‘I suppose it’s sex, whatever that is,’ said Lucille.

‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’ feels drastically unlike other Lawrence I’ve read so far because it is:

1. funny
2. ‘with it’ (i.e. littered with fashionable 1920s slang)
3. written (mostly) in surprisingly pared-back, declarative prose

The wife of meek Arthur Saywell, the vicar, runs off and leaves him with two young daughters to raise. The scandal makes his current post untenable so the Church moves him to the Yorkshire parish of Papplewick and makes him rector there. The rectory is a much bigger house and into it move Saywell’s ancient, fat domineering mother, ‘The Mater’, as well as silently seething Aunt Cissie and self-absorbed Uncle Fred.

The depiction of ‘the Mater’, her psychological domination of Saywell, and of Aunt Cissie with her hissing green rages, are done for comic effect and reminiscent, in their grotesqueness and the repetition of key words for comic effect, of Dickens. For example, the way the mother who ran away comes to be referred to as ‘She-who-was-Cynthia’, a phrase Lawrence repeats 16 times for comic effect. Or straight out sitcom-style comedy like the daily palaver of getting Granny involved with the evening crossword puzzle. Comedy! Who knew Lawrence was capable of lols!

‘With it’ phraseology

• So the young people set off on their jaunt, trying to be very full of beans.
• Leo, always on the go, moved quickly.
• ‘More glad rags!’ said her father to her, genially.
• Leo arrived with his car, the usual bunch.
• Lucille kept breaking out with: ‘Oh, I say!’

I assume Lawrence is satirising these ‘with it’, ‘always on the go’ sorts of phrases – they are solely associated with the young generation of characters – but they indicate a comically satirical effect I haven’t come across before in his writing.

Prose style

Lawrence’s basic unit of meaning is the paragraph and a lot of the prose conforms to the fundamental Lawrence playbook, namely depicting character, perceptions and moods through a kind of whipped-up meringue of paragraphs which repeat key words and phrases to magnify the thing and view it from different angles.

What feels new is that there are quite a few sentences which are freestanding statements of fact, which simply state something and not part of paragraphs constructed with repetition of key words or feelings in mind. This is completely normal for other writers, in fact it’s how most writers operate but it is completely new in my reading of Lawrence.

Posh women

What is like the other stories I’ve been reading is that ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy’ has 1) a woman protagonist and 2) she’s posh. The narrative tells us that Saywell sent his two daughters, Lucille and Yvette, away to boarding school and when the story opens they’re returning from finishing school in Lausanne. They both have fashionable 1920s haircuts and:

were quite the usual thing, tall young creatures with fresh, sensitive faces and bobbed hair and young-manly, deuce-take-it manners

where I assume ‘deuce’ was the acceptable version of Devil, as in ‘the Devil take it’!

The two sisters say ‘frightfully’ and ‘awfully’ and ‘jolly’ all the time. Their friends at home – Lottie and Ella and Leo and Bob – are similarly posh. Lawrence is crystal clear about the gulf that separates them from the ‘workmen’ whose cottages they occasionally visit in a spirit of charity.

If anybody asked her out to a meal, even if a woman in one of the workmen’s houses asked her to stay to tea, she accepted at once. In fact, she was rather thrilled. She liked talking to the working men, they had often such fine, hard heads. But of course they were in another world.

When the others ask why she tipped the gypsy, Yvette explains:

‘You have to be a bit lordly with people like that.’ (p.191)

The household employs a cook, a housemaid and a gardener who are never named or, I think, even speak. Why did Lawrence, the son of an illiterate miner, the most working class of our great writers, end up writing stories about phenomenally posh middle-class ladies?

Despising men

‘St Mawr’ is a novella about two women who despise modern men for being pathetic, tamed and lifeless. So is this. Yvette thinks the gypsy woman is strong but, like Lou in St Mawr, she can only define a woman’s strength, or her own desire for independence, by contrast with men and, more specifically, by denigrating contemporary men who, in both women’s opinions, are barely worth the name.

She liked her [the gypsy woman]. She liked the danger and the covert fearlessness of her. She liked her covert, unyielding sex, that was immoral, but with a hard, defiant pride of its own. Nothing would ever get that woman under. She would despise the rectory and the rectory morality, utterly! She would strangle Granny with one hand. And she would have the same contempt for Daddy and for Uncle Fred, as men, as she would have for fat old slobbery Rover, the Newfoundland dog. A great, sardonic female contempt, for such domesticated dogs, calling themselves men. (p.196)

The disappointing younger generation

Like E.M. Forster in ‘Howards End’, Lawrence has to accept that people drive cars, but he can still cordially dislike them, their noise and pollution, and associate them with spiritual emptiness. Bigger than this, though, is his disappointment with the empty-headed younger generation.

Six young rebels, they sat very perkily in the car as they swished through the mud. Yet they had a peaked look too. After all, they had nothing really to rebel against, any of them. They were left so very free in their movements. Their parents let them do almost entirely as they liked. There wasn’t really a fetter to break, nor a prison-bar to file through, nor a bolt to shatter. The keys of their lives were in their own hands. And there they dangled inert.

Combine the two, disappointing young people and disappointing men and you have a the simple setup that when a real man enters pampered Yvette’s life, she will, of course, fall for him off a cliff.

The plot

So meek, genial Arthur Saywell lives in the Rectory, dominated by the monstrous figure of fat, farting, deaf old Granny who insists on having a stiflingly hot fire burning at all times in the living room where she squats, with jealous passive-aggressive Aunt Cissie seething off to one side. Lawrence is particularly disgusted by the aroma of human ordure which taints the air.

Her heart was hard with repugnance, against the rectory. She loathed these houses with their indoor sanitation and their bathrooms, and their extraordinary repulsiveness. She hated the rectory, and everything it implied. The whole stagnant, sewerage sort of life, where sewerage is never mentioned, but where it seems to smell from the centre of every two-legged inmate, from Granny to the servants, was foul. (p.196)

The daughters, Lucille and Yvette, return from finishing school abroad to be appalled by the literally oppressive, smelly atmosphere of this sordid dwelling. The narrative is interesting for depicting the extreme boredom which most people of the day endured. There was nowhere to go, except the pub or for walks in the surrounding country, so most people spent most of their time in their little houses. The radio was still uncommon so, in the Rectory, the two bright young girls sit in an agony of boredom, trying to read or sew while Arthur and Uncle Fred shout clues to the daily crossword at the deaf and blind Mater.

They go out as much as they can, in fact they’re very sociable, but it isn’t enough for Yvette.

So the months went by. Gerry Somercotes was still an adorer. There were others, too, sons of farmers or mill-owners. Yvette really ought to have had a good time. She was always out to parties and dances, friends came for her in their motor-cars, and off she went to the city, to the afternoon dance in the chief hotel, or in the gorgeous new Palais de Danse, called the Pally.

Yet she always seemed like a creature mesmerised. She was never free to be quite jolly. Deep inside her worked an intolerable irritation, which she thought she ought not to feel, and which she hated feeling, thereby making it worse. She never understood at all whence it arose.

At home, she truly was irritable, and outrageously rude to Aunt Cissie. In fact Yvette’s awful temper became one of the family by-words.

Occasionally the girls’ posh young friends call round only to be trapped in the same stifling atmosphere, being laboriously introduced to deaf, blind Mater then sitting on the edges of their chairs in agonies of boredom before they’re allowed to go out to play.

Best of all is when Leo comes round and invites everyone to go for a drive through the hilly, laney countryside. On one such drive they motor up to Bonsall Head and come across a small gypsy camp under the shelter of some cliffs. They have to slow right down because the lane is blocked by a gypsy backing his cart into the entrance of the small quarry where the others have parked their three caravans. As they’re stationary an older gypsy woman calls out to ask whether they want their fortunes read and the young people agree to do so for a lark.

But the point of this extended scene is the animal magnetism of the 30-year-old male gypsy who was backing the cart into the little camp, and now sardonically watches the young people one by one have their palms read amid squeaks and squawks of amusement, but all the time has his eye on Yvette, who feels watched and caught and weighed.

‘Don’t the pretty young ladies want to hear their fortunes?’ said the gipsy on the cart, laughing except for his dark, watchful eyes, which went from face to face, and lingered on Yvette’s young, tender face. She met his dark eyes for a second, their level search, their insolence, their complete indifference to people like Bob and Leo, and something took fire in her breast. (p.185)

He looked at Yvette as he passed, staring her full in the eyes, with his pariah’s bold yet dishonest stare. Something hard inside her met his stare. But the surface of her body seemed to turn to water. (p.189)

Yvette realises he is married to the fortune teller, though it doesn’t affect the uncanny impact his hard stare has on her body and mind.

Chapter 4

A big row when Aunt Cissie discovers Yvette has been pilfering cash from the box where she’s been storing funds towards commissioning a stained glass window for the church to commemorate the fallen of the Great War. Massive row which genial Arthur steps in to resolve by replacing the money, as a loan on which Yvette will have to pay interest, but Aunt Cissie hates Yvette with a hissing malignity.

A second row breaks out when the girls have cluttered the table with all the paraphernalia of making a dress and Yvette accidentally knocks a large mirror off the piano. It doesn’t break but Cissie (filled with ‘a great tumour of hate’) bursts out with accusations which blind old Granny joins in and the household is instantly in an uproar. From all this tension, Yvette retreats to her room where she lies, dreaming of the gypsy.

And the gipsy man himself! Yvette quivered suddenly, as if she had seen his big, bold eyes upon her, with the naked insinuation of desire in them. The absolutely naked insinuation of desire made her life prone and powerless in the bed, as if a drug had cast her in a new molten mould. (p.197)

Chapter 5

The gypsy comes by on his cart, pulled by a roan horse, into Papplewick to hawk his wares, and knocks at the Rectory door. The maid answers and calls Aunt Cissie but Yvette saw him from the landing window and also goes to the door. The gypsy is handsome and dapper, soft and submissive, but his eyes flash desire.

‘The candlestick is lovely!’ said Yvette. ‘Did you make it?’
And she looked up at the man with her naïve, childlike eyes, that were as capable of double meanings as his own.
‘Yes lady!’ He looked back into her eyes for a second, with that naked suggestion of desire which acted on her like a spell, and robbed her of her will. (p.205)

Maybe the key point about her, is that Yvette wants someone, or something, ‘to have power over her’. Not in a BDSM way. More because she suffers an existentialist emptiness. The whole of her life, whether the stifling atmosphere of the Rectory or the endless shiny parties, both seem equally as meaningless.

Dimly, at the back of her mind, she was thinking: Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?
That was her constant refrain, to herself: Why is nothing important? Whether she was in church, or at a party of young people, or dancing in the hotel in the city, the same little bubble of a question rose repeatedly on her consciousness: Why is nothing important?
There were plenty of young men to make love to her: even devotedly. But with impatience she had to shake them off. Why were they so unimportant? – so irritating! (p.208)

She wants something real, something that matters, something that will shake her out of her emptiness.

Lest anyone think she is the unqualified heroine of the story, it needs pointing out that she is selfish. She cultivates a vague, heedless manner which doesn’t hide the fact that she genuinely doesn’t care about other people, ‘her straying, absent-minded detachment from things’ (p.226).

This is especially true of the friends her age. Loads of men throw themselves at her and she dismisses them all. At a dance, poor young Leo shyly proposes to her. Yvette has no idea that, without meaning to, she has been sweet with him and has led him on, leading him away from poor Emma Framley who is besotted with Leo and distraught that he ignores her for Yvette. And Yvette snorts with laughter at Leo’s proposal, he makes a few attempts to talk her into it then goes off in anger. She has no idea she has this effect on others.

And a key part of this aloofness is despising the young men of her generation (exactly as Lou Carrington despises the men of her generation in ‘St Mawr’). Here she is at a dance watching the young men.

