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The plot is typical of Lawrence: a struggle between prurient prudishness and primitive purity. Yvette is the younger of two daughters of an English parson. Her mother had run away with another man, is no longer mentioned. Yvette's grandmother has taken her daughter-in-law's place in the household. "She was one of those physically vulgar, clever old bodies who had got her own way all her life by buttering the weaknesses of her men-folk." Yvette hates her grandmother, is discontented with her parochial life, the parochial young men who court her. One day she happens on a gypsy camp, meets a gypsy who is different from all the men she knows. She thinks of him constantly, nearly goes to him, but never does. When a nearby reservoir bursts she is sitting by the river; the gypsy rescues her from the flood and carries her to her room in safety. They keep each other alive through the cold night while half the house is swept away. In the morning, when a rescue party comes, the gypsy has gone.
The Author. The late David Herbert Lawrence died at Vence near Nice last March of tuberculosis. Son of a coalminer in central England, he had a hard time all his life. In 1914 he tactlessly married Frieda von Richthofen, sister of the famed German flyer. Three times declared consumptive, unfit for military service, he was nevertheless suspected of pacifism or worse, did not enjoy the War. After the Armistice he left England, wandered the world, lived for a while near Taos, N. Mex. Other books: Sons and Lovers, Aaron's Rod, Fantasies of the Unconscious, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Butterfly
WHISTLER—James Laver—Cosmopolitan ($5).
The two most famed modern U. S. painters were both expatriates.* James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was born in Lowell, Mass. He studied unsuccessfully at West Point. A job in Washington, in the U. S. Coast & Geodetic Survey, got him interested in etching. He went to Paris to study art, never returned to the U. S. Before he died he was at the top of his profession.
Of the many tales told of Whistler's egotism, belligerent wit, publicity-seeking dandyism, Biographer Laver reproduces a ruthless cross-section, adds a few to the collection. Though the expatriate Whistler never wholly succeeded in acclimatizing himself in England, though he always regarded the British as Philistines, called them "the Islanders," Laver gives an instance of how super-English Whistler became on the question of money. He once presented a bill for 2.000 guineas. His client thought the price excessive; the bill was finally settled for £1,000. But to Whistler "the difference between a pound and a guinea was not the difference between twenty shillings and twenty-one, but the difference between being treated as a tradesman and treated as a professional man or an artist. Such a feeling is very English and almost impossible to explain to a foreigner, but Whistler had absorbed it ... completely. ... A thousand guineas for his work might have sent him away not too dissatisfied, but a thousand pounds seemed to him a deliberate insult."