Tortoises

By

D. H. Lawrence

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Contents

BABY TORTOISE. 3

TORTOISE-SHELL. 5

TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS. 7

LUI ET ELLE. 9

TORTOISE GALLANTRY. 12

TORTOISE SHOUT. 13

BABY TORTOISE

You know what it is to be born alone,      Baby tortoise!      The first day to heave your feet little by little           from the shell,      Not yet awake,      And remain lapsed on earth,      Not quite alive.

A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.

To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if           it would never open,      Like some iron door;      To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base      And reach your skinny little neck      And take your first bite at some dim bit of           herbage,      Alone, small insect,      Tiny bright-eye,      Slow one.

To take your first solitary bite      And move on your slow, solitary hunt.      Your bright, dark little eye,      Your eye of a dark disturbed night,      Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,      So indomitable.

No one ever heard you complain.

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your           little wimple      And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-           pinned toes,      Rowing slowly forward.      Whither away, small bird?

Rather like a baby working its limbs,      Except that you make slow, ageless progress      And a baby makes none.

The touch of sun excites you,      And the long ages, and the lingering chill      Make you pause to yawn,      Opening your impervious mouth,      Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some           suddenly gaping pincers;      Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,      Then close the wedge of your little mountain           front,      Your face, baby tortoise.

Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn           your head in its wimple      And look with laconic, black eyes?      Or is sleep coming over you again,      The non-life?

You are so hard to wake.

Are you able to wonder?

Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of           the first life      Looking round      And slowly pitching itself against the inertia      Which had seemed invincible?

The vast inanimate,      And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye.

Challenger.

Nay, tiny shell-bird,      What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must           row against,      What an incalculable inertia.

Challenger.

Little Ulysses, fore-runner,      No bigger than my thumb-nail,      Buon viaggio.

All animate creation on your shoulder,      Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.

The ponderous, preponderate,      Inanimate universe;      And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.

How vivid your travelling seems now, in the           troubled sunshine,      Stoic, Ulyssean atom;      Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.

Voiceless little bird,      Resting your head half out of your wimple      In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.      Alone, with no sense of being alone,      And hence six times more solitary;      Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through           immemorial ages      Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,      Small bird,      Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,      With your tail tucked a little on one side      Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,      Invincible fore-runner.

The Cross, the Cross      Goes deeper in than we know,      Deeper into life;      Right into the marrow      And through the bone.

TORTOISE-SHELL

Along the back of the baby tortoise      The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,      Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections      Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides      Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.      Five, and five again, and five again,      And round the edges twenty-five little ones,      The sections of the baby tortoise shell.

Four, and a keystone;      Four, and a keystone;      Four, and a keystone;      Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.

It needed Pythagoras  to see life placing her           counters on the living back      Of the baby tortoise;      Life establishing the first eternal mathematical           tablet,      Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but           in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell.

The first little mathematical gentleman      Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers      Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.

Fives, and tens,      Threes and fours and twelves,      All the volte face of decimals,      The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven,      Turn him on his back,      The kicking little beetle,      And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching           belly,      The long cleavage of division, upright of the           eternal cross.

And on either side count five,      On each side, two above, on each side, two below      The dark bar horizontal.

It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,      Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,      Through his five-fold complex-nature.

So turn him over on his toes again;      Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb-           piece,

Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing-           head,

Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all           mathematics.

The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate      Of the baby tortoise.

Outward and visible indication of the plan within,      The complex, manifold involvedness of an           individual creature      Blotted out      On this small bird, this rudiment,      This little dome, this pediment      Of all creation,      This slow one.

TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS

On he goes, the little one,      Bud of the universe,      Pediment of life.

Setting off somewhere, apparently.      Whither away, brisk egg?

His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were           no more than droppings,      And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were           an old rusty tin.

A mere obstacle,      He veers round the slow great mound of her.

Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional           voice:      "This is your Mother, she laid you when you were           an egg."

He does not even trouble to answer:   "Woman,           what have I to do with thee?"      He wearily looks the other way,      And she even more wearily looks another way           still,      Each with the utmost apathy,      Incognizant,      Unaware,      Nothing.

