tion>David Herbert Lawrence
The White Peacock
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066442033
Table of Contents
Lettie Pulls Down the Small Gold Grapes
Strange Blossoms and Strange New Budding
Kiss When She’s Ripe for Tears
An Arrow from the Impatient God
The Fascination of the Forbidden Apple
The First Pages of Several Romances
The Dominant Motif of Suffering
A Prospect Among the Marshes of Lethe
The People of Nethermere
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE PEOPLE OF NETHERMERE
I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond. They were grey, descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty. The whole place was gathered in the musing of old age. The thick-piled trees on the far shore were too dark and sober to dally with the sun; the weeds stood crowded and motionless. Not even a little wind flickered the willows of the islets. The water lay softly, intensely still. Only the thin stream falling through the mill-race murmured to itself of the tumult of life which had once quickened the valley.
I was almost startled into the water from my perch on the alder roots by a voice saying:
“Well, what is there to look at?” My friend was a young farmer, stoutly built, brown eyed, with a naturally fair skin burned dark and freckled in patches. He laughed, seeing me start, and looked down at me with lazy curiosity.
“I was thinking the place seemed old, brooding over its past.”
He looked at me with a lazy indulgent smile, and lay down on his back on the bank, saying:
“It’s all right for a doss—here.”
“Your life is nothing else but a doss. I shall laugh when somebody jerks you awake,” I replied.
He smiled comfortably and put his hands over his eyes because of the light.
“Why shall you laugh?” he drawled.
“Because you’ll be amusing,” said I.
We were silent for a long time, when he rolled over and began to poke with his finger in the bank.
“I thought,” he said in his leisurely fashion, “there was some cause for all this buzzing.”
I looked, and saw that he had poked out an old, papery nest of those pretty field bees which seem to have dipped their tails into bright amber dust. Some agitated insects ran round
