D. H. Lawrence

“ It was an awful dinner-party. I never could hear a word anybody said, except Carlotta. They all let their words die in their throats, as if the larynx were the coffin of sound.
Carlotta tried to keep her end up, the cheerful hostess sort of thing. But Lady Lathkill somehow, in silence and apparent humility, had stolen the authority that goes with the hostess, and she hung on to it grimly, like a white ermine sucking a rabbit. Carlotta kept glancing miserably at me, to see what I thought. I didn't think anything. I just felt frozen within the tomb. ”

“ They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. My spirit is like a naked nerve on the air."
Carlotta has ceased to weep. She sat with her head dropped, as if asleep. The rise and fall of her small, slack breasts was still heavy, but they were lifting on a heaving sea of rest. It was as if a slow, restful dawn were rising in her body, while she slept. ”

“ I had fought too much, even against the most imposing circumstances, to use any more violence for love. Desire is a sacred thing, and should not be violated.
"Hush!" I said to myself. "I will sleep, and the ghost of my silence can go forth, in the subtle body of desire, to meet that which is coming to meet it. Let my ghost go forth, and let me not interfere. There are many intangible meetings, and unknown fulfilments of desire."
So I went softly to sleep, as I wished to, without interfering with the warm, crocus-like ghost of my body. ”

“ It may be, it may be."
"I know," said Luke. "As if she weren't worth noticing, what you did to her. Haven't I done it myself? And don't I know now, it's a horrible thing to do, to oneself as much as to her? Her poor ghost, that ached, and never had a real body! It's not so easy to worship with the body. Ah, if the Church taught us that sacrament: with my body I thee worship! that would easily make up for any honouring and obeying the woman might do. But that's why she haunts you. You ignored and disliked her body, and she was only a living ghost. ”

“ I was looking back over my life, and thinking how the cold weight of an unliving spirit was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything. Even Carlotta herself had gone numb again, cold and resistant even to me. The thing seemed to happen wholesale in her.
"One has to choose to live," I said, dancing on.
But I was powerless. With a woman, when her spirit goes inert in opposition, a man can do nothing. I felt my life-flow sinking in my body. ”

“ Luke sat with the hand of the dark young woman pressed against his breast. His face was warm and fresh, but he too breathed heavily, and stared unseeing. Mrs. Hale sat at his side erect and mute. But she loved him, with erect, black-faced, remote power.
"Morier!" said Luke to me. "If you can help Carlotta, you will, won't you? I can't do any more for her now. We are in mortal fear of each other." ”

“ I had always believed that people could be born again: if they would only let themselves.
"I'm sure they do," I said to Luke.
But I was thinking, if people were born again, the old circumstances would not fit the new body.
"What about yourself, Luke?" said Carlotta abruptly.
"I!" he exclaimed, and the scarlet showed in his cheek. "I! I'm not fit to be spoken about. I've been moaning like the ghost of disembodiment myself, ever since I became a man." ”

“ I shall never know if it was a ghost, some sweet spirit from the innermost of the ever-deepening cosmos; or a woman, a very woman, as the silkiness of my limbs seems to attest; or a dream, a hallucination! I shall never know. Because I went away from Riddings in the morning, on account of the sudden illness of Lady Lathkill.
"You will come again," Luke said to me. "And in any case, you will never really go away from us." ”

“ In the rain, a soppy crowd, with soppy bare heads, soppy emotions, soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurestinus! A steam of wet mob-emotions! Ah, no, it shouldn't be allowed."
Carlotta's face had fallen. She again could feel death in her bowels, the kind of death the war signifies.
"Wouldn't you have us honour the dead?" came Lady Lathkill's secretive voice across at me, as if a white ermine had barked. ”

“ Pondering with all his body. His young wife watched the sunken, bald head in a kind of stupor. His day seemed so far from her day. Carlotta had lifted her face; she was beautiful again, with the tender before-dawn freshness of a new understanding.
She was watching Luke, and it was obvious, he was another man to her. The man she knew, the Luke who was her husband, was gone, and this other strange, uncanny creature had taken his place. She was filled with wonder. Could one so change, as to become another creature entirely? ”

