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

in silence,
sightless, brooding like the lotus softly shutting again, with its gold
core full of fresh life. She saw nothing, for her own petals were a
sheath to her. Only she thought: 'I am full of Osiris. I am full of the
risen Osiris!
    But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to
the sea, and the dog–star green towards the sea's rim. And he thought:
'How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose
of dark–petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness!
How full it is, and great beyond all gods. How it leans around me, and I
am part of it, the great rose of Space. I am like a grain of its perfume,
and the woman is a grain of its beauty. Now the world is one flower of
many petalled darknesses, and I am in its perfume as in a touch.'
    So, in the absolute stillness and fullness of touch, he slept in his cave
while the dawn came. And after the dawn, the wind rose and brought a
storm, with cold rain. So he stayed in his cave in the peace and the
delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on
the earth, and to see one white–and–gold narcissus bowing wet, and still
wet. And he said: "This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The
grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the
invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one."
    He waited at the temple for the woman, and she came in the rain. But she
said to him:
    "Let me sit awhile with Isis. And come to me, will you come to me, in the
second hour of night?"
    So he went back to the cave and lay in stillness and in the joy of being
in touch, waiting for the woman who would come with the night, and
consummate again the contact. Then when night came the woman came, and
came gladly, for her great yearning, too, was upon her, to be in touch,
to be in touch with him, nearer.
    So the days came, and the nights came, and days came again, and the
contact was perfected and fulfilled. And he said: "I will ask her
nothing, not even her name, for a name would set her apart."
    And she said to herself: "He is Osiris. I wish to know no more."
    Plum blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past,
anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean–field was
in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its petals
and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact
was established, the man and the woman were fulfilled of one another, and
departure was in the air.
    One day he met her under the trees, when the morning sun was hot, and the
pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pear blossom was
scattering. She came slowly towards him, and in her gentle lingering, her
tender hanging back from him, he knew a change in her.
    "Hast thou conceived?" he asked her.
    "Why?" she said.
    "Thou art like a tree whose green leaves follow the blossom, full of sap.
And there is a withdrawing about thee."
    "It is so," she said. "I am with young by thee. Is it good?"
    "Yea!" he said. "How should it not be good? So the nightingale calls no
more from the valley–bed. But where wilt thou bear the child, for I am
naked of all but life?"
    "We will stay here," she said.
    "But the lady, your mother?"
    A shadow crossed her brow. She did not answer.
    "What when she knows?" he said.
    "She begins to know."
    "And would she hurt you?"
    "Ah, not me! What I have is all my own. And I shall be big with
Osiris…But thou, do you watch her slaves."
    She looked at him, and the peace of her maternity was troubled by
anxiety.
    "Let not your heart be troubled!" he said. "I have died the death once."
    So he knew the time was come again for him to depart. He would go alone,
with his destiny. Yet not alone, for the touch would be upon him, even as
he left his touch on her. And invisible suns would go with him.
    Yet he must go. For here on the bay the little life of jealousy and
property was resuming sway again, as the suns of