We were happy in the Forest of Dean, though it was a strange, frightening place. Lawrence told me afterwards that it scared him so that at first he felt like running away. The dark and ancient steepness of those woods, with the mines inconspicuously burrowing everywhere, is unlike anything else in England. But we had fine weather, and peaches were ripening on the walls of the old south-sloping garden, and we had the roomy stone house to ourselves.
Lawrence had looked forward to the visit with 'peculiar anticipation', and when we met him on the platform of Upper Lydbrook station we were struck by his high spirits. Frieda was beaming and ejaculatory as usual - perhaps even more than usual - but Lawrence was like a schoolboy home for the holidays. His festive array - a green-and-red striped blazer and grey flannel trousers - and the fact that both garments were so shrunken as to show stretches of wrist and ankle, added to this impression. One felt the boy had grown since we last saw him. In a gay aside he informed me that these were now his only trousers - and that he had to wash them himself of a night-time after undressing so that they might be ready for wear again by the morning. Owing to the fact that he wore espadrilles and no socks, his thin ankles were especially in evidence. I rather think his toilet was completed by an old panama hat. With this strange attire and his beard he attracted some local notice.
The holiday dwells in my memory, for, although he had his variations, his prevailing mood was of extraordinary gaiety, serenity and youthfulness, such as we never saw again in him.
Having heard beforehand of the impossible forest roads, we had brought no sort of baby carriage, and, as I was nursing the child, we had to carry him about with us, which meant taking turn and turn about. Frieda that summer vied with her husband in the inexpensive gaiety of her dress. She wore the largest and brightest of cotton checks, and when out together we attracted, to Lawrence's displeased surprise, something of the attention that might have been accorded to a travelling circus. Sometimes we took with us a home-made carrier for the baby, consisting of string bags strung upon two broomsticks to form a sort of hammock, which was decked with Frieda's rainbow. But though this was a real convenience Lawrence preferred to travel without it.
When Lawrence said he found the place 'scaring', this must be understood, like so much else, according to his own idiom. In the ordinary way of speaking he certainly found it interesting, even fascinating. It was a coal-mining district - the oldest in these islands - and therefore he felt at home in it. But it was different from any mining district he had known, and therefore it engaged his attention. Although he avoided contact with the natives he cast a professional eye over them and their place, and commented with brisk amusement on the tininess of the workings - e.g., the cages so small that only two or three men could be wound down at a time. Once in a walk through the forest he stopped suddenly to examine a half-derelict working that was not a perpendicular shaft but a low tunnel driven into a hillside, from which the coal was drawn up on a trolley worked by a hand-winch and cable. That was a 'gin-pit', he said - an old sort of thing that was becoming a rarity.
Lydbrook lies in a pleasant fold in the hills, but it is a grey, squalid village - just one long shabby street of a mile or more. Lawrence expressed himself as puzzled why mining villages should be so needlessly ugly. He suggested the reason might be that miners through having to work underground had become blind to form values. They craved for 'a bit of colour', and so loved and cultivated flowers with passion. But, though sensitive to natural beauty, they had a merely utilitarian regard for man-made surroundings.
Often we went far afield. One day we went by train to Monmouth and bought lard cakes there and picnicked by the river. Lawrence wrote of this to Donald when he had gone back to Mountain Cottage, saying how he had enjoyed it:
... the bright sunny town, and the tears in one's inside because there isn't real peace; and - very nice, the meal in the green riding: also our evenings. They are good memories - worth a lot really. And it pleases me that we carried the child about. One has the future in one's arms so to speak: and one is the present... I imagine you in that vicarage room this evening - no more 'What are the Wild Waves Saying?' for a bit.
Not liking the vicarage drawing-room with its china cabinets, we always sat in the pleasant kitchen, which had an outlook on the walled fruit garden; and of a night we used to sing. Hence the reference to 'What are the Wild Waves Saying?' which was a great success given as a duet by Lawrence and Donald, with Lawrence in the male part.
Lawrence had brought with him a little manual of French songs which he carried about everywhere like a Bible, and even the hated china cabinets did not keep him away from the drawing-room piano at which he was often to be found seated, picking out melodies from his manual with one finger. His expression at such times was one of intense and concentrated earnestness, as he hummed the tune over and over and learned every verse of the longest ballad by heart. Though he had an odd sort of singing voice he knew supremely well how to sing any kind of folksong. But I liked best of all to hear him in English ones, like 'A Cottage Well Thatched with Straw' or 'Twanky-dillo', which he wrote out for me, music and all, and he rendered deliriously the prim, absurd charm of Offenbach in English:
Evoë! Wonderful ways
Have the goddesses now and then
For beguiling the hearts of men!