“ It was Lady Lathkill who broke it. She seemed to be sinking downwards, crouching into herself like a skulking animal.
"I suppose," she said, "we shall all go to bed?"
"You go, Mother. We'll come along in a moment."
She went, and for some time we four sat silent. The room seemed to become pleasanter, the air was more grateful.
"Look here," said Lord Lathkill at last. "What do you think of this ghost business?"
"I?" said I. "I don't like the atmosphere it produces. There may be ghosts, and spirits, and all that. The dead must be somewhere; there's no such place as nowhere. ”

“ Hale's hand convulsively against his breast. The tears had already slowly gathered in Carlotta's eyes and were dropping on to her hands in her lap.
"Don't cry, Carlotta," he said. "Really, don't. We haven't killed one another. We're too decent, after all. We've almost become two spirits side by side. We've almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can't give it you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We've suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. ”

“ Lady Lathkill sat down heavily in the chair next the Colonel.
"How do you feel?" she asked him, in a secretive mutter.
He looked round at her, with the large blue eyes of candour.
"I never knew what was wrong," he said, a little nervously. "She only wanted to be looked after a bit, not to be a homeless, houseless ghost. It's all right! She's all right here." He pressed his clutched hand on his breast. "It's all right; it's all right. She'll be all right now."
He rose, a little fantastic in his brocade gown, but once more manly, candid and sober. ”

“ He is quiet, and proud now, and very hale and hearty, raising swine ad maiorem gloriam Dei. A good sport!
"I am in love with this house and its inmates, including the plum-blossom-scented one, she who visited you, in all the peace. I cannot understand why you wander in uneasy and distant parts of the earth. For me, when I am at home, I am there. I have peace upon my bones, and if the world is going to come to a violent and untimely end, as prophets aver, I feel the house of Lathkill will survive, built upon our ghost. ”

“ Oh, Mother dear, a man has to be in love in his thighs, the way you ride a horse. Why don't we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness? Oh, Mother of my body, thank you for my body, you strange woman with white hair! ”

“ I looked back at her, and being clairvoyant in this house, was conscious of the curves of her erect body, the sparse black hairs there would be on her strong-skinned dusky thighs. She was a woman of thirty, and she had had a great dread, lest she should never marry. Now she was as if mesmerised.
"What do you do usually in the evenings?" I said.
She turned to me as if startled, as she nearly always did when addressed.
"We do nothing," she replied. "Talk; and sometimes Lady Lathkill reads."
"What does she read?"
"About spiritualism." ”

“ I knew Riddings, Lord Lathkill's place, from the outside. It was an old Derbyshire stone house, at the end of the village of Middleton: a house with three sharp gables, set back not very far from the high road, but with a gloomy moor for a park behind.
Monday was a dark day over the Derbyshire hills. The green hills were dark, dark green, the stone fences seemed almost black. Even the little railway-station, deep in the green, cleft hollow, was of stone, and dark and cold, and seemed in the underworld. ”

“ Bonny boys, aren't they, nurse?" I said softly.
"Yes, sir!" she said quickly. "They are!"
"Ever think I'd have twins, roistering twins?" said Carlotta, looking at me.
"I never did," said I.
"Ask Luke whether it's bad luck or bad management," she said, with that schoolgirl's snirt of laughter, looking up apprehensively at her husband.
"Oh, I!" he said, turning suddenly and speaking loud, in his wounded voice. "I call it amazing good luck, myself! Don't know what other people think about it." Yet he had the fine, wincing fear in his body, of an injured dog. ”

“ Beyond all the pearly mufflings of consciousness, of age upon age of consciousness, deep calls yet to deep, and sometimes is answered. It is calling and answering, new-wakened God calling within the deep of a man, and new God calling answer from the other deep. And sometimes the other deep is a woman, as it was with me, when my ghost came. ”

