HOW THE MISSING CHAPTER CAME INTO MY POSSESSION

By Sandra Darroch

EFORE you read this Missing Chapter from Lawrence's Kangaroo, I should explain how it came into my possession.

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a member of the family which had been involved with Lawrence during his time in Sydney and Thirroul. I had never met her but she said she knew of our interest in Lawrence and her family connection. She told me that her great-aunt was recently clearing out her house in preparation for moving into a nursing home and she recounted what her great-aunt had said:

"I've found a couple of old books that belonged to DH Lawrence when he was living down at Wyewurk," her great-aunt told her. "My older sister, your great-aunt Dorothy - we called her Dawdie, had taken the Lawrences down to see Wyewurk and settle them in there. Our family had the house across the road in Craig Street and were friends with the owners of Wyewurk.

Frieda Lawrence

"Then after the Lawrences left for America, Dawdie went back into Wyewurk to check that it was shipshape for the next tenants. She found some old books in a drawer of a bedside table under some of Frieda's underwear she'd also left behind.

"I've kept them all these years but I was about to toss the books out when I opened one and found tucked in it some pages from an exercise book. They look as if they were cut out of the exercise book with a pair of sewing or nail scissors. You might like to have a look at them."

So that is how how the Missing Chapter - Chapter X, came into my possession.

CHAPTER X

By Sandra Darroch
(with apologies to Lawrence)

BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES

Wyewurk by Garry Shead

SOMERS got up early the next morning. The sun was rising over the Pacific in a sky wiped of yesterday's rain. He could hear the waves pounding and booming against the rocks below. He went out to the yard and chopped some wood for a fire to warm the house. Then he brushed out the ashes from the grate, lit the fire and busied himself with preparing breakfast. He put some porridge into a saucepan on the stove and spread a blue-and-white checked cloth on the table, arranging the cutlery neatly. Harriet was still asleep and

Somers was faintly relieved not to hear her voice calling out from the bedroom.

He planned to go out into the warm bush later to sit beneath a tree in peace and quiet and try to get the novel, his "romance" moving again. Where was his notebook? Somers searched the top of the jarrah table in the room where he often sat to write when it was raining. He couldn't find it anywhere. He wandered out to the verandah. At last he spied it on the floor beside Harriet's armchair. There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts. She must have been reading his notebook after he had gone to bed.

Somers felt a queer foreboding that Harriet would not have been pleased by what he had written in the last chapter, Chapter 9, of his troublesome novel. He had called the chapter "Harriet and Lovat at Sea in Marriage" and it was to his mind an accurate assessment of where they were now after 10 years of matrimony: marooned somewhere between romantic love and comfortable companionship, though he, Somers, favoured the role of lord and master. Harriet of course would have none of that.

Somers prepared a cup of tea and took it into the bedroom where Harriet was stirring.

"I've made some porridge," he said."I'm going down to the beach for a walk."

The sand was glistening with rivulets of yesterday's rain draining down to the sea. He took off his shoes and walked along the hard sand close to the water's edge, the little waves hissing up and caressing his ankles. Above him was the great cathedral of Australian sky. For a moment Somers felt overwhelmed with love for the world, love for the freedom he felt all around him. Then the sense of foreboding crushed down on him again and he went back to the house.

Harriet was up and dressed and in the garden, wearing an apron and hanging out newly-washed clothes on the makeshift line he had strung up for her.

Somers greeted her tentatively, aware from her bustling demeanour that all was not well.

He would wait for her to start the argument, as she always did. Subtlety was not Harriet's strong point. In fact, Somers frowned, if only she could be more subtle; Harriet was so direct in everything she did and said. He had begun to find her tedious.

"I've read your latest chapter," she began as she followed him into the house. "You don't love me at all, Lovat."

She only called him Lovat when she was either angry with him or when they made love.

"Of course I love you," Somers replied.

"Pah!, " she retorted. "Tell that to the horse marines! You couldn't write what you said in that chapter "Harriet and Lovat at Sea in Marriage" if you loved me!"

Harriet picked up his notebook and turned to the offending chapter.

"Look!" she said in a gutteral-sounding tone, "You say you are to be the lord and master and me the humble slave. See, you wrote: 'Or at the very best she was to be a sort of domestic Mrs Gladstone…' You say I've to submit to the mystic man and male in you..that I must bow down to you!"

She read out parts of a paragraph, breathing heavily and spluttering:
"She was to submit to the mystic man and male in him, with reverence, and even a little awe, like a woman before the altar of the great Hermes….there was In him also the mystery and lordship of - of Hermes, if you like - but the mystery and the lordship of the forward-seeking male. That she must emphatically realise and bow down to. Yes,

bow down to. You can't have two masters of one ship: neither can you have a ship without a master.

