Setup
Countess Johanna zu Rassentlow aka Hannele is a refugee in a German city after the First World War, but she’s not hard up. She and her friend Annamaria von Prielau-Carolath (aka Mitchka) own a shop where they sell large dolls and beautiful cushions of embroidered coloured wools, ‘and such-like objects of feminine art’. The dolls have become quite famous, so the two women do not starve.
Slowly we piece together the fact that they’re in a German city which has been occupied by victorious British troops at the end of the Great War. During this period Hannele has fallen in love with Captain Alexander Hepburn, a Scotsman, aka Alec. He is married but has been away from home for over a year and doesn’t care much about his wife. They have a strange love-hate Lawrentian relationship which puzzles both of them.
Chapter 1
The story opens with Hannele sitting in the loft where the Captain is billetted, putting the finishing touches to a realistic doll of a Scottish officer in tartan trews, based closely on the Captain – it is ‘the Captain’s doll’ of the title. He enters, hangs up his coat, admires the doll and kisses her. Pages are then devoted to outlining her ambivalent feelings about him. She quizzes him about his wife, which doesn’t help.
Chapter 2
One day a 50-something nice English lady with a tinkling little laugh enters Mitchka and Hannele’s shop. She likes the two dolls for sale but asks if there’s anything else. Mitchka prompts Hannele to take the captain’s doll out of storage where they’d put it. The Englishwoman asks if it’s based on anyone and the two German ladies rather too quickly admit it’s based on a real person, a Captain Hepburn. They are both horrified when the Englishwoman says she knows him well and it is an excellent likeness. After some more chat, she buys a cushion cover and leaves.
Giving away so much information worries both women. If Hannele’s liaison with Hepburn is reported to the authorities they may be deported from the city and Mitchka doesn’t want to have to start over again in a new place.
Hannele’s loft is next to Hepburn’s. That’s how they met. One night she hears voices coming up the stairs and opens her door to listen. She realises it is the Englishwoman who visited their shop, and that she is discussing the two German ladies with ‘Alec’ as they climb up the stairs. She must be related to Alec! His mother?! Hannele quietly closes the door before they reach the attic landing.
Chapter 3
Hannele can’t sleep. The church bell sounds two o’clock. There’s a corridor between the two attic rooms which leads to a door out onto a little terrace. The captain was billeted here because he wanted a room high up for his telescope and astronomy. Hannele wraps up warm and goes out onto the terrace to find him staring through his telescope. He tells her the older woman is his wife! He is 51, she is 49!
Worse, Alec admits he’ll probably go and stay with his wife at her hotel, tomorrow, for a week or so. He likes to make her happy.
Hannele just can’t understand this British lack of passion or energy. Alec supposes he’ll do this or that, says it doesn’t really matter, whatever. She is appalled. And she, what does she mean to him? When he apathetically replies, ‘Oh you know,’ Hannele astonished. She asks herself whether this is a man at all?
All the Lawrence stories I’ve read recently feature strong women who are appalled at how weak and empty their menfolk are. I’m beginning to think his core subject is not sex at all, but how futile 1920s men were.
Chapter 4
Mrs Hepburn accidentally-on-purpose bumps into Hannele in the street and invites her to tea at her hotel, along with Alec. Alec is surprised at her arrival and rings for tea for three. There’s all sorts of British fussing about tea and teapots and milk and suchlike till Mrs H sends Alec off on an errand. Then very calmly and deftly she explains to Hannele the basis of her marriage, how Alec got down on one knee on their wedding night and vowed to make her happy and always has. Oh she’s been a bit flirtatious with other men but never unfaithful, dear me no. And then, the war has had a bad effect on everyone. She mentions a hospital a friend went to work at where it turned out all the nurses were having flings with the soldiers. And another friend whose husband told her he delayed arriving home by a day because on the train he bumped into a woman who asked him to stay the night with her at a hotel and so he did. Standards have changed, my dear.
All this is by way of silkily getting round to her point, which is that when she heard her husband was having a little dalliance she was glad for him. Made him more real. Made her feel less guilty about her ‘little peccadilloes’.
But she then proceeds to the Big Revelation. Mrs H now explains that, back in England, she heard just the merest whisper of gossip about her husband and a refugee noblewoman and thought she’d better come and investigate. She arrived, heard about the studio shop visited it and… she has got the wrong woman. She thinks Mitchki is Alec’s lover. And she is telling Hannele all this because she wants her advice and help.
She has asked her husband to quit the army in the next three months and come home but he has refused and Hannele agrees a man needs an independent career. So, the wife continues, if Alec won’t quit the army, the British authorities will be notified and asked to move the two women on. That is the threat Mrs H wants Hannele to convey to Mitchka.
One last thing, she wants the doll of her husband. Affronted and angry, Hannele on the spot says it will cost three guineas, a lot of money. Herself angered, Mrs H asks for it to be delivered and leaves.
What a deliciously artful and malicious scene, which brilliantly shifts its tone from frivolous tea party via surprisingly candid sex stories and then onto real threat, all conveyed through the little posh British lady with her tinkling laugh and jangling bangles. Brilliant!
Chapter 5
The impact on stunned Hannele. How lowering it is to see the man you’re in love with in his domestic habitat with his wife. The scene Mrs H painted of him kneeling before his wife to pledge to make her happy, how pathetic. How he stood around during tea, at her beck and call, how pathetic. How can she (Hannele) be in love with such a wimp?
Since his wife arrived, she and Alec haven’t been together and there’s been time for her feelings to wane. Now she sees him as a pathetic ass, small and vulgar. And yet… the magic of their evenings in the attic, the way he walked quietly across it and stroked her under her chin and kissed her. Which is real, the sad little man who jumps when his wife orders him or the magical figure looking at the stars? Hannele just can’t decide.
Chapter 6
A few days later Alec gets a letter from Hannele summarising her conversation with Mrs H (whose name, we now learn, is Evangeline). She includes a letter she received from Mrs H (Evangeline) quietly demanding the doll she was promised and quietly explaining that she, Evangeline, has met the officer in charge of the British garrison’s ‘morals’ and established that any Germans considered a danger to morality i.e. Hannele and Mitchka, can be forced to leave town with 24 hours notice.
Chapter 7
Then a terrible thing happens. Around 10 at night Mitchka comes running to the attic to tell Hannele that Evengeline is dead. She fell out the third floor window of the hotel. She had washed a camisole and placed it on the window sill to dry and is presumed to have slipped. The captain claims to have been shaving, heard a strange cry, come into the living room, found it empty and assumed she’d popped out. It was only when hotel staff came knocking to tell him the terrible news that he fainted.
Well, that’s convenient. And it raises the obvious question whether this faint-hearted, shilly-shallying man is a murderer.
Next evening he knocks at her door and invites her over to his studio (the accident happened at the hotel where Mrs H had been staying and Alec with her; he hadn’t relinquished his attic room next to hers).
Creepily, he declares that now his wife will be at peace. She never really fitted into this world. He explains he felt for his wife like he felt for a wild bird he caught once and kept in a cage but always knew would die from its captivity. Once again, Hannele listens, incredulously.
Chapter 8
The captain feels all his ties with all other humans have been severed. He doesn’t want contact with anyone, even Hannele. Anyone attempting to get close, to share his emotions, fills him with revulsion. He goes back to England to sort out his affairs, to arrange his children’s schools, to sell off his wife’s large house, to liquidate his affairs. He decides to quit the army, maybe he’ll travel the world a bit, he doesn’t know. He never writes to Hannele or even thinks about her.
Chapter 9
But he was only 40 and Lawrence insists a single man’s thoughts always return to love. No they don’t, one is tempted to reply.
No way is he going back to the kind of adoration he showed his wife, that’s finished. But the pretty young things he meets in England, he’d like to be adored by them if only it could be a little flock of adorers. Just one wouldn’t be enough.
Eventually his thoughts return to Hannele and he writes but gets no reply. Making enquiries he discovers they’ve left for Munich. One thing leads to another and he finds himself on the train to Munich. He hates it. The Bavarians are rude and he can find no trace of the ladies until one day he spots… the model of himself in an art shop window! What would fiction be without far-fetched coincidences!
Alec enquires and the shop girl tells him Hannele is alive and thriving although, alas, Mitchka was shot in a riot in Salzburg. He asks her to enquire after Hannele’s address and says he’ll return.
Chapter 10
He reads a snippet in the local newspaper praising a still life a local artist painted which included the doll and mentioning that Hannele is now engaged to another aristocrat who lives in the Tyrol, the Herr Regierungsrat von Poldi from Kaprun.
Chapter 11
So Alec buys the still life featuring his doll, packs his bags and takes train to the Kaprun. Inevitably it now feels trashy and bankrupt. Unnecessarily Lawrence tells us:
It was still crowded and still elegant. But alas, with a broken, bankrupt, desperate elegance, and almost empty shops. The captain felt rather dazed. He found himself in an hotel full of Jews of the wrong, rich sort…
Lawrence’s antisemitism, his dislike of Jews ‘of the wrong sort’, seems to run deep (see Antisemitism section, below).
Chapter 12
He tracks down the Herr Regierungsrat and finds him a fat 50-something, once something in the imperial administration, now poor, a widower with two children. But he has great presence, great charm, and endless fascinating talk. When he kisses her hand with a flourish he makes her feel like a queen. His job is running the local government administration, his office is full of young men and women flirting, Hannele likes the lifefulness. And he has acquired over a lifetime a vast store of knowledge of his home district and plans to write a complete history, some day.
So Hannele is flattered into thinking she would like to marry this man, become his queen and help him write his history and so she allows herself to become engaged.
Chapter 13
So Alec finally bumps into Hannele one summer day. He is taking money out of a bank and she is walking through the square arm in arm with the Herr Regierungsrat. She doesn’t notice him till he is in front of her, bowing when she is struck dumb and the sunny day shrivels. She introduces them, the Herr Regierungsrat dark and silent, recognising a rival. She can’t think of anything to say so invites him to come visit her at the villa, which is on an island in the lake.
Lawrence writes a wonderful four-page description of the captain being rowed across the lake on a glorious summer day to find Hannele swimming in the water with another woman friend and the Herr Regierungsrat’s teenage son and daughter. It is a picture of sensual freedom.
Chapter 14
Without much explanation the next chapter cuts to the captain taking Hannele for an excursion to a glacier. Wonderful description of being driven in a 12-seater charabanc up into the mountains. After various adventures it parks outside a hotel and Alec and Hannele cross a roaring mountain stream and set off on foot up the tourist path. The scenery becomes ever more spectacular as they climb but Alec is put off by the touristy aspect of everything. They had to squeeze past other busses packed with trippers on the way up, the hotel is crammed with tourists pigging out on food and drink, the berries growing beside the path have been stripped by the locust plague of tourists. Well, you thought it was bad in 1922, Dave, you should try it in 2022. Ain’t no part of the world not devastated by tourism. You have to queue to reach the peak of Mount Everest.
Our couple are in a bad mood. Hannele hates the climbing but finds the sights and sound of the rushing water bracing. Alec just hates it, full stop. He’s a seaside man not a mountain man.
Chapter 15
Higher and higher they climb till they emerge from the pines and into a pure upper mountain valley with no trees, just grass and rock and nodding flowers. Breath-takingly beautiful.
Chapter 16
They stop to eat at 11, cheese, egg, bread, Hungarian wine. Across the valley they see the lines of other tourists criss-crossing like ants. For the first time they discuss what happened. In his backpack, rather madly, he has brought the still life which featured his doll. He shows it her. Neither of them like it. He asks why she sold it. Because she needed the money. And because he disappeared and never wrote. After a little bicker they pack up and head on. There’s still a long way to go. I’m exhausted just reading about it.
It starts to rain and they have a furious argument about her not bringing a raincoat. It gets out of control with him yelling that he hates the mountains and then incomprehensibly insisting that he is bigger than the mountains while she mocks him.
Eventually they tire and plod on higher and Lawrence gives Hannele several pages as she tries to puzzle out what Alec wants, eventually coming to the conclusion that she wants her to love him and maybe she does love him, but she isn’t going to let him bully her into it.
Somehow, in the middle of this series of fiery arguments with Lawrence’s psychological commentary on what was behind them, or what the characters try to figure out is behind them, it occurred to me that these are like the endless quarrels Lawrence and his wife apparently had. And made me wonder how much of the arguments between Lawrence’s umpteen men and women are just versions of the fiery fights he had with his wife.
Chapter 17
They finally arrive at the next hotel which is, of course, packed with tourists, including more ‘Jews of the wrong sort’ (see section on Antisemitism, below). Then the final part of the ascent across a mile wide valley and up to the glacier itself which Lawrence describes with a characteristically brilliant simile, comparing it to a great sky bear.
