The Project Gutenberg eBook ofTortoisesThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: TortoisesAuthor: D. H. LawrenceRelease date: August 31, 2007 [eBook #22475]Most recently updated: December 26, 2012Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TORTOISES ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: TortoisesAuthor: D. H. LawrenceRelease date: August 31, 2007 [eBook #22475]Most recently updated: December 26, 2012Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger
Title: Tortoises
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release date: August 31, 2007 [eBook #22475]Most recently updated: December 26, 2012
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TORTOISES ***
titlepage (56K)
BABY TORTOISE
TORTOISE-SHELL
TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS
LUI ET ELLE
TORTOISE GALLANTRY
TORTOISE SHOUT
You know what it is to be born alone,Baby tortoise!The first day to heave your feet little by littlefrom the shell,Not yet awake,And remain lapsed on earth,Not quite alive.A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as ifit would never open,Like some iron door;To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower baseAnd reach your skinny little neckAnd take your first bite at some dim bit ofherbage,Alone, small insect,Tiny bright-eye,Slow one.To take your first solitary biteAnd move on your slow, solitary hunt.Your bright, dark little eye,Your eye of a dark disturbed night,Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,So indomitable.No one ever heard you complain.You draw your head forward, slowly, from yourlittle wimpleAnd set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,Rowing slowly forward.Whither away, small bird?Rather like a baby working its limbs,Except that you make slow, ageless progressAnd a baby makes none.The touch of sun excites you,And the long ages, and the lingering chillMake you pause to yawn,Opening your impervious mouth,Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like somesuddenly gaping pincers;Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,Then close the wedge of your little mountainfront,Your face, baby tortoise.Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turnyour head in its wimpleAnd look with laconic, black eyes?Or is sleep coming over you again,The non-life?You are so hard to wake.Are you able to wonder?Or is it just your indomitable will and pride ofthe first lifeLooking roundAnd slowly pitching itself against the inertiaWhich had seemed invincible?The vast inanimate,And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye.Challenger.Nay, tiny shell-bird,What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you mustrow against,What an incalculable inertia.Challenger.Little Ulysses, fore-runner,No bigger than my thumb-nail,Buon viaggio.All animate creation on your shoulder,Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.The ponderous, preponderate,Inanimate universe;And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.How vivid your travelling seems now, in thetroubled sunshine,Stoic, Ulyssean atom;Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.Voiceless little bird,Resting your head half out of your wimpleIn the slow dignity of your eternal pause.Alone, with no sense of being alone,And hence six times more solitary;Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching throughimmemorial agesYour little round house in the midst of chaos.Over the garden earth,Small bird,Over the edge of all things.Traveller,With your tail tucked a little on one sideLike a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.All life carried on your shoulder,Invincible fore-runner.The Cross, the CrossGoes deeper in than we know,Deeper into life;Right into the marrowAnd through the bone.
Along the back of the baby tortoiseThe scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sectionsOr a bee's.Then crossways down his sidesTiger-stripes and wasp-bands.Five, and five again, and five again,And round the edges twenty-five little ones,The sections of the baby tortoise shell.Four, and a keystone;Four, and a keystone;Four, and a keystone;Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.It needed Pythagoras to see life placing hercounters on the living backOf the baby tortoise;Life establishing the first eternal mathematicaltablet,Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, butin life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell.The first little mathematical gentlemanStepping, wee mite, in his loose trousersUnder all the eternal dome of mathematical law.Fives, and tens,Threes and fours and twelves,All the volte face of decimals,The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven,Turn him on his back,The kicking little beetle,And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touchingbelly,The long cleavage of division, upright of theeternal cross.And on either side count five,On each side, two above, on each side, two belowThe dark bar horizontal.It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,Through his five-fold complex-nature.So turn him over on his toes again;Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb-piece,Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing-head,Four and one makes five, which is the clue to allmathematics.The Lord wrote it all down on the little slateOf the baby tortoise.Outward and visible indication of the plan within,The complex, manifold involvedness of anindividual creatureBlotted outOn this small bird, this rudiment,This little dome, this pedimentOf all creation,This slow one.
