Читать книгу "Not I, but the Wind..." - Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence - Страница 23

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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.

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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: