‘The Ladybird’ is a war story, set across the last years of the First World War, from the autumn of 1917 through all of 1918 and into spring of 1919. It describes the impact of the war on five lives.
It is, a bit surprisingly, set among the aristocracy. Lady Beveridge was a sprightly bluestocking in the 1890s but she has been broken by the deaths of both her sons and her brother in the war. Now the new, hard young generation see her as ‘a shabby, old-fashioned little aristocrat’. Her husband, the Earl, has decamped to their place in Scotland for the duration. But charitable Lady B insists on regarding enemy prisoners and wounded as human beings like us.
One day she visits a hospital for German prisoners at Hurst Place just outside London. Among the ranks of beds she recognised Count Johann Dionys Psanek, a Bohemian. She had known him when he was a boy, and only in the spring of 1914 he and his wife had stayed with Lady Beveridge in her country house in Leicestershire. She addresses him but he is too weak to talk. He has two bad bullet wounds and is expected to die.
She goes on to visit her daughter, Lady Daphne. Daphne married one of the most famous young politicians in the land who was, nonetheless, a commoner with little money. Now she lives in a shabby block of flats. She is another victim of the war.
Lady Daphne was tall, only twenty-five years old. She had been one of the beauties, when the war broke out, and her father had hoped she would make a splendid match. Truly, she had married fame: but without money. Now, sorrow, pain, thwarted passion had done her great damage. Her husband was missing in the East. Her baby had been born dead. Her two darling brothers were dead. And she was ill, always ill.
Lawrence gives her a very schematic character. He says that she has been brought up in her mother’s milk-and-kindness charity but this is completely at odds with her inheritance. She inherited from her father and her father’s desperate race a wild energy which is eating her away from within.
The earldom had begun with a riotous, dare-devil border soldier, and this was the blood that flowed on. And alas, what was to be done with it? Daphne had married an adorable husband: truly an adorable husband. Whereas she needed a dare-devil. But in her mind she hated all dare-devils: she had been brought up by her mother to admire only the good. So, her reckless, anti-philanthropic passion could find no outlet… So her own blood turned against her, beat on her own nerves, and destroyed her.
Lady Beveridge tells her daughter about meeting the Count. Daphne dutifully phones the hospital in succeeding days to check on his progress. A week or so later she hears news that her husband is captured but alive in Turkey and she decides to pay the Count a visit.
She ends up going back repeatedly and they develop a twisted sort of bond. The Count is notably small and, the narrative keeps insisting, has a low-browed, round-nosed appearance, ‘A queer, dark, aboriginal little face he had, with a fine little nose: not an Aryan’.
He is moved from Hurst Place to Voynich Hall. As he slowly recovers, he shares with Lady Daphne his strange theories. For a start he is full of deep anger against the world and life. Not only that, but he detects in her the deep urge for wild dare-devil living which she has repressed, disturbing her. He has a theory that the real life is inside and we must live ‘inside out’.
‘We’ve got the world inside out. The true living world of fire is dark, throbbing, darker than blood. Our luminous world that we go by is only the reverse of this… You and your beauty – that is only the inside-out of you. The real you is the wild-cat invisible in the night, with red fire perhaps coming out of its wide, dark eyes. Your beauty is your whited sepulchre.’ (p.36)
This is flirtatious talk and Daphne finds herself comparing her husband, who loves the pale moon in her, to the Count, who has perceived her secret wild-cat nature, and wondering what it would be like to be loved by him.
One odd conversation leads round to the odd request, he asks her if she could make him a hand-made shirt. Here in England, a prisoner, he is wearing prison uniform: as an aristocrat he’s never worn anything but hand-made items. He gives her a metal thimble which has an elaborate design. And he explains that his shirts always bear the family emblem, a small ladybird, at the back of the neck where a label would go. It is March 1918.
Daphne makes several silk shirts for him but then her visits and even their correspondence cease as she makes plans for her husband’s arrival home from prisoner of war camp. Her husband is called Basil. She compares Basil – tall, handsome, English, adoring her white outside – with the Count – small, aboriginal, almost like a goblin or figure from fairy tale, who perceives her secret wild-cat side.
