Read Online The Man Who Died by D. H. Lawrence - Free Book Online

gradually warmth
began to take the place of the cold terror, and he felt: 'I am going to
be Warm again, and I am going to be whole! I shall be warm like the
morning. I shall be a man. It doesn't need understanding. It needs
newness. She brings me newness—'
    And he listened to the faint, ceaseless wail of distress of his wounds,
sounding as if for ever under the horizons of his consciousness. But the
wail was growing dim, more dim.
    He thought of the woman toiling over him: 'She does not know! She does
not realise the death in me. But she has another consciousness. She comes
to me from the opposite end of the night.'
    Having chafed all his lower body with oil, having worked with her slow
intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and
dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side,
and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she
pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a
river. And the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness,
and darkness in his soul, unbroken, dark stillness, wholeness.
    Then slowly, slowly, in the perfect darkness of his inner man, he felt
the stir of something coming. A dawn, a new sun. A new sun was coming up
in him, in the perfect inner darkness of himself. He waited for it
breathless, quivering with a fearful hope…"Now I am not myself. I am
something new…"
    And as it rose, he felt, with a cold breath of disappointment, the girdle
of the living woman slip down from him, the warmth and the glow slipped
from him, leaving him stark. She crouched, spent, at the feet of the
goddess, hiding her face.
    Stooping, he laid his hand softly on her warm, bright shoulder, and the
shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered
if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.
    Now all his consciousness was there in the crouching, hidden woman. He
stooped beside her and caressed her softly, blindly, murmuring
inarticulate things. And his death and his passion of sacrifice were all
as nothing to him now, he knew only the crouching fullness of the woman
there, the soft white rock of life…"On this rock I built my life." The
deep–folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her
face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn.
    He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power
rise up in his loins, magnificent.
    "I am risen!"
    Magnificent, blazing indomitable in the depths of his loins, his own sun
dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone
unconsciously.
    He untied the string on the linen tunic and slipped the garment down,
till he saw the white glow of her white–gold breasts. And he touched
them, and he felt his life go molten. "Father!" he said, "why did you
hide this from me?" And he touched her with the poignancy of wonder, and
the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire. "Lo!" he said, "this is
beyond prayer." It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and
penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose! My mansion is the intricate
warm rose, my joy is this blossom!
    She looked up at him suddenly, her face like a lifted light, wistful,
tender, her eyes like many wet flowers. And he drew her to his breast
with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire, and the last thought:
'My hour is upon me, I am taken unawares—'
    So he knew her, and was one with her.
    Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his sides
with her finger–tips, and said:
    "But they no longer hurt?"
    "They are suns!" he said. "They shine from your torch. They are my
atonement with you."
    And when they left the temple, it was the coldness before dawn. As he
closed the door, he looked again at the goddess, and he said: "Lo, Isis
is a kindly goddess; and full of tenderness. Great gods are warm–hearted,
and have tender goddesses."
    The woman wrapped herself in her mantle and went home