She looked at the young men dancing, elbows out, hips prominent, waists elegantly in. They gave her no clue to her problem. Yet she did particularly dislike the forced elegance of the waists and the prominent hips, over which the well-tailored coats hung with such effeminate discretion… The elegance of these dancers seemed so stuffed, hips merely wadded with flesh. Leo the same, thinking himself such a fine dancer! and a fine figure of a fellow!… She gazed glaringly at the insipid beaux on the dancing floor. And she despised them. Just as the raggle-taggle gipsy women despise men who are not gipsies, despise their dog-like walk down the streets, she found herself despising this crowd. Where among them was the subtle, lonely, insinuating challenge that could reach her? She did not want to mate with a house-dog. (p.211)

In St Mawr, Lou describes the pallid young Englishmen she knows as domesticated dogs. Obviously it was a favourite thought of Lawrence, from a different class and generation and an unfathomably different worldview.

On a practical note, when Aunt Cissie bought a candlestick of the gypsy and went inside, Yvette playfully asked about his wife, the fortune teller and the gypsy quietly tells her his wife is absent every Friday. Every Friday. This fact sticks in her mind…

Chapter 6

A few Fridays later Yvette goes for a bike ride, up to the tops and then finds herself meandering and arrives at the gypsy camp. The sexy gypsy is there tapping a brass pot, the old woman is tending a fire, three kids are playing ‘like little wild animals’. She stays for the meal the old woman has been cooking. They all eat and the gypsy’s soul masters hers.

And he, as he blew his hot coffee, was aware of one thing only, the mysterious fruit of her virginity, her perfect tenderness in the body.

Like a snowdrop blossoming. God, Lawrence has such a magician’s way with words.

The gypsy, supremely aware of her, waited for her like the substance of shadow, as shadow waits and is there.

Anyway, he has complete control over her almost as if he’s hypnotised her and suggests she go into his caravan to wash her hands where he transparently plans to have sex with her and she, hypnotised, is on the steps up into the caravan, when they all hear a motor car approaching.

I thought it would be her friends but it isn’t, it’s strangers who stop and ask if they can warm their hands at the fire. It’s winter and they (foolishly) have been driving with the car’s top down. Must be freezing! Of course this breaks the spell and the gypsy goes back to tapping his bronze pot, now with the anger of frustrated lust. Again, the trope of men as dogs.

The man… strolled over to the gipsy, and stood in silence looking down on him, holding his pipe to his mouth. Now they were two men, like two strange male dogs, having to sniff one another.

This couple stay a long time, it becomes an entire episode during which the athletic chap with his expensive clothes goes over to watch the gypsy at work while the rich mistress sits with Yvette and explains her situation in unnecessary detail. She explains that she is the wife of the well-known northern engineer, Simon Fawcett, and she is divorcing him. Then she’ll be free to marry the handsome rich sportsman, Major Eastwood, who’s driving her round in his big manly car.

In the kind of coincidence which only occurs in fiction it turns out the gypsy was in the same regiment as Major Eastwood during the war, and Lawrence captures the big blond man’s officer-class confidence:

‘I thought I remembered his face,’ he said. ‘One of our grooms, A. 1. man with horses.’ (p.220)

Mrs Fawcett is Jewish, a fact Lawrence really drives home (see Antisemitism section, below). It’s clouding over and getting cold. They offer to give her a lift down to a nearby town from which it will be an easy cycle back to Papplewick.

Antisemitism

In ‘St Mawr’ Mrs Witt hates looking at the rich Jews riding their horses along Rotten Row.

Her eyes became dagger-like as she watched the clipped, shorn, mincing young Englishmen. She refused to look at the prosperous Jews.

The entire episode of Major Eastwood and Mrs Fawcett stopping by the gypsy camp in the quarry is dominated by Lawrence’s negative depiction of her as a Jewess, invoking classic tropes around her wealth, her fingers festooned with jewels, her sharp malice. So:

She was a very small woman, with a rather large nose: probably a Jewess. Tiny almost as a child, in that sable coat she looked much more bulky than she should, and her wide, rather resentful brown eyes of a spoilt Jewess gazed oddly out of her expensive get-up.

She crouched over the low fire, spreading her little hands, on which diamonds and emeralds glittered.

‘Ugh!’ she shuddered. ‘Of course we ought not to have come in an open car! But my husband won’t even let me say I’m cold!’ She looked round at him with her large, childish, reproachful eyes, that had still the canny shrewdness of a bourgeois Jewess: a rich one, probably.

