Gerald crossly.
“No man,” said Birkin, “cuts another man’s throat unless he wants to
cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete
truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee.
And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable
is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.”
“Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,” said Gerald to Birkin. “As a matter
of fact, none of us wants our throat cut, and most other people would
like to cut it for us—some time or other—”
“It’s a nasty view of things, Gerald,” said Birkin, “and no wonder you
are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.”
“How am I afraid of myself?” said Gerald; “and I don’t think I am
unhappy.”
“You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and
imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,” Birkin said.
“How do you make that out?” said Gerald.
“From you,” said Birkin.
There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very
near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk
brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous
intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with
apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence.
And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the
heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other,
inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their
relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to
be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them.
They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and
men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful
but suppressed friendliness.