found in Mr. D. H. Lawrence; there is a mass of passionate strength, that of an angry man straining [pg 022] with his nerves because he despises his hands; there is a gentleness in his writing of children which could never be capable of such melodrama as that in Mr. Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," but in his men and women, in their day and night, there is no drop of sweetness. And I do not think he wishes it otherwise. [pg 019] [pg 020] [pg 021] [pg 022] As the train flew through the Derbyshire countryside, whose hillsides and vales, covered with the brilliant sheen of the autumn sun, met the eye pleasantly with a rising and falling of pale yellowish green, with here and there a dark green patch of woodland, and made me want to stop the hurrying train and breathe the air of the place, my thoughts slipped back to the spring and the summer just before the war; and, with my eyes on the quickly passing sunshine on the low hills, I found that, after all, those last few months of peace had passed, perhaps, too lightly, too carelessly; but it was pleasant to think back to those days when lunches and dinners and week-ends took up so much of one's time. I was glad now that I had not spent the three summer months in Yorkshire [pg 023] on the moors, where I should have been uncomfortable; and had to be for ever sending postcards to Hatchard's to post me this or that book, which would come when my mood for it had passed. [pg 023] And how dreadful it is to want to read suddenly "Love in the Valley," and have to be content with Tennyson, to long for a chapter of Dostoieffsky, and be met with complete editions of Trollope and Surtees! So I see that my middle age will be crabbed and made solitary by my books, and that I shall never have the heart to leave them and go to the East to see the land of my father Haik, or to walk about the lake upon which the great Queen Semiramis (who was the first in the world to discover that men could be conveniently changed into eunuchs) built the city Semiramakert, which is now called Van, and where later, when she was pursued by the swordsmen of her son, she threw a magic bracelet into the lake and turned herself into a rock, which still stands there covered with the triumphant script of the Assyrians. The London Venture: II [pg 027] [pg 027]
Prev.
Back
Top