‘There wants a man about the place,’ said the youth softly. Banford burst out laughing. ‘Take care what you say…’
(Don’t mess with the lesbians, page 99)
Like ‘the Ladybird’, ‘The Fox’ is a wartime story. Early on Lawrence mentions the passage of the new Daylight Saving Act (which was passed 1916), the third of the three characters is a soldier just back from the front, we hear about rationing, about the billetting of soldiers in the local village, and so on. Wartime.
The narrative concerns two single women in their late twenties, Jill Banford and Ellen ‘Nellie’ March, who decide to go shares and make a living on a farm. They have a very close relationship and I assume they are lesbians, maybe wrongly. Banford is the thin one with spectacles but she brings the capital, gifted to her by her father, a tradesman in Islington.
March was more robust. She had learned carpentry and joinery at the evening classes in Islington. She would be the man about the place… she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident.
So they buy Bailey Farm (no indication where it is, which county). Banford’s old grandfather lived with them at the start and he had been a farmer but he died after a year. Initially they had a load of chickens and two heifers but the one heifer refuses to stay in the fields, was continually breaking out and roaming free so they sold it. The other heifer they sold after the grandfather died, and so they became two single women running a chicken farm. I’m not sure how ‘exotic’ this notion of two women living alone and running a farm would have been in the 1920s…
But try as they might, they simply couldn’t get the chickens to lay eggs, despite March building them a lovely hencoop and taking pains over their feed.
And then there was the fox, which continually carries off their best fowl. Two years pass without them turning a profit. That summer they rent out the farm house and retreat to live in an abandoned railway carriage in a field, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the non-viability of the place.
All this is the setup. The narrative proper gets going one evening at the end of August (p.88) when March has gone out with a gun to hunt the fox. She sees him and he sees her in a standoff, then the fox slips away into the woods. Somehow, the fox has cast his spell over her. Several more times she sees it but it slips away but its spell infiltrates her quiet, musing times. November comes and the long dark nights.
Then one night they hear footsteps approaching, March sweeps up her gun, the kitchen door opens and there stands a young man in army uniform. He had expected to find William Grenfel, his grandfather, who he lived with there for five years. The girls tell him they’ve been living there for three years. They’d heard tell of an old man who lived here before them but he died before they bought the place.
Something about the boy’s fair-haired appearance and bright eyes and thrust-forward face holds March ‘spellbound’ (the same word used of the fox) and, in that voodoo way of Lawrence’s, she sees the boy as the fox. Now he is here, she can cease to be two-minded, a daytime mind and the dark fox mind. Now the boy-fox is here she can relax.
Back in the real world, they invite the young man (aged about 20) into the house, and give him a basic dinner of bread, margarine and jam. He explains how he ran away from his grandfather to Canada, volunteered for the Army when the war broke out, has just returned from his final posting in Salonika (Greece). His name is Henry (never Harry) Grenfel. When the women describe their failures at farming he can’t help bursting out laughing. When he says they need a man about the place, March warns him to watch his tongue.
But when Henry asks if he can stay, none of them can think of a reason not and so he does. That night March dreams of the fox and, from now on, seeing Henry, being near him, hearing his voice, brings back the vivid intimacy of the powerful fox dream. So he stays for a few days, which turn into weeks etc. It is late November 1918 i.e. the war is just over. (Historical note: When Henry says he’ll go and stay at the village pub, The Swan, the girls tell him the owners are all laid up with the flu i.e. the famous Spanish Flu which swept the world in 1918.)
Slowly, Lawrence achieves the effect of making Henry a fox-man by overlapping their physical descriptions. Like the fox, Henry has bright eyes, brown hair except light round his face, walks with his head thrust forward, like loping around the fields after dark. He discomfits both the women.
He likes living there so much that one rainy night in November he conceives the notion of proposing to March. But not proposing so much as hunting her. It’s worth quoting the passage in full.
How to hunt a wife
He would have to go gently. He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. It’s no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: ‘Please fall to my gun.’ No, it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home. When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don’t then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet’s flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.
He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck in a regiment. And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. So he gathered himself subtly together, seemed to withdraw into a kind of invisibility. He was not quite sure how he would go on. And March was suspicious as a hare. So he remained in appearance just the nice, odd stranger-youth, staying for a fortnight on the place.
Henry proposes to March in the woodshed and she says no. Neither of them tell Banford but she senses something has taken place and there is tension in the evenings as they all sit quietly trying to crochet or read but unable to settle. March is miles away, thinking she can hear the singing of the fox around the house. After Banford goes to bed, Henry hunts-seduces March again, deploying his soft, velvety voice, insistently telling March that she will marry him, insinuating himself, sliding closer, touching her arm, then kissing her neck until, in an agony to break away, she says Yes yes, now I have to go upstairs to bed.
Next day he announces the marriage to Banford who is full of disbelief. That night he hears the two girls arguing in their room. He goes out with his gun and spots the fox and shoots it dead. This wakes the girls. He holds up the fox by its brush in a flashlight for them to see. That night March has another dream about the fox, this time she dreams that Banford dies and she has to find something to line the coffin and so uses a lovely soft fox skin.
Henry is meant to be leaving in a few days’ time, catching the train. Banford taunts him, asking if he really is going to marry March and how he is going to support her. She forces Henry to extemporise that he’s going back to Canada and he’ll take March with him. Banford continues to badger him, asking whether they’ll marry before or after he’s found a place in Canada.