Months pass and she makes a shirt for her husband – she is discovered doing so by Basil’s sister, Primrose, on a sudden visit. But then she misplaces the thimble and its loss nags at her. It had become a talisman of something. And through some subterranean train of thought, she finds herself drawn back to visit Count Dionys at Voynich Hall. It is now autumn 1918 and she finds him ruffling through the leaves looking for chestnuts. The visit is really an excuse for the Count to explain to her his new philosophy if destruction. He has found a new God.
‘I found the God who pulls things down: especially the things that men have put up…Not the devil of destruction, but the god of destruction. The blessed god of destruction… I have found my God. The god of anger, who throws down the steeples and the factory chimneys. Ah, Lady Daphne, he is a man’s God, he is a man’s God… I say to my heart: Beat, hammer, beat with little strokes. Beat, hammer of God, beat them down. Beat it all down… The world, the world of man.’ (p.42)
He sounds like a lunatic and scares her.
‘I believe in the power of my red, dark heart. God has put the hammer in my breast–the little eternal hammer. Hit–hit–hit! It hits on the world of man. It hits, it hits! And it hears the thin sound of cracking. The thin sound of cracking. Hark!’
Dazzled and bewildered, Daphne finds herself asking the Count whether he wants to kiss her but he bridles and says No, whereupon she shakes his hand, says her polite goodbyes, and returns home, determined to put him out of her mind.
It is late in the year when Basil, Major Apsley, arrives at the London flat, after the Armistice (11 November 1918). He has a scar from his mouth across his cheek, is gaunt and has a new intense white gleam in his eye. He is just as gentlemanly and posh in his speech, as polite and diffident. But there is something fanatical about the way he abjectly worships Daphne, in a strange scene insisting on getting right down on his hands and knees and kissing her feet (p.48).
‘I knew,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I knew you would make good. I knew if I had to kneel, it was before you. I knew you were divine, you were the one–Cybele–Isis. I knew I was your slave. I knew. It has all been just a long initiation. I had to learn how to worship you.’ He kissed her feet again and again, without the slightest self-consciousness, or the slightest misgiving. Then he went back to the sofa, and sat there looking at her, saying: ‘It isn’t love, it is worship. Love between me and you will be a sacrament, Daphne. That’s what I had to learn. You are beyond me. A mystery to me.’ (p.49)
Daphne lets him slake his long-absent desire on her but feels strange and alienated (mind you, this is a common condition for even the most passionate Lawrence lovers). She doesn’t feel strong enough to bear her husband’s intense ‘adoration-lust’. She becomes ill again in what we now know to be caused by the conflict between her role as white moon goddess to her husband, and the inner wildcat which has been aroused by the strange, God-of-destruction gnome Count Dionys.
I realised the two men have been allotted symbolic names: Basil is Greek for ‘king’ while Dionys is an abbreviation of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy.
On the same afternoon that Basil arrived back he discovers Count Psanek’s thimble down the back of her sofa, and in it a scrap of paper which Daphne, in a mooning moment, had written a piece of German doggerel poetry on. Daphne straight out tells Basil she’s been visiting the Count and Basil is intrigued. As she becomes ill and unable to bear the weight of her husband’s adoration-lust she wishes to see the Count and Basil says he’d love to come, too.
So a few weeks before Christmas the pair go and visit him together. The contrast between the two types of men is made super-clear:
The Major looked with his keen, white attention into the dark, low-browed face of the other man… She could feel that the presence of her tall, gaunt, idealistic husband was hateful to the little swarthy man. (p.55)
There follows a strange interview, where the Count and Basil have a long dialogue. It starts with the Major saying he thinks the war and wounding and imprisonment showed him a higher level of love. Then that the war revealed something about men, about the deep love between them. There is talk of whether or not love involves an amount of submission and this morphs into Basil asking whether the Count expects his serfs, the people on his estate, to submit to his authority when he returns home, and this moves to the general point of how men will obeise themselves before a true leader.
‘At a certain moment the men who are really living will come beseeching to put their lives into the hands of the greater men among them, beseeching the greater men to take the sacred responsibility of power.’ (p.59)
The Count appears to say it will be the entire people, the whole people will look for new leaders in defeat and willingly consign themselves to complete obedience.