As for papa,      He snaps when I offer him his offspring,      Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,      Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible           tortoise      Being touched with love, and devoid of           fatherliness.

Father and mother,      And three little brothers,      And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating           pebbles scattered in the garden,      Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old           tins.

Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances,           of course,      But family feeling there is none, not even the           beginnings.

Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless      Little tortoise.

Row on then, small pebble,      Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled           sunshine,      Young gayety.

Does he look for a companion?      No, no, don't think it.      He doesn't know he is alone;      Isolation is his birthright,      This atom.

To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny           toes,      To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth,           afraid of the night,      To crop a little substance,      To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:      Basta!

To be a tortoise!      Think of it, in a garden of inert clods      A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself--      Croesus!

In a garden of pebbles and insects      To roam, and feel the slow heart beat      Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding      From   the   warm  blood,   in   the   dark-creation           morning.

Moving, and being himself,      Slow, and unquestioned,      And inordinately there, O stoic!      Wandering in the slow triumph of his own           existence,      Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in           chaos,      And biting the frail grass arrogantly,      Decidedly arrogantly.

LUI ET ELLE

She is large and matronly      And rather dirty,      A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had           driven her to it.

Though what she does, except lay four eggs at           random in the garden once a year      And put up with her husband,      I don't know.

She likes to eat.

She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny           legs,      When food is going.      Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes.

She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great           mouthfuls,      Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron,           pristine face      Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth      Like sudden curved scissors,      And gulping at more than she can swallow, and           working her thick, soft tongue,      And having the bread hanging over her chin.

O Mistress, Mistress,      Reptile mistress,      Your eye is very dark, very bright,      And it never softens      Although you watch.

She knows,      She knows well enough to come for food,      Yet she sees me not;      Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,      Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,      Reptile mistress.

Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless           mouth,      She has no qualm when she catches my finger in           her steel overlapping gums,      But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking           are nothing to her,      She does not even know she is nipping me with           her curved beak.      Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag           it in horror away.

Mistress, reptile mistress,      You are almost too large, I am almost frightened.      He is much smaller,      Dapper beside her,      And ridiculously small.

Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,      His, poor darling, is almost fiery.

His wimple, his blunt-prowed face,      His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long,           scaled, striving legs,      So striving, striving,      Are all more delicate than she,      And he has a cruel scar on his shell.

Poor darling, biting at her feet,      Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy,           splay feet,      Nipping her ankles,      Which she drags apathetic away, though without           retreating into her shell.

Agelessly silent,      And with a grim, reptile determination,      Cold,  voiceless  age-after-age  behind him,           serpents' long obstinacy      Of horizontal persistence.

Little old man      Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his           opportunity,      Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and           seizing her scaly ankle,      And hanging grimly on,      Letting go at last as she drags away,      And closing his steel-trap face.

His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.      Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.

And how he feels it!

The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker      through chaos,      The immune, the animate,      Enveloped in isolation,      Forerunner.      Now look at him!

Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.      His adolescence saw him crucified into sex,      Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek           his consummation beyond himself.      Divided into passionate duality,      He, so finished and immune, now broken into           desirous fragmentariness,      Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself      In his effort toward completion again.

Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,      The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into           pieces,      And he must struggle after reconstruction,           ignominiously.

And so behold him following the tail      Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,      Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,      But with more than bovine, grim,  earth-dank           persistence,      Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches           out to walk,      Roaming over the sods,      Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail      Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.

Their two shells like doomed boats bumping,      Hers huge, his small;      Their   splay   feet   rambling   and   rowing   like           paddles,      And stumbling mixed up in one another,      In the race of love--      Two tortoises,      She huge, he small.

She seems earthily apathetic,      And he has a reptile's awful persistence.

I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère           Tortue.      While I, I pity Monsieur.      "He pesters her and torments her," said the           woman.      How much more is he pestered and tormented,           say I.

What can he do?      He is dumb, he is visionless,      Conceptionless.