Before them lay the last level of the up-climb, the Lammerboden. It was a rather gruesome hollow between the peaks, a last shallow valley about a mile long. At the end the enormous static stream of the glacier poured in from the blunt mountain-top of ice. The ice was dull, sullen-coloured, melted on the surface by the very hot summer: and so it seemed a huge, arrested, sodden flood, ending in a wave-wall of stone-speckled ice upon the valley bed of rocky débris. A gruesome descent of stone and blocks of rock, the little valley bed, with a river raving through.
On the left rose the grey rock, but the glacier was there, sending down great paws of ice. It was like some great, deep-furred ice-bear lying spread upon the top heights, and reaching down terrible paws of ice into the valley: like some immense sky-bear fishing in the earth’s solid hollows from above. Hepburn it just filled with terror. Hannele too it scared, but it gave her a sense of ecstasy. Some of the immense, furrowed paws of ice held down between the rock were vivid blue in colour, but of a frightening, poisonous blue, like crystal copper sulphate. Most of the ice was a sullen, semi-translucent greeny grey. (p.237)
When they finally arrive at the edge of the glacier Alec insists on actually going onto the great sea of ice, despite having smooth soled shoes, so he has to go painfully slowly, digging into the melting idea with his heels or flinging down his coat and going on all fours then flinging it in front again. But he succeeds in making it to a brow of the glacier and is awed by the long black slits like gills which you can look down through sapphire blue depths and hear the gushing water beneath.
Hannele screams again and again at him to be careful. When he turns to come back it is much harder and he is petrified he will slip and careen all the way to the edge and tumble down the rocks. When he makes it back to the solid path, Hannele has got tired of waiting and set off back.
Chapter 18
They arrive back at the highest hotel and stop. His fingers are bleeding from digging his nails into the ice. She insists he loved it. Maybe, but never again.
Chapter 19
They eat venison and spinach then walk slowly back, she collecting flowers. It has clouded over and starts to rain as they arrive at the hotel by the motor-car terminus. Again Lawrence goes out of his way to deride some Jews at this hotel (see below). This is a stain on the whole text.
Anyway they have another argument at the hotel and she swears she’ll catch a different bus down the mountain and stomps off, but he has her ticket in his pocket and she’s forced to come back and ask for it. In the end they go back in the same charabanc.
There is the closest thing to Lawrentian comedy when they continue their argument in the car but, because it’s open-topped and because of the racket they have to yell their arguments at the top of their voices.
They carry on arguing even after the car’s deposited them at the pick-up place and even in the boat Alec rows Hannele back out to her island villa in.
What Alec wants
What it boils down to is this: Alec gives a long explanation of the way that all his life he has depended on love, felt love for his mother, sister, several girls and then his wife and it always ended badly. So now, aged 40, he’s had it with love. What he wants, quite simply, is to be honoured and obeyed. As in the marriage vows. Only on the condition of being honoured and obeyed will he marry her.
Hannele mocks and ridicules all his arguments all the way through the stop at the hotel, the car journey and the row across the lake. And yet at the end she agrees. Or seems to agree. Or says she might agree. He explains he’s off to East Africa to help a friend establish a farm. He’s leaving tomorrow. Will she come with him? Not on your life, she says, not under such ridiculous conditions.
And yet as she climbs up onto the jetty stretching out from the island she asks whether loving him is enough and he is absolutely fixed on being honoured and obeyed. And the story’s very last words are her asking him to come and collect her first thing tomorrow morning.
Like so many of Lawrence’s endings it’s irrational, crazy, wilful and utterly compelling. You can see this extremely ill-matched couple heading off for Africa and a lifetime of arguments and misunderstandings, one more of the many, many, many couples we see around us all the time who are completely ill-matched, who argue all the time and yet stick together through some occult unfathomable attraction.
Lawrence’s fictions have the implausibility and impenetrability of real life.
The war’s effect
Like ‘The Ladybird’ and ‘The Fox’ it’s a war story, a story about the deleterious long-term effects on everyone. It features in Evangeline and Hannele’s conversation:
‘It’s the war. It’s just the war. It’s had a terribly deteriorating effect on the men.’
‘In what way?’ said Hannele.
‘Why, morally. Really, there’s hardly one man left the same as he was before the war. Terribly degenerated.’
‘Is that so?’ said Hannele.