‘My chosen aristocrat would say to those who chose him: “If you choose me, you give up forever your right to judge me. If you have truly chosen to follow me, you have thereby rejected all your right to criticize me. You can no longer either approve or disapprove of me. You have performed the sacred act of choice. Henceforth you can only obey.”‘ (p.60)
Out of this rather obscure conversation suddenly looms the spectre of fascism and the Nazis but way before anybody knew of them as a real threat (the story was published in 1923).
From the narrative point of view, Daphne is irritated to be left out by the two men, who disagree but enjoy their rather prickly conversations. In fact Basil becomes addicted to the Count’s company but, in a funny threesome or love triangle, they only get on when Daphne is present; somehow, she completes the triangle. Left to themselves they become tongue-tied. And Daphne becomes alienated from both these bothersome men.
Basil initiates the final movement of the play. He invites the Count to come and stay at the family’s Scottish estate, Thoresway. The old Earl, who lives there, is a large passionate man, utterly disgusted by the way the democratic rabble (‘smelly mongrels’) have risen to the top of society. He tentatively welcomes the German Count.
There are five at dinner (the Earl, Lady Beveridge, Major Apsley, Lady Diana and Count Dionys). They start off all agreeing that there will be no more war after this one before moving on to ask the Count about his wife and two daughters (he’s no idea where they are). All the time the Count is tormented by the presence next to him of beautiful young Daphne, the key phrase of this passage being that she is like a hot-house flower.
Only Daphne was making him speak. It was she who was drawing the soul out of him, trying to read the future in him as the augurs read the future in the quivering entrails of the sacrificed beast. She looked direct into his face, searching his soul.
Conversation goes on to the subject of the Count’s family emblem, the ladybird. Surprisingly, he associates it with the scarab beetle of the ancient Egyptians, which the Earl has read was a symbol of the origin of the universe. There you go.
The Earl and Countess depart leaving the three young people. Thoresway is a lovely Elizabethan mansion which Lawrence describes very evocatively. It is early spring 1919. They take to living apart, doing their own thing, only occasionally meeting up. Lady Daphne likes to talk to the staff. There’s a groundsman she could fancy if only they were the same class. (Obviously the reader sees this as an anticipation of the plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.)
There was a gamekeeper she could have loved–an impudent, ruddy-faced, laughing, ingratiating fellow; she could have loved him, if he had not been isolated beyond the breach of his birth, her culture, her consciousness. Her consciousness seemed to make a great gulf between her and the lower classes, the unconscious classes. She accepted it as her doom. She could never meet in real contact anyone but a super-conscious, finished being like herself: or like her husband. (p.70)
A funny thing happens. After bedtime the Count sings to himself, strange foreign ditties, ‘the old songs of his childhood’. And Daphne hears him once and from then on is impatient every night for everyone to go to bed, so she can wait a bit, then open her door to catch the Count’s strange singing. And the singing seems an invitation for her to leave the world and follow the tune to the underworld. Lawrence describes her wish to escape the world and even herself which is almost identical to the feelings Ursula has at the end of The Rainbow.
It was like a thread which she followed out of the world: out of the world. And as she went, slowly, by degrees, far, far away, down the thin thread of his singing, she knew peace – she knew forgetfulness. She could pass beyond the world, away beyond where her soul balanced like a bird on wings, and was perfected. So it was, in her upper spirit. But underneath was a wild, wild yearning, actually to go, actually to be given. Actually to go, actually to die the death, actually to cross the border and be gone, to be gone. To be gone from this herself, from this Daphne, to be gone from father and mother, brothers and husband, and home and land and world: to be gone. To be gone to the call from the beyond: the call. It was the Count calling. He was calling her. She was sure he was calling her. Out of herself, out of her world, he was calling her.
And it does summon her. She takes to sitting in a big old wooden chair outside the Count’s room, swaddled in a big black shawl, in order to hear his singing. On the third night she can’t help it but knocks on his door. When he opens, surprised to see her, she insists on going into his bedroom.
