Originally Posted by Janine
DHL to To Rachel Annand Taylor, 3 December 1910
I have been at home now ten days. My mother is very near the end.: Today I have been to Leicester. I did not get home till half past nine. Then I ran upstairs. Oh she was very bad. The pains had been again.
'Oh my dear' I said, 'is it the pains?'
'Not pain now - Oh the weariness' she moaned, so that I could hardly hear her. I wish she could die tonight.
My sister and I do all the nursing. My sister is only 22. I sit upstairs hours and hours till I wonder if ever it were true that I was at London. I seem to have died since, and that is an old life, dreamy.
I will tell you. My mother was a clever, ironical delicately moulded woman of good, old burgher descent. She married below her. My father was dark, ruddy, with a fine laugh. He is a
* Referring to The Trespasser?
t Referring to The White Peacock?
~ Lawrence's mother died on 9 December 191O~
coal miner. He was one of the sanguine temperament, warm and hearty, but unstable: he lacked principle, as my mother would have said. He deceived her and lied to her. She despised him - he drank.
Their marriage life has been one carnal, bloody fight. I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember, I shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very- bad before I was born.
This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We know each other by instinct. She said to my aunt - about me: 'But it has been different with him. He has seemed to be part of me.' - And that is the real case. We have been like one, so sensitive to each other that we never needed words. It has been rather terrible and has made me, in some respects, abnormal.
I think this peculiar fusion of soul (don't think me highfalutin) never comes twice in a life-time - it doesn't seem natural. When it comes it seems to distribute one's consciousness far abroad from oneself, and one understands! I think no one has got 'Understanding' except through love. Now my mother is nearly dead, and I don't quite know how I am.
I have been to Leicester today, I have met a girl* who has always been warm for me - iike a sunny happy day - and I've gone and asked her to marry me: in the train, quite unpremeditated, between Rothley and Quorn - she lives at Quorn. When I think of her I feel happy with a sort of warm radiation - she is big and dark and handsome. There were five other people in the carriage. Then when I think of my mother: - if you've ever put your hand round the bowl of a champagne glass and squeezed it and wondered how near it is to crushing-in and the wine all going through your fingers - that's how my heart feels - like the champagne glass. There is no hostility between the warm happiness and the crush of misery: but one is concentrated in my, chest, and one is diffuse - a suffusion, vague.
* Louie Burrows, according to Jessie Chambers, one of-the models for Clara Dawes.
Muriel [Jessie Chambers] is the girl I have broken with. She loves me to madness, and demands the soul of me. I have been cruel to her, and wronged her, but I did not know.
Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had it, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere. Don't say I am hasty this time - I know. Louie - whom I wish I could marry the day after the funeral - she would never demand to drink me up and have me. She loves me - but it is a fine, warm, healthy, natural love - not like Jane Eyre, who is Muriel, but like - say Rhoda Fleming or a commoner Anna Karenina. She will never plunge her hands through my blood and feel for my soul, and make me set my teeth and shiver and fight away. Ugh - I have done well - and cruelly - tonight.
I look at my father - he is like, a cinder. It is very terrible, mis-marriage.