Apparently she was in love, in a Jewess’s curious way, with the big, blond man…

The gipsy had laid down his work, and gone into his caravan. The old woman called hoarsely to the children, from the enclosure. The two elder children came stealing forward. The Jewess gave them the two bits of silver, a shilling and a florin, which she had in her purse, and again the hoarse voice of the unseen old woman was heard.

The gipsy descended from his caravan and strolled to the fire. The Jewess searched his face with the peculiar bourgeois boldness of her race.

We know her name is Mrs Fawcett because she tells us so. But Lawrence doesn’t refer to her name, instead insists on describing her as ‘the Jewess’, ‘the little Jewess’, ‘the tiny Jewess’, nearly 50 times, denying her individuality, emphasising her ‘race’ and racial stereotypes.

Chapter 7

Unexpectedly, the Eastwoods – Major Eastwood and the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs Fawcett, who give out to the world that they’re married – become a major part of the story. They’ve rented a small summer cottage, by the moors up at Scoresby, not far from the hills. Mrs Fawcett is diminished even further by being referred to as ‘the little Jewess’ or even ‘the tiny Jewess’. They have filled the rented cottage with fine treasures but have dispensed with a maid and so the tall strong blond Major does the washing up and ‘the tiny Jewess’ dries. Unconventional for the 1920s, we assume.

Back from a visit where she witnesses all this, Yvette and Lucille have a conversation about what makes men and women fall in love, is it sex (which neither of them have experienced or understand)? What is sex? Why are the ‘low’ ‘common’ sort of men, who you could never associate with, noted for sex, while the posh good sort of chap they know, is never associated with sex? Oh if men and women could only be people without all this beastly sex business interfering? Will we ever get married? Will we ever fall in love?

‘I believe, one day, I shall fall awfully in love.’
‘Probably you never will,’ said Lucille brutally. ‘That’s what most old maids are thinking all the time.’ (p.225)

This long conversation is very similar to the long conversation on the same topic between March and Banford in ‘The Fox’. I note it for two reasons. 1) It marks extended and relatively short, brisk dialogue, something absent from his master text, The Rainbow. And 2) why are these male writers drawn to writing stories about young women protagonists who have conversations about sex and marriage?

Anyway, Yvette takes to regularly visiting ‘the Eastwoods’, where she is intrigued by ‘the little Jewess’ and attracted to tall, handsome, athletic, commanding Major Eastwood. Hang on. I thought this was a story about the virgin and a gypsy. It’s more than that, isn’t it? More variegated and complex.

On one of her visits Yvette raises the subject of love and marriage, asking this experienced couple about it. Mrs Fawcett explains that love means being attracted to someone who makes you feel different, is there any man who does that to her? After a pause, Yvette replies that the only one she can think of is the gypsy. Mrs Fawcett is appalled that such a low commoner should be the only one Yvette can think of but the Major makes one of his rare interventions.

Major Eastwood on desire and appetite

There’s something quietly comic about the strong, mostly silent, pipe-smoking Major Charles Eastwood. He intervenes in Yvette and Mrs Fawcett’s conversation to say:

‘I think,’ said the Major, taking his pipe from his mouth, ‘that desire is the most wonderful thing in life. Anybody who can really feel it, is a king, and I envy nobody else!’ He put back his pipe.
The Jewess looked at him stupefied.
‘But Charles!’ she cried. ‘Every common low man in Halifax feels nothing else!’
He again took his pipe from his mouth.
‘That’s merely appetite,’ he said.
And he put back his pipe. (p.229)

Then he says something strange and mysterious. He tells them the gypsy was really a notable man in his regiment for his way with horses. He nearly died of pneumonia but survived. So the Major regards him as ‘a resurrected man’. This is all the more significant because the Major himself is a resurrected man. He was buried under a huge snowfall for 20 hours but survived. In a throwaway but immensely telling detail, he says they only dug him out by accident.

It’s a tiny detail at the end of the chapter but conveys a kind of seismic implication: all of our lives hang on the slightest coincidences and accidents.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 opens with a detailed description of the rector’s character. On the surface he is genial, humorous and tolerant but deep down he doesn’t believe and this makes him afraid of the unconventional, afraid that it will unmask him.