Next day she goes into town on the train, returning at 4.30. Henry watches her cross the fields, his heart full of hatred of her for continually thwarting him. When she returns, March joins her to help her carry the bags and he overhears their conversation, Banford berating March for letting herself be treated so cheaply.
It’s he last night before he’s due to catch the train. The last supper of bread and butter and a bit of meat. Henry wants Banford to go to bed so he can seduce March again but she won’t. Instead, Henry insists on taking March out to the woodshed, despite Banford’s entreaties for her to stay in the farm, and there he batters her down till she agrees to marry him as a soon as possible and he kisses her (although he gets nowhere near touching her breasts, as he had spent half a page, earlier, fantasising about doing).
Next morning Henry and March go to the town and see a registrar and pledge to marry, before he catches the train back to his garrison in the West. Nine days later she writes a long letter saying it’s madness to marry him and go off to Canada since she hardly knows him, whereas she knows Banford inside out and loves her and they look after each other and she can imagine them growing old together. It is a very reasonable letter and she asks him to forgive and forget her.
The letter infuriates young Henry who feels he is being balked again. He is described biting his teeth with his snout raised, like an angry fox. He gets permission from his captain (a fellow Cornish man) for one day’s leave and cycles off to the station.
It is just before Christmas. Banford’s old mother and father are staying at the farm. March is in the final stages of chopping down a big fir tree. They’re standing round calculating where it fall, when Henry arrives, hot and sweaty on his bike.
Embarrassment all round except that when March sees Henry she feels lost all over again, completely under his influence. Several times she’s been described as drawing her lips back so her teeth make her look like a rabbit. She is the plump aimless rabbit to his focused fox.
There is a lot of fol-de-rol and fussing about giving the final chops to the tree with an axe, but Henry volunteers to do it and sees that there’s a way of doing it which will ensure it falls onto Banford, who’s standing away from the main group. He makes a big show of telling her to move in case it falls awkwardly but she mockingly refuses so then he strikes the last few blows and it does, indeed, fall on top of her, breaking her neck and killing her. General hysteria and that sad sinking feeling I always have in short stories which can’t think of any other way of ending than having someone die.
To Cornwall
The last four or five pages leave reality altogether to enter the Lawrence realm of hyperbolic emotions. With Banford out of the way, Henry has definitely ‘won’ March. They are married within weeks and he takes her as honeymoon to his village in Cornwall.
Here they sit on the rocks staring West over the sea but they are not at rest. With mad unrealism she doesn’t blame him for killing her best friend, her one true love. This thought doesn’t even appear in the delirious last four or five pages. Instead we get peak Lawrence describing her feeling that life always ends in failure, that she (March) set out to protect Banford but failed because every attempt at happiness ends in the pit.
The more you reached after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you became aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any farther. You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.
Henry has ‘won’ and yet he doesn’t ‘possess’ her. Her sadness resists him. Sometimes he wishes he’d left them both at the farm where they’d have ended up killing each other (unlikely). He just wants to hustle her across the sea to Canada where they can, somehow, start a new life, but – it is strongly implied – this is not going to happen. But not for the obvious reason you or I might have imputed, namely he murdered her girlfriend. Instead, for deeply Lawrentian reasons which are hard to follow or credit.
He wanted her to give herself without defences, to sink and become submerged in him. And she – she wanted to sit still, like a woman on the last milestone, and watch. She wanted to see, to know, to understand. She wanted to be alone: with him at her side…
He wants her asleep, unconscious in the sea of his love or possession, while she insists on staying awake.
He wanted her asleep, at peace in him. He wanted her at peace asleep in him… [but] She seemed to stretch her eyes wider in the obstinate effort and tension of keeping awake. She would keep awake. She would know. She would consider and judge and decide. She would have the reins of her own life between her own hands. She would be an independent woman to the last… (p.158)
Let’s make a wild guess and predict that it is not likely to be a happy marriage.
Thoughts
Lawrence really only has one subject which is the extraordinarily intense vision of the love between a man and a woman. The basic idea is padded out with the intrusion of a third party to create a love triangle, as in both ‘The Ladybird’ and this story.
The last four or five pages, the extended description of March’s feelings, are so wildly improbable and almost incomprehensible that it’s hard to tell whether it’s twaddle or some kind of visionary genius.
Lawrence’s characters seem to live more intensely than you or I. Whether he’s summarising passages of time or character or specific events or conversations, they seem more alert, alive, full of more depth and resonance of life and experience, than I am in a week!
Then again, they seem to only live in their emotions. They have next to no work to do. A good deal of my life, my time and my mental energy goes in planning, organising, scheduling and doing work. At the end of all that I’m often too tired to read or think. Lawrence’s characters, by contrast, spend all their time feeling passionately and intensely. In this sense, his fictions are wonderful dreams or delusions, escapes from our real experiences of exhausting life.
Turns of phrase
His face seemed extraordinarily like a piece of the out-of-doors come indoors: as holly-berries do.
A line of four brown-speckled ducks led by a brown-and-green drake were stemming away downhill from the upper meadow, coming like boats running on a ruffled sea, cockling their way top speed downwards towards the fence and towards the little group of people, and cackling as excitedly as if they brought news of the Spanish Armada.
Credit
‘The Fox’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in 1922 in The Dial magazine. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with The Ladybird and The Captain’s Doll.
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