GLAD GHOSTS
By
D. H. LAWRENCE
ERNEST BENN LIMITED
BOUVERIE HOUSE LONDON
GLAD GHOSTS
I knew Carlotta Fell in the early days before the war. Then she wasescaping into art, and was just "Fell." That was at our famous butuninspired school of art, the Thwaite, where I myself was diligentlymurdering my talent. At the Thwaite they always gave Carlotta theStill-life prizes. She accepted them calmly, as one of our conquerors,but the rest of the students felt vicious about it. They called itbuttering the laurels, because Carlotta was Hon., and her father awell-known peer.
She was by way of being a beauty, too. Her family was not rich, yet shehad come into five hundred a year of her own, when she was eighteen; andthat, to us, was an enormity. Then she appeared in the fashionablepapers, affecting to be wistful, with pearls, slanting her eyes. Thenshe went and did another of her beastly still-lives, a cactus-in-a-pot.
At the Thwaite, being snobs, we were proud of her too. She showed off abit, it is true, playing bird of paradise among the pigeons. At the sametime, she was thrilled to be with us, and out of her own set. Herwistfulness and yearning "for something else" was absolutely genuine.Yet she was not going to hobnob with us either, at least notindiscriminately.
She was ambitious, in a vague way. She wanted to coruscate, somehow orother. She had a family of clever and "distinguished" uncles, who hadflattered her. What then?
Her cactuses-in-a-pot were admirable. But even she didn't expect them tostart a revolution. Perhaps she would rather glow in the wide if dirtyskies of life, than in the somewhat remote and unsatisfactory ether ofArt.
She and I were "friends" in a bare, stark, but real sense. I was poor,but I didn't really care. She didn't really care either. Whereas I didcare about some passionate vision which, I could feel, lay embedded inthe half-dead body of this life. The quick body within the dead. I couldfeel it. And I wanted to get at it, if only for myself.
She didn't know what I was after. Yet she could feel that I was It, andbeing an aristocrat of the Kingdom of It, as well as the realm of GreatBritain, she was loyal—loyal to me because of It, the quick bodywhich I imagined within the dead.
Still, we never had much to do with one another. I had no money. Shenever wanted to introduce me to her own people. I didn't want it either.Sometimes we had lunch together, sometimes we went to a theatre, or wedrove in the country, in some car that belonged to neither of us. Wenever flirted or talked love. I don't think she wanted it, any more thanI did. She wanted to marry into her own surroundings, and I knew she wasof too frail a paste to face my future.
Now I come to think of it, she was always a bit sad when we weretogether. Perhaps she looked over seas she would never cross. Shebelonged finally, fatally, to her own class. Yet I think she hated them.When she was in a group of people who talked "smart," titles and beaumonde and all that, her rather short nose would turn up, her wide mouthpress into discontent, and a languor of bored irritation come even overher broad shoulders. Bored irritation, and a loathing of climbers, aloathing of the ladder altogether. She hated her own class: yet it wasalso sacrosanct to her. She disliked, even to me, mentioning the titleof her friends. Yet the very hurried resentment with which she said,when I asked her. Who is it?—