With what feels like a sudden lurch of tone, Lawrence has the rector suddenly hating his daughter for consorting with the adulterous Eastwoods, hate her with a rat-like venom. Hang on. Where did this come from. This is a throwback to the rhetorical exorbitance of The Rainbow. The rector is suddenly viciously hateful to his daughter which leads up to the ridiculously melodramatic declaration: ‘But I will kill you before you shall go the way of your mother.’ Where did this come from?

And with the old Rainbow manner comes the old Rainbow approach of repeating key words.

Somewhere inside him, he was cowed, he had been born cowed. And those who are born cowed are natural slaves, and deep instinct makes them fear with prisonous fear those who might suddenly snap the slave‘s collar round their necks.

It was for this reason the rector had so abjectly curled up, who still so abject curled up before She-who-was-Cynthia: because of his slave‘s fear of her contempt, the contempt of a born-free nature for a base-born nature.

So that’s the root of it. The rector and the Saywell family in general, are base-born while the two daughters have inherited their mother’s spirited freedom. But it was that free-spiritedness which prompted her to run off with a man causing great hurt but also social scandal, and so the rector is terrified his two daughters will turn out the same. Hence his mad over-reaction to Yvette seeing the ‘dirty’ ‘unclean’ adulterous Eastwoods. Hence his ludicrous threat:

‘But I will kill you before you shall go the way of your mother.’ (p.232)

Well, she depends on him for her food and housing so she buckles down. She writes a short note to the Eastwoods saying her father disapproves so she can’t visit them again and she stops. But she hardens inside. She becomes more cynical. She realises her father is a scared little man and despises him. But most of all she comes to hate the old Granny, squatting like a red fungus as the centre of the household. God, what a ghastly existence!

What was the revolt of the little Jewess, compared to Granny and the Saywell bunch! A husband was never more than a semicasual thing! But a family!–an awful, smelly family that would never disperse, stuck half dead round the base of a fungoid old woman! How was one to cope with that?

She sees the gypsy once, from the landing window as he comes to hawk wares again, but she doesn’t go down, but they see each other through the glass. How can she escape? Sometimes she fantasises about running away with him, but she likes being ‘inside the pale’, she likes the warmth and prestige being a rector’s daughter brings her, albeit small. She likes safety.

Lucille says a woman has till she’s 26 to have her ‘fling’, then she must marry and settle down. Yvette is 21. Five years to have her ‘fling’, whatever that means, and then settle down with someone like Leo or Gerry Somercotes.

The gypsy again

Months pass and it is March. Yvette bumps into the gypsy hawking his wares to cottages by Codnor Gate. She stops to have a look and buys ‘a little oval brass plate, with a queer figure like a palm-tree beaten upon it.’ She feels the connection between him but he is as distant as ever. He tells her the old gypsy (referred to as the hag) had a dream about her, in which it was said ‘Be braver in your body, or your luck will leave you’ and ‘Listen for the voice of water.’

He tells her they’ll be breaking camp soon and heading north. She says maybe she’ll come and visit before they leave, to say goodbye to them all.

Chapter 9. The Flood

Yvette is dawdling in the terrace garden leading down to the wall by the hump-backed bridge over the river Papple. The water is loud with spring torrent from melting snow. Her father is out. She senses Aunt Cissie saying goodbye and she accompanies her sister, Aunt Nell, over the bridge and back towards her home.

Then she sees the gardener running towards her and, of all people, the gypsy running downhill the road opposite and she hears a mighty roar and the next thing she knows a huge tsunami of water engulfs the garden. The gypsy has made it across the bridge and grabs her as the water sweeps her off her feet. In the next few action-packed minutes, he manhandles her through the flood up the terraces to the house, but even here the flood is up to their waists.

He clings to the wisteria with one hand, her wrist with the other, till she’s in a position to make it to the back door and he follows her inside. Here it’s flooding fast. They run to the stairs and are on the first landing when she sees old Granny struggling in the flood, gasping and going under.