‘It is indeed. Why, isn’t it the same with the German men and officers?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Hannele. (p.186)
But is a more over-arching presence, in fact underpins the entire story. It’s only because of the war that the two aristocratic ladies are down on their luck and making crafts or that either of them meet Captain Hepburn, a member of the Allied occupying forces.
And then, all the passages set in Austria where Alec goes to track down Hannele, every little chapter has a reference to this or that degradation and shabbiness caused by the war. The prices. The inflation. The boarded-up shops. Even up in the mountain meadows, Lawrence feels the shadow.
The two sat in the changing sunshine under their rock, with the mountain flowers scenting the snow-bitter air, and they ate their eggs and sausage and cheese, and drank the bright-red Hungarian wine. It seemed lovely: almost like before the war: almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man’s everlasting holiday. But not quite. Never again quite the same. The world is not made for man’s everlasting holiday. (p.229)
Antisemitism
At the hotel in Kaprun:
It was still crowded and still elegant. But alas, with a broken, bankrupt, desperate elegance, and almost empty shops. The captain felt rather dazed. He found himself in an hotel full of Jews of the wrong, rich sort…
During the excursion up to the glacier, when they’re in the charabanc:
There were gates to open, and Hepburn jumped down to open them, as if he were the footboy. The heavy Jews of the wrong sort, seated behind, of course did not stir.
They arrive at one of the mountain hotels:
In the hotel was a buzz of tourists. Alexander and Hannele sat in the restaurant drinking hot coffee and milk, and watching the maidens in cotton frocks and aprons and bare arms, and the fair youths with maidenly necks and huge voracious boots, and the many Jews of the wrong sort and the wrong shape. These Jews were all being very Austrian, in Tyrol costume that didn’t sit on them, assuming the whole gesture and intonation of aristocratic Austria, so that you might think they were Austrian aristocrats, if you weren’t properly listening, or if you didn’t look twice. Certainly they were lords of the Alps, or at least lords of the Alpine hotels this summer, let prejudice be what it might. Jews of the wrong sort. And yet even they imparted a wholesome breath of sanity, disillusion, unsentimentality to the excited ‘Bergheil’ atmosphere. Their dark-eyed, sardonic presence seemed to say to the maidenly-necked mountain youths: ‘Don’t sprout wings of the spirit too much, my dears.’
Then, on the way back down, stopping again at the hotel.
The big hotel restaurant was hideous, and seemed sordid. So in the gloom of a grey, early twilight they went out again and sat on a seat, watching the tourists and the trippers and the motor-car men. There were three Jews from Vienna: and the girl had a huge white woolly dog, as big as a calf, and white and woolly and silky and amiable as a toy. The men, of course, came patting it and admiring it, just as men always do, in life and in novels. And the girl, holding the leash, posed and leaned backwards in the attitude of heroines on novel-covers. She said the white cool monster was a Siberian steppe-dog. Alexander wondered what the steppes made of such a wuffer. And the three Jews pretended they were elegant Austrians out of popular romances.
Why, why does Lawrence go out of his way to single out and insult Jews? It is a stinky stain across his writings, his imagination, his worldview.
Pairs
Lawrence likes pairs of women: Ursula and Gudrun; March and Banford; Yvette and Lucille; Hannele and Mitchka.
Partly it allows him to compare and contrast female characters. But having two intimate woman friends means he can also depict extended female conversations such as Hannele and Mitchka, at some points, have, in the first half of the story. Thinking about it, Lawrence almost never depicts extended conversations between men. For all his heteronormative stereotyping of ‘male’ and ‘female’, Lawrence is a woman’s man through and through.
Posh
And why, why did the son of an illiterate miner, the most working class of all England’s great writers, so quickly take to writing stories about aristocratic women, women who attend finishing schools, women with titles to their names, women who (like Mrs Hepburn) send their sons to Winchester, the creme de la creme? What drove Lawrence to this upper class obsession? Was it just that the upper middle classes lead more interesting lives and are more articulate? After you’ve depicted a certain number of farmers and miners, you’ve exhausted the seam? In which case, it’s a sort of indictment of the novel itself, as a form, that it requires interesting and articulate characters and so is hopelessly biased towards the bourgeoisie?
Or was it because he developed into a snob?
Credit
‘The Captain’s Doll’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in 1923. References are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with ‘The Ladybird’ and ‘The Fox’.
Books & Boots 