On he goes, the little one,Bud of the universe,Pediment of life.Setting off somewhere, apparently.Whither away, brisk egg?His mother deposited him on the soil as if he wereno more than droppings,And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she werean old rusty tin.A mere obstacle,He veers round the slow great mound of her.Tortoises always foresee obstacles.It is no use my saying to him in an emotionalvoice:"This is your Mother, she laid you when you werean egg."He does not even trouble to answer: "Woman,what have I to do with thee?"He wearily looks the other way,And she even more wearily looks another waystill,Each with the utmost apathy,Incognizant,Unaware,Nothing.As for papa,He snaps when I offer him his offspring,Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,Because he is irascible this morning, an irascibletortoiseBeing touched with love, and devoid offatherliness.Father and mother,And three little brothers,And all rambling aimless, like little perambulatingpebbles scattered in the garden,Not knowing each other from bits of earth or oldtins.Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances,of course,But family feeling there is none, not even thebeginnings.Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterlessLittle tortoise.Row on then, small pebble,Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilledsunshine,Young gayety.Does he look for a companion?No, no, don't think it.He doesn't know he is alone;Isolation is his birthright,This atom.To row forward, and reach himself tall on spinytoes,To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth,afraid of the night,To crop a little substance,To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:Basta!To be a tortoise!Think of it, in a garden of inert clodsA brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself—Croesus!In a garden of pebbles and insectsTo roam, and feel the slow heart beatTortoise-wise, the first bell soundingFrom the warm blood, in the dark-creationmorning.Moving, and being himself,Slow, and unquestioned,And inordinately there, O stoic!Wandering in the slow triumph of his ownexistence,Ringing the soundless bell of his presence inchaos,And biting the frail grass arrogantly,Decidedly arrogantly.
She is large and matronlyAnd rather dirty,A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity haddriven her to it.Though what she does, except lay four eggs atrandom in the garden once a yearAnd put up with her husband,I don't know.She likes to eat.She hurries up, striding reared on long uncannylegs,When food is going.Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.She snaps the soft bread from my hand in greatmouthfuls,Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron,pristine faceInto an enormously wide-beaked mouthLike sudden curved scissors,And gulping at more than she can swallow, andworking her thick, soft tongue,And having the bread hanging over her chin.O Mistress, Mistress,Reptile mistress,Your eye is very dark, very bright,And it never softensAlthough you watch.She knows,She knows well enough to come for food,Yet she sees me not;Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,Reptile mistress.Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothlessmouth,She has no qualm when she catches my finger inher steel overlapping gums,But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinkingare nothing to her,She does not even know she is nipping me withher curved beak.Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I dragit in horror away.Mistress, reptile mistress,You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.He is much smaller,Dapper beside her,And ridiculously small.Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,His, poor darling, is almost fiery.His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long,scaled, striving legs,So striving, striving,Are all more delicate than she,And he has a cruel scar on his shell.Poor darling, biting at her feet,Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy,splay feet,Nipping her ankles,Which she drags apathetic away, though withoutretreating into her shell.Agelessly silent,And with a grim, reptile determination,Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him,serpents' long obstinacyOf horizontal persistence.Little old manScuffling beside her, bending down, catching hisopportunity,Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, andseizing her scaly ankle,And hanging grimly on,Letting go at last as she drags away,And closing his steel-trap face.His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.And how he feels it!The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalkerthrough chaos,The immune, the animate,Enveloped in isolation,Forerunner.Now look at him!Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seekhis consummation beyond himself.Divided into passionate duality,He, so finished and immune, now broken intodesirous fragmentariness,Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himselfIn his effort toward completion again.Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence intopieces,And he must struggle after reconstruction,ignominiously.And so behold him following the tailOf that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dankpersistence,Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretchesout to walk,Roaming over the sods,Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tailBeneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.Their two shells like doomed boats bumping,Hers huge, his small;Their splay feet rambling and rowing likepaddles,And stumbling mixed up in one another,In the race of love—Two tortoises,She huge, he small.She seems earthily apathetic,And he has a reptile's awful persistence.I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the MèreTortue.While I, I pity Monsieur."He pesters her and torments her," said thewoman.How much more ishepestered and tormented,say I.What can he do?He is dumb, he is visionless,Conceptionless.His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds notAs her earthen mound moves on,But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leatheryskin,Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,And drags at these with his beak,Drags and drags and bites,While she pulls herself free, and rows her dullmound along.