“ And the smell of plum-blossom—don't you notice it? It is our ghost, in silence like a crocus. There, your fire has died down! But it's a nice room! I hope our ghost will come to you. I think she will. Don't speak to her. It makes her go away. She, too, is a ghost of silence. We talk far too much. But now I am going to be silent too, and a ghost of silence. Good-night!"
He closed the door softly and was gone. And softly, in silence, I took off my things. I was thinking of Carlotta, and a little sadly, perhaps, because of the power of circumstance over us. ”

“ Hale at all? Do you mean to say you never have lived with her?"
"I've got a higher claim on me," said the unhappy Colonel.
"My God!" said Lord Lathkill.
I looked in amazement: the sort of chap who picks up a woman and has a good time with her for a week, then goes home as nice as pie, and now look at him! It was obvious that he had a terror of his black-browed new wife, as well as of Lucy's spirit. A devil and a deep sea with a vengeance! ”

“ Carlotta gazed at him, then, with strange, heavy, searching look, at me. I smiled to her, and she looked away. The dark young woman looked over her shoulder as she went out. Lady Lathkill hurried past her son, with head ducked. But still he laid his hand on her shoulder, and she stopped dead.
"Good-night, Mother, Mother of my face and my thighs. Thank you for the night to come, dear. Mother of my body." ”

“ Hale's yellow-brown eyes looked at me every time she came round.
"Why does she look at me?" I said.
"I can't imagine," said Carlotta, with a cold grimace.
"I'd better go upstairs and see what's happening," she said, suddenly rising and disappearing in a breath.
Why should she go? Why should she rush off to the battle of wills with her mother-in-law? In such a battle, while one has any life to lose, one can only lose it. There is nothing positively to be done, but to withdraw out of the hateful tension.
The music ran down. Lord Lathkill stopped the Victrola.
"Carlotta gone?" ”

“ He wrote very rarely.
"Carlotta has a son," he said, "and I an heir. He has yellow hair, like a little crocus, and one of the young plum-trees in the orchard has come out of all season into blossom. To me he is flesh and blood of our ghost itself. Even mother doesn't look over the wall, to the other side, any more. It's all this side for her now.
"So our family refuses to die out, by the grace of our ghost. We are calling him Gabriel.
"Dorothy Hale also is a mother, three days before Carlotta. She has a black lamb of a daughter, called Gabrielle. ”

“ Lady Lathkill rustled her finger-tips in the finger-bowl, and laid down her napkin decisively. The Colonel, old buck, rose at once to draw back her chair. Place aux hommes! I bowed to my neighbour, Mrs. Hale, a most disconcerting bow, and she made a circuit to get by me.
"You won't be awfully long?" said Carlotta, looking at me with her slow, hazel-green eyes, between mischief and wistfulness and utter depression. ”

“ Her family was not rich, yet she had come into five hundred a year of her own, when she was eighteen; and that, to us, was an enormity. Then she appeared in the fashionable papers, affecting to be wistful, with pearls, slanting her eyes. Then she went and did another of her beastly still-lives, a cactus-in-a-pot.
At the Thwaite, being snobs, we were proud of her too. She showed off a bit, it is true, playing bird of paradise among the pigeons. At the same time, she was thrilled to be with us, and out of her own set. Her wistfulness and yearning "for something else" was absolutely genuine. ”

“ They say that alcohol, if it has an effect on your psyche, takes you back to old states of consciousness, and old reactions. But some people it doesn't stimulate at all, there is only a nervous reaction of repulsion."
"There's certainly a nervous reaction of repulsion in me," said Carlotta.
"As there is in all higher natures," murmured Lady Lathkill.
"Dogs hate whisky," said I.
"That's quite right," said the Colonel. "Scared of it!" ”

“ Mother of my thighs!"
He switched off some of the lights as we went, accompanying me to my room.
"You know," he said, "I can understand that the Colonel is happy, now the forlorn ghost of Lucy is comforted in his heart. After all, he married her! And she must be content at last: he has a beautiful chest, don't you think? Together they will sleep well. And then he will begin to live the life of the living again. How friendly the house feels to-night! ”