His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not      As her earthen mound moves on,      But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery           skin,      Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,      And drags at these with his beak,      Drags and drags and bites,      While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull           mound along.

TORTOISE GALLANTRY

Making his advances      He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,      No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.

Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin      That work beneath her while she sprawls along      In her ungainly pace,      Her folds of skin that work and row      Beneath  the   earth-soiled  hovel  in  which  she           moves.

And so he strains beneath her housey walls      And catches her trouser-legs in his beak      Suddenly, or her skinny limb,      And strange and grimly drags at her      Like a dog,      Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful      persistency.

Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.      Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation      And doomed to partiality, partial being,      Ache, and want of being,      Want,      Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add           himself on to her.

Born to walk alone,      Forerunner,      Now suddenly distracted into this mazy           sidetrack,      This awkward, harrowing pursuit,      This grim necessity from within.

Does she know      As she moves eternally slowly away?      Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird           flying in the dark against a window,      All knowledgeless?

The awful concussion,      And the still more awful need to persist, to follow,           follow, continue,      Driven,   after  aeons  of  pristine,   fore-god-like           singleness and oneness,      At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron,      Driven away from himself into her tracks,      Forced to crash against her.

Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile,      Little gentleman,      Sorry plight,      We ought to look the other way.

Save that, having come with you so far,      We will go on to the end.                                     J

TORTOISE SHOUT

I thought he was dumb,      I said he was dumb,      Yet I've heard him cry.

First faint scream,      Out of life's unfathomable dawn,      Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's           dawning rim,      Far, far off, far scream.

Tortoise in extremis.

Why were we crucified into sex?

Why were we not left rounded off, and finished           in ourselves,      As we began,      As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

A far, was-it-audible scream,      Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

Worse than the cry of the new-born,      A scream,      A yell,      A shout,      A pæan,      A death-agony,      A birth-cry,      A submission,      All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first      dawn.

War-cry,  triumph,  acute-delight,  death-scream           reptilian,      Why was the veil torn?

The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?      The male soul's membrane      Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.

Crucifixion.

Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of           that dense female,      Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching           out of the shell      In tortoise-nakedness,      Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded,      spread-eagle over her house-roof,      And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved           beneath her walls,      Reaching  and gripping  tense,  more  reaching           anguish in uttermost tension      Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping           like a jerking leap, and oh!      Opening its clenched face from his outstretched           neck      And giving that fragile yell, that scream,      Super-audible,      From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,      Giving up the ghost,      Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.

His scream, and his moment's subsidence,      The moment of eternal silence,      Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the      sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once      The inexpressible faint yell--      And so on, till the last plasm of my body was           melted back      To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.

So he tups, and screams      Time after time that frail, torn scream      After each jerk, the longish interval,      The tortoise eternity,      Agelong, reptilian persistence,      Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the           next spasm.

I remember, when I was a boy,      I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught           with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting           snake;      I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break           into sound in the spring;      I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat           of night      Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;      I remember the first time, out of a bush in the           darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and           gurgles startled the depths of my soul;      I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went           through a wood at midnight;      I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and           blorting through the hours, persistent and           irrepressible;      I remember my first terror hearing the howl of           weird, amorous cats;      I remember the scream of a terrified, injured           horse, the sheet-lightning      And running away from the sound of a woman in           labor, something like an owl whooing,      And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a           lamb,      The first wail of an infant,      And my mother singing to herself,      And the first tenor singing of the passionate           throat of a young collier, who has long since           drunk himself to death,      The first elements of foreign speech      On wild dark lips.

And more than all these,      And less than all these,      This last,      Strange, faint coition yell      Of the male tortoise at extremity,      Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest           far-off horizon of life.

The cross,      The wheel on which our silence first is broken,      Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single           inviolability, our deep silence      Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling           across the deeps, calling, calling for the           complement,      Singing, and calling, and singing again, being           answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking           for what is lost,      The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ,           the Osiris-cry of abandonment,      That which is whole, torn asunder,      That which is in part, finding its whole again           throughout the universe.

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