They feel the house itself shake with the shock of the waters. He knows the chimney piece will stay so orders her to take him to their bedroom. He is correct, the chimney, and her room around it, remains in place, but when he re-opens her bedroom door they see that half the house has been swept away. It opens into raving flood water and the evening sky.

They are both shivering from the snow melt water and shock and so he orders her to strip and strips himself and rubs them both dry with a towel. She gets into her bed shivering and he climbs in, too, and holds her, till the shock passes away, and the warmth takes them and they fall asleep.

The flood reminds me of the canal breaking, flooding Marsh Farm and drowning drunk Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow.

Chapter 10

The last few pages describe the efforts of the rescuers. The bridge over the Papple has been swept away so they cross it on ladders to the perilously half-wrecked rectory, surrounded by mud and broken trees and detritus. Very tentatively they enter the ruins, encountering Granny’s foot sticking out of a wall of mud, then use ladders to go up to the only first floor windows remaining, all the time shouting with no reply.

When one smashes the window it wakes Yvette from her deepest ever sleep with a cry, and she takes minutes to come fully conscious. And then she wonders where on earth the gypsy is! Where is he? They were in the bed together.

But she quickly gets dressed in her soaking wet things (! did none of the rescuers think of bringing blankets?) and is coaxed by the friendly policeman into climbing down the wobbly ladder to greet her father who’s crying his eyes out for his dead mother but also for the life of his daughter.

She faints and is taken to the nearby house of friends, the Framleys to be reunited with weeping Aunt Cissie, hysterical Lucille etc.

The flood was caused by the sudden bursting of the great reservoir, up in Papple Highdale, five miles from the rectory. It was found out later that an ancient, perhaps even a Roman mine tunnel, unsuspected, undreamed of, beneath the reservoir dam, had collapsed, undermining the whole dam. That was why the Papple had been, for the last day, so uncannily full. And then the dam had burst.

Yvette is vague at the best of times. Now she tells everyone the gypsy ran across the bridge to warn her and helped her to the porch, she went in and upstairs by himself. Witnesses saw him running across the bridge in the last moments. To everyone’s surprise Bob Framley declares the gypsy is owed a medal for saving Yvette’s life.

But when they motor up to the quarry they find the gypsies have vanished, struck camp and disappeared. And Yvette cries and cries and tells herself she loves him but, at the same time, knows the wisdom of his going. He has left her something much deeper than sex could ever be.

Names

But after Granny’s funeral, she received a little letter, dated from some unknown place.

‘Dear Miss, I see in the paper you are all right after your ducking, as is the same with me. I hope I see you again one day, maybe at Tideswell cattle fair, or maybe we come that way again. I come that day to say goodbye! and I never said it, well, the water give no time, but I live in hopes. Your obdt. servant Joe Boswell.’

And only then she realised that he had a name.

Wow. After all the gruelling travails (the smelly Granny, the stifling house), madness (of the rector ranting about clean and unclean), the dreamlike digression of the Mrs Fawcett and her blond lover, the dance parties and puppy love, somehow the whole thing ends with this fairy tale completion.

Feelings are so complicated

Between her and the gypsy is always a complicated web of feelings.

Something almost like a perfume seemed to flow from her young bosom direct to him, in a grateful connection… She looked at him with clear eyes. Man or woman is made up of many selves. With one self, she loved this gypsy man. With many selves, she ignored him or had a distaste for him.

But then something similar is true of her feelings for the rector, her father, after he rants and threatens to kill her.

Under the rector’s apparently gallant handsomeness, she saw the weak, feeble nullity. And she despised him. Yet still, in a way, she liked him too. Feelings are so complicated.

And it is this complexity, love unto hate, attraction and repulsion, the unsettling irrationality of the soul, the never-still nature of these ever-changing moods, which is Lawrence’s territory, of which he is king. As he puts it in ‘The Captain’s Doll’:

But then one never can know the whys and the wherefores of one’s passional changes.

---

Credit

‘The Virgin and The Gipsy’ by D.H. Lawrence was written in 1926 but first published in 1930. References are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with ‘St Mawr’.

Related links

• The Virgin and the Gypsy online

Related reviews

• D.H. Lawrence reviews