Somewhat predictably they end up sitting together on the couch in the darkness but then, completely unpredictably, with the deep absurdity of Lawrence, she throws herself at his feet and kisses them, bathing them in tears, and he feels like an Egyptian god, sitting erect.
And he declares she is now the night wife of the ladybird (in its ancient form of the hold scarab, symbol of the birth of the universe). Although he has no power in the mundane daylight of etiquette and convention, he will come to her in the darkness and she will always be his. So, a kind of spiritual marriage of souls.
Basil notices and the next evening, as they’re preparing for bed, asks her if she loves the Count. She doesn’t reply because she doesn’t know. By this time a lot of the initial lust for her has damped down and, at this, it vanishes. Now Basil feels for Daphne like a sister, a much more profound, pure and wonderful emotion. So he tells her he will never touch her again in a sexual way but will love her with a pure devotion. For her part, Daphne knows she belongs to the Count now:
It was to the Count she belonged. This had decided itself in her down to the depths of her soul. If she could not marry him and be his wife in the world, it had nevertheless happened to her for ever. She could no more question it. Question had gone out of her.
He has to leave, to go back to Germany. But he leaves her with parting words which encapsulate the uncanny weirdness, the preposterousness and yet power of the entire worldview.
‘Don’t forget me. Always remember me. I leave my soul in your hands and your womb. Nothing can ever separate us, unless we betray one another. If you have to give yourself to your husband, do so, and obey him. If you are true to me, innerly, innerly true, he will not hurt us. He is generous, be generous to him. And never fail to believe in me. Because even on the other side of death I shall be watching for you. I shall be king in Hades when I am dead. And you will be at my side. You will never leave me any more, in the after-death. So don’t be afraid in life. Don’t be afraid. If you have to cry tears, cry them. But in your heart of hearts know that I shall come again, and that I have taken you for ever. And so, in your heart of hearts be still, be still, since you are the wife of the ladybird.’
And the narrative ends with Basil driving the Count to the station, no hard feelings at all, in fact the opposite, as both men puzzle how they will find their true selves in the new post-war world but, characteristically for Lawrence, completely free from, oblivious of, the wider world, of society or work or any external pressures. Solely in terms of cultivating the self.
‘You know, Count, something of me died in the war. I feel it will take me an eternity to sit and think about it all.’
‘I hope you may think it out to your satisfaction, Major.’
‘Yes, I hope so too. But that is how it has left me – feeling as if I needed eternity now to brood about it all, you know. Without the need to act – or even to love, really. I suppose love is action.’
‘Intense action,’ said the Count.
‘Quite so. I know really how I feel. I only ask of life to spare me from further effort of action of any sort – even love. And then to fulfil myself, brooding through eternity. Of course, I don’t mind work, mechanical action. That in itself is a form of inaction.’
‘A man can only be happy following his own inmost need,’ said the Count.
‘Exactly!’ said Basil. ‘I will lay down the law for nobody, not even for myself. And live my day – ‘
‘Then you will be happy in your own way. I find it so difficult to keep from laying the law down for myself,’ said the Count. ‘Only the thought of death and the after life saves me from doing it any more.’
‘As the thought of eternity helps me,’ said Basil. ‘I suppose it amounts to the same thing.’
‘I will lay down the law for nobody, not even for myself. And live my day – .’ That sounds like Lawrence’s credo.
Thoughts
It is, like all Lawrence, peculiar. It doesn’t make any rational sense but it has a peculiar, worrying, subterranean plausibility. Some of the phrasing, especially at the start, seems unusually mundane or banal, but most of it has the strange, angled unexpectedness of prime Lawrence. And the repetition of key words in particular paragraphs or passages gives it a subtly incantatory, hieratic quality, a semi-religious feel which emerges in the visionary speeches of the Count, at first about the god of destruction then, towards the end, in his vision of being a king in Hades.
The Count is described as regularly laughing and Daphne frequently smiles and yet, as far as I could see, none of the characters says anything remotely funny or amusing. Lawrence knows humour exists but he can’t do it.
Credit
‘The Ladybird’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in book form in 1923. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’.
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