It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.
Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty-acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranchos de Taos. A shepherd’s fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence’s big tree with his phoenix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.
This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one’s blood.
But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.
I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the ‘petit point’ canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.
It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.
So I sit and try to write.
I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? Is it any use, my writing?
Do I want to blow my own trumpet? Yes, I do. But will it have a clear rousing sound or will it be a bit wheezy and out of tune? Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can’t I?
After all, this is my book, that I am writing. Do I understand anything at all or am I recording unliving dull facts?
Is it a genuine necessity for me to write or has Lawrence said all a million times better than I could? Will this, that costs me so much, be of any use, any pleasure to anybody else? Will others who come after learn from our life, take from it the good and avoid our mistakes?... I wonder...
Anyhow, I will try to write as honestly as I can. Lies are all very well in their place but the truth seems to me so much more interesting and proud, but truth is not so easily conquered, there is always more of it, like a bottomless pit is truth. It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills. But a few realities remained, a lasting truth triumphed.
Whatever happened on the surface of everyday life, there blossomed the certainty of the unalterable bond between us, and of the ever-present wonder of all the world around us.
We had so many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters.
There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence’s chief themes. He felt that each should keep intact his own integrity and isolation, yet at the same time preserve a mutual bond like the north and south poles which between them enclose the world.
Then there was the class war. We came from different worlds. We both had to reach beyond our class, to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.
Then beyond class there was the difference in race, to cross over to each other. He, the Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along.
Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.
As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.
I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness, as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.
Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here’s a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy! Then another day - alas! all is changed: it is chilly and it rains and I wish, how I wish, it were sunny again.
I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.
Life and emotions change in us. We are not pictures, ‘Patiences on monuments’; anyhow Lawrence wasn’t, nor I either. Ours was not just a love affair, just as his writing was not just writing as a profession.
His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failure and the miseries of my past. He made me new and fresh, that I might live freely and lightly as a bird. He fought for the liberty of my being, and won. Just as in his writings he tried, with his fierce and responsible love for his fellowmen, to free them of the stale old past, and take the load of all the centuries of dead thought and feeling on himself.
Will the world gain from him as I did? I hope so, in the long run.