One evening we tried charades, in which Lawrence excelled, having invented a special kind of his own. But I am the worst of performers, and Donald is not much better, so that we failed in playing up, while we could not be spared to act as audience.
It was here that Lawrence first thought of his story called The Blind Man. We had an old and lovable, but almost half-witted servant, a woman like a squirrel, with squirrel-coloured hair piled high over a pad on top of her head in a fashion so elaborate that she used to rise at five in the morning to complete her toilet by seven. I can still see her face of bewilderment as Lawrence, seated one day at the kitchen table, tried to include her with me in his outline of the story. Stupid as Letty was, and far as this was from any tale she was accustomed to, she seemed, as well as myself, to breathe the dark air of the stable, to see the blind man delicately groping about it, and to feel the sad, enclosed, yet natural atmosphere in which these people moved.
That September we were to have gone to Mountain Cottage, but could not. Lawrence wrote on his thirty-third birthday to say that he had received papers calling him up for medical re-examination, but that he was determined not to go. I never heard what happened. Possibly the authorities accepted a doctor's certificate.
That autumn and winter - the winter of the Armistice - things were as hard as ever for Lawrence, and more upsetting as he had no place of his own. The money situation would have been desperate but for hopeful news from America, where there seemed to be a growing market for his stories and Huebsch was negotiating for Look! We Have Come Through! Still almost nothing was coming in, and in England he could not command more than five pounds for one of his Studies in Classic American Literature, while the indigent English Review seemed the only magazine that would print his short stories. The four little essays on 'The Education of the People' ('Good,' wrote Lawrence, 'but most revolutionary') did not meet with the approval of The Times Educational Supplement, and were returned with the request for something 'more suitable'.
We had been obliged to go to Scotland. It was the winter of the great influenza epidemic, and Donald went down with it badly in Edinburgh. The next we heard - at the turn of the year - was that Lawrence, in the Midlands for the holiday, had been at death's door with the same epidemic, 'with complications'.
During an alarmingly slow recovery he went on as well as he could with his plans for leaving England at the first opportunity, which would not be, he was told, till peace was ratified. The idea of going with the Eders to the eastern slopes of the Andes had since been modified into a visit to Palestine. But both had fallen through. Lawrence had a great longing at this time for the sea. This too turned out to be impracticable, and there was nothing for it but to reoccupy the cottage at Hermitage so long as the Radfords were not there. It was less cold and bleak than Derbyshire, and further from the deathly reminders of home. Also it was nearer to London. On the revival of the Athenaeum under the editorship of Middleton Murry, the suggestion had been made that Lawrence should become a regular contributor. 'I am to contribute,' he wrote me of this piece of news - 'good thing if I could earn a little weekly money. But,' he added, 'I don't trust Murry.'
In spite of this addition he was very anxious to try what could be done. He was longing to 'meet and have a little happy time together'. So he came south in March.
Murry has given us his own story. He has told us that he welcomed, though with some natural trepidation, the idea of contributions from Lawrence. He became editor in January, 1919. On April 11th, under the pseudonym of 'Grantorto', Lawrence's beautiful and suitable essay, 'The Whistling of Birds' appeared. But the next essay, says Murry, was unsuitable and was returned as such, whereupon 'Lawrence was annoyed, and sent us nothing more.'
From this one would naturally infer that these two efforts covered the extent of contributions tendered by Lawrence. But such is not the case. Other articles were submitted, some at least of which must have been suitable enough. To my own knowledge there were then in existence some of the essays which later appeared in the collection, Assorted Articles, none of which could have given serious offence to readers of the Athenaeum even in 1919. After telling us that Lawrence sent nothing more, but without connecting the two events, Murry admits that he went himself in May, by Lawrence's request, to stay a few days at Hermitage and 'talk things over'. He admits too that he then found Lawrence 'ill and weary', as well as poor and depressed, and despairing of his life in England. It was the period of Lawrence's greatest need of English literary support. Murry has denounced with eloquence the English literary men who earlier withheld this. We have already seen that as a comparatively unimportant reviewer he avoided doing what he might for The Rainbow. Now that he had some standing, we find not only that he could risk nothing to give Lawrence a hand, but that as time went on he lost few opportunities of disparaging Lawrence in public. Perhaps he thought Lawrence was finished, and he had his own growing reputation as a critic to safeguard. The next two novels by Lawrence that appeared were murderously handled in the Athenaeum. It was not until 1922, when Lawrence was well enough established neither to need a hand nor to involve any risk for those who gave it, that Murry discovered a masterpiece in a book of far less significance than either The Rainbow or Women in Love, a book that is certainly not superior as a novel to The Lost Girl - namely, Aaron's Rod. With that and the Fantasia of the Unconscious, he declares, Lawrence reached the 'pinnacle of his achievement', before wallowing once more in the disintegration - this time a final one - of his later work.