TheHarriet and Lovat had been an experiment of ten years' endurance. Now she was to be broken up, or burnt, so he said, and the non-existent Hermes was to take her place."

Harriet banged the notebook down on the table.

"Your problem, Lovat," she went on, her face taking on that queer blanched look "is that you're all fired up with these men you are seeing so much of - Jack and Kangaroo - talking about manliness and leadership and rallying men to fight. You're going back to your old blood brotherhood

ideas - just like when we were living in Cornwall and

you and Leonard wanted to cut your hands and draw blood and clasp hands and claim everlasting blood brotherhood. And what you thought you were doing with that young farm boy you spent all your time in the hayfields with, I can't imagine."

The memory of those fraught days and nights at Higher Tregarthen flooded through Somers's head. It had all started out so happily. He had painted the walls of the two cottages and made little shelves and cabinets, getting the plae ready for Leonard and Mary. Mary was to have her own writing tower and they would all go for walks over the downs and come back to the cottages for tea and talk.

"You didn't care a jot for me," Harriett jeered."You didn't care that I had left my children for you. You were so full of brotherly love for Leonard and making the place comfortable for that New Zealand scribbler. Mary told me her real story, Lovat, and if you'd known more about her, you wouldn't have been so lovey-duvvie."

It had all gone so terribly wrong. The memory of his aching desire to reach some kind of deep understanding, manly love, with Leonard engulfed him. Then there was Mary, cool and enigmatic, jeering at him, while Harriet wept for her abandoned children when she wasn't throwing pots and pans at him in their wild tirades around the kitchen table. The military authorities were treating them as spies, the locals were suspicious…He felt himself falling back into the dark morass, the engulfing terror of helpless fear that had permeated his pores, filled his breath, warped his very thinking during those dark days.

"I thought we'd found peace,"spat Harriet. "We sailed away from Europe, got away from the darkness. Got away from the war. We sailed away from the Old World and discovered the New. I thought you were happy now, Lovat. But you aren't. All you want to do is be my lord and master! Pah!"

Somers was gripped in a dark frenzy, the memories engulfing him. Harriet went on and on, her voice rising to a pitch of utter frenzy.

"You're weak and useless, Lovat! You took me away and now you don't love me. I'm a baroness! I used to know the leading intellectuals in Germany. You have reduced me to nothing! Nothing! I wash and clean for you while you go up to town to talk treason with those stupid men.

"You even betrayed our love when you gave Kangaroo that little wooden heart we found in the Black Forest at the start of our liaison. I kept it on my dressing table wherever we were living. You took it from my dressing table and you gave it to Kangaroo! It was a token of your love,' Harriet wailed. "But you gave it to that dreadful man, Kangaroo."

"That heart wasn't a token of love," Somers spat. "It was a symbol of manliness and bravery. I gave it to you because I wanted to demonstrate to you how much more manly I was than that effeminate army officer you were flirting with at that time. I wanted to show you I would be the victor."

Harrriet looked at hm quizzicly: "What do you mean?"

"As you well know, Somers replied, "the writing on the wooden heart says "Dem Mutigen gehort die Welt" - "To the manly brave belongs the world"."That was the motto to have on one's red heart: not Love or Hope or any of those aspiring emotions.

"I gave it to Kangaroo not as a token of Love but of manliness."

"But it was mine, " Harriet countered.

Somers went silent, a cold silence that put out the burning coals of his vengeance. Harriet was nothing to him. Nothing mattered now.

"I'm going out to do some writing," he said. "And I'll go up to Sydney first thing tomorrow morning. I shall stay overnight with Jack."

With that, he went out the door, leaving Harriet standing appalled, tears sleuced down her cheeks and she wiped them on her apron.

NOTE:

Lawrence left his notebook on the jarrrah table later the next day when he went for an afternoon walk. In his absence, Frieda read the chapter he had written that morning - Chapter X "BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES" , descrbing their quarrel. She went into the bedroom, found her sewing scissors and in a frenzy of rage, hacked out the chapter and hid it in a drawer of her bedside table.

Lawrence replaced the excised chapter X with another Chapter x "DIGGERS". The opening paragraph says:

"They had another ferocious battle, Somers and Harriet; they stood opposite to one another in such fury one against the other that they nearly annihilated one another…."

A few days later, on the Satuday, their quarrel and the memory of the dark days in Cornwall still occupying his thoughts, Lawrence took the 6am train p to Sydney to meet Kangaroo. That night he had the nightmare described in Chapter X1.