Making his advancesHe does not look at her, nor sniff at her,No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skinThat work beneath her while she sprawls alongIn her ungainly pace,Her folds of skin that work and rowBeneath the earth-soiled hovel in which shemoves.And so he strains beneath her housey wallsAnd catches her trouser-legs in his beakSuddenly, or her skinny limb,And strange and grimly drags at herLike a dog,Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awfulpersistency.Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolationAnd doomed to partiality, partial being,Ache, and want of being,Want,Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to addhimself on to her.Born to walk alone,Forerunner,Now suddenly distracted into this mazysidetrack,This awkward, harrowing pursuit,This grim necessity from within.Does she knowAs she moves eternally slowly away?Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a birdflying in the dark against a window,All knowledgeless?The awful concussion,And the still more awful need to persist, to follow,follow, continue,Driven, after aeons of pristine, fore-god-likesingleness and oneness,At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron,Driven away from himself into her tracks,Forced to crash against her.Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile,Little gentleman,Sorry plight,We ought to look the other way.Save that, having come with you so far,We will go on to the end. J
I thought he was dumb,I said he was dumb,Yet I've heard him cry.First faint scream,Out of life's unfathomable dawn,Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon'sdawning rim,Far, far off, far scream.Tortoisein extremis.Why were we crucified into sex?Why were we not left rounded off, and finishedin ourselves,As we began,As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?A far, was-it-audible scream,Or did it sound on the plasm direct?Worse than the cry of the new-born,A scream,A yell,A shout,A pæan,A death-agony,A birth-cry,A submission,All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the firstdawn.War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-screamreptilian,Why was the veil torn?The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?The male soul's membraneTorn with a shriek half music, half horror.Crucifixion.Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall ofthat dense female,Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reachingout of the shellIn tortoise-nakedness,Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded,spread-eagle over her house-roof,And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curvedbeneath her walls,Reaching and gripping tense, more reachinganguish in uttermost tensionTill suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tuppinglike a jerking leap, and oh!Opening its clenched face from his outstretchedneckAnd giving that fragile yell, that scream,Super-audible,From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,Giving up the ghost,Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.His scream, and his moment's subsidence,The moment of eternal silence,Yet unreleased, and after the moment, thesudden, startling jerk of coition, and at onceThe inexpressible faint yell—And so on, till the last plasm of my body wasmelted backTo the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.So he tups, and screamsTime after time that frail, torn screamAfter each jerk, the longish interval,The tortoise eternity,Agelong, reptilian persistence,Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for thenext spasm.I remember, when I was a boy,I heard the scream of a frog, which was caughtwith his foot in the mouth of an up-startingsnake;I remember when I first heard bull-frogs breakinto sound in the spring;I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throatof nightCry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;I remember the first time, out of a bush in thedarkness, a nightingale's piercing cries andgurgles startled the depths of my soul;I remember the scream of a rabbit as I wentthrough a wood at midnight;I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting andblorting through the hours, persistent andirrepressible;I remember my first terror hearing the howl ofweird, amorous cats;I remember the scream of a terrified, injuredhorse, the sheet-lightningAnd running away from the sound of a woman inlabor, something like an owl whooing,And listening inwardly to the first bleat of alamb,The first wail of an infant,And my mother singing to herself,And the first tenor singing of the passionatethroat of a young collier, who has long sincedrunk himself to death,The first elements of foreign speechOn wild dark lips.And more than all these,And less than all these,This last,Strange, faint coition yellOf the male tortoise at extremity,Tiny from under the very edge of the farthestfar-off horizon of life.The cross,The wheel on which our silence first is broken,Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our singleinviolability, our deep silenceTearing a cry from us.Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us callingacross the deeps, calling, calling for thecomplement,Singing, and calling, and singing again, beinganswered, having found.Torn, to become whole again, after long seekingfor what is lost,The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ,the Osiris-cry of abandonment,That which is whole, torn asunder,That which is in part, finding its whole againthroughout the universe.