David Herbert Lawrence - The Lost Girl

ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or

else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too

much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or

throws them disused aside.

There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think

the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when

he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a butt of

it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And

we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual

floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really

hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We

detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and

in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the

ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary

points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they

are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and

mechanical days.

There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would

have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her

case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged

shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible

from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted

self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are

usually the most conceited of men: even as was James Houghton. But

to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to

live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth.

And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.

And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each

one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had passed her

twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her

twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth. It ought to be a

laughing matter. But it isn't.

Ach, schon zwanzig

Immer noch durch's Leben tanz' ich

Jeder, Jeder will mich kьssen

Mir das Leben zu versьssen.

Ach, schon dreissig

Immer Mдdchen, Mдdchen heiss' ich.

In dem Zopf schon graue Hдrchen

Ach, wie schnell vergehn die Jдhrchen.

Ach, schon vierzig

Und noch immer Keiner find 'sich.

Im gesicht schon graue Flecken

Ach, das muss im Spiegel stecken.

Ach, schon fьnfzig