At Villach, Karnten, in Austria, he was at first hardly able to walk. But though the weather was variable, he rejoiced in the coolness after the gruelling heat of that July in Florence, and he grew quickly stronger. In September he went with Frieda to Germany, returning to the place from which he and she had started on their perilous mating more than fifteen years earlier - Irschenhausen in the Isarthal, near Munich. Here, in the very same little wooden house at the corner of the forest, and even attended by the very same servant as before, they stayed the month out quietly. Frieda's sister Else (of The Rainbow) visited them. The forest was behind, the open country in front, with the mountains beyond, all still unspoiled. Lawrence drank goat's milk and rested. They were both happy, hut I think it was Frieda's hour.
Sadly for me I missed seeing them at Baden-Baden, where I was able to call one day that September. In circumstances wholly unforeseen I had been dispatched by my brother-in-law by aeroplane to be with my sister who was having heart treatment at Nauheim. I did not know of the Lawrences' whereabouts, and - taking my chance - missed seeing even Frieda's mother. In October I should have caught all three, but by then I was back at home. A letter from Frieda at Baden told me that Lawrence was doing some more inhaling there, and that he was very 'mild and tame', the utmost of excitement being a game of whist in the evenings with the 'old excellencies' at the Stift, whose darling he was.
When Lawrence wrote soon after, it was to assure us that it was only 'a question now of putting on weight and getting the general condition up again'. He had been badly shaken by this last bout, and even while he felt better he could not eat. Still he believed that all would yet come right. 'We really must all chirp up, and have one of the jolly old times,' he wrote. 'We must chirp up, all of us. Sempre! D. H. L.' Incredible as it now seems I was not seriously anxious about Lawrence at this time. I had always known that he was 'delicate'. Equally I knew that he recovered from every upset and was never very long knocked out. I am sure that most of us felt the same - more anxious to hear of his expected restoration to his normal state than we were afraid of not hearing of it.
He enclosed a number of photographs, taken at the Mirenda, of the pictures he had been painting during the past two years. In the back of each was a pencil note of the dimensions and colours. One of these days, he said, he might think of exhibiting them.
There was a shy but eager note in every mention by Lawrence of his pictures which I never found in any reference to his novels, though there was something like it in the case of certain poems. In painting he was at once more playful and more exposed than in the writing of prose. He had tremendously enjoyed the making of his pictures, and at the same time he felt that he was expressing by means of them something both personal and fundamental to himself. But he had kept very quiet about it, regarding it for long as little more than an amusement. He had, in fact, begun through having by chance at the same time both a number of canvases left by somebody at the villa and a collection of oddments of ordinary house-paints left over from redecorations.
By then the larger and more memorable of his pictures - the 'Holy Family', the 'Expulsion from Eden', the Boccaccio illustration and the men bathing by the willows - were all in existence, besides most of the smaller ones.
I am no judge of paintings, especially not of paintings by Lawrence. Some who are said to be good judges have told me they are worthless. Others again, whose judgement is equally estimable, have contradicted this verdict. I certainly liked the look of those in the photographs, as I did when I later saw them at the Warren Gallery. They seemed to me work that could have been done by nobody but Lawrence, and, like everything by Lawrence, they opened windows and let in fresh air. Simply as compositions I found the Boccaccio piece and the willows landscape lovely. And I was delighted by the true believer's touch of mockery in the rendering of the Eternal Triangle of Father, Mother and Child posed in front of their cottage crocks - that cheeky, clever little Jesus who was going to upset everybody's apple-cart, that mindless, smiling, big-breasted mother Eve, and that moustachioed Father and Husband who was so clearly the master in his own house! Who but Lawrence would have seen them just so?