 Section one of tortoises. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. From our information, nor to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Amy Grimoire. Tortoises. By D. H. Lawrence. Baby Tortoise. You know what it is to be born alone, Baby Tortoise. The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell. Not yet awake and remain lapsed on earth, not quite alive. A tiny fragile half-animate bean. To open your tiny beak mouse that looks as if it would never open, like some iron door, to lift the upper hawk beak from the lower base and reach your skinny little neck and take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage, a lone small insect, tiny bright eye, slow one. To take your first solitary bite and move on your slow solitary hunt, your bright dark little eye, your eye of a dark disturbed night, under its slow lid, tiny Baby Tortoise, so indomitable. No one ever heard you complain. You draw your head forward slowly from your little wimple and set forward slow dragging on your four pinned toes, rowing slowly forward wither away, small bird. Rather like a baby working its limbs, except that you make slow, ageless progress and a baby makes none. The touch of sun excites you and the long ages and the lingering chill make you pause to yawn, opening your impervious mouth, suddenly beak-shaped and very wide like some suddenly gaping pinchers, soft red tongue and hard thin gums, then close the wedge of your little mountain front, your face, Baby Tortoise. Do you wander at the world as slowly you turn your head in its wimple and look with laconic black eyes? Or is sleep coming over you again, the non-life? You are so hard to wake. Are you able to wonder? Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life, looking round and slowly pitching itself against the inertia which had seemed invincible? The vast inanimate and the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye, Challenger. Nay, tiny shellbird. What a huge vast inanimate it is that you must row against. What an incalculable inertia. Challenger. Little Ulysses, forerunner, no bigger than my thumbnail. One viagio. All animate creation on your shoulder. Set forth, little Titan, under your battle shield. The ponderous preponderate inanimate universe. And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone. How vivid your traveling seems now in the troubled sunshine. Stoic, Ulyssian atom. Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes. Voiceless little bird, resting your head half out of your wimple in the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone with no sense of being alone. Enhance six times more solitary. Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages. Your little round house in the mist of chaos. Over the garden earth, small bird. Over the edge of all things. Traveller with your tail tucked a little on one side like a gentleman in a long skirted coat. All life carried on your shoulder, invincible forerunner. End of baby tortoise. Section two of tortoises by D. H. Lawrence. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Tortoise shell. The cross, the cross, goes deeper in than we know. Deeper into life. Right into the marrow and through the bone. Along the back of the baby tortoise. The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge. Scale lapping like a lobster's sections or a bee's. Then crossways down his sides, tiger stripes and wasp bands. Five and five again and five again. And round the edges, twenty-five little ones. The sections of the baby tortoise shell. Four and a keystone. Four and a keystone. Then twenty-four and a tiny little keystone. It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her counters on the living back of the baby tortoise. Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet. Not in stone like the Judean Lord or bronze, but in life-clouded life-rosy tortoise shell. The first little mathematical gentleman. Stepping, we might, in his loose trousers, under all the eternal dome of mathematical law. Fives and tens. Threes and fours and twelves. All the vault-fasts of decimals. The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven. Turn him on his back, the kicking little beetle. And there again on his shell tender, earth-touching belly, the long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross. And on either side count five. On each side, two above, on each side, two below. The dark bar, horizontal. The cross. It goes right through him, the sprottling insect. Through his cross-wise cloven psyche. Through his five-fold complex nature. So turn him over on his toes again. Four pinpoint toes and a problematical thumb piece. Four rowing limbs and one wedge-balancing head. Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all mathematics. The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate of the baby tortoise. Outward invisible indication of the plan within. The complex manifold, involvement-ness of an individual creature. Blotted out on this small bird, this rudiment, this little dome, this pediment of all creation, this slow one. And of tortoise shell. Section three of tortoises by D. H. Lawrence. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eva Davis. Tortoise family connections. On he goes. The little one. Bud of the universe. Pediment of life. Setting off somewhere, apparently. Wither away, brusqueg. His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings. And now he scuffles tinally past her, as if she were an old rusty tin. A mere obstacle. He veers round the great slow mound of her. Tortises always foresee obstacles. It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice. This is your mother. She laid you when you were an egg. He does not even trouble to answer. Woman, what have I to do with thee? He wearily looks the other way. And she even more wearily looks another way still. Each with the utmost apathy, incognizant and aware. Nothing. As for Papa, he snaps when I offer him his offspring. Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him. Because he is irascible this morning. An irascible tortoise. Being touched with love and devoid of fatherliness. Father and mother. And three little brothers. And all rambling aimless like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden. Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins. Except that Papa and Mama are old acquaintances, of course. But family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless, little tortoise. Row on then, small pebble. Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine, young gaiety. Does he look for a companion? No, no, don't think it. He doesn't know he is alone. Isolation is his birthright this atom. To row forward and reach himself tall on spiny toes. To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night. To crop a little substance. To move and to be quite sure that he is moving. Basta. To be a tortoise, think of it. In a garden of inert clods, a brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself. Creases. In the garden of pebbles and insects, to roam and feel the slow heartbeat tortoise-wise. The first bell sounding from the warm blood in the dark creation morning. Moving and being himself, slow and unquestioned, and inordinately there, o stoic. Mondering in the slow triumph of his own existence, ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos. And biting the frail grass arrogantly, decidedly, arrogantly. End of tortoise family connections. Section 4 of tortoises by D. H. Lawrence. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Eva Davis. Louis Etel. She is large and matronly and rather dirty. A little sardonic looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year, and put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs when food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron pristine face into an enormously wide-beaked mouth like sudden-curved scissors, and gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, and having the bread hanging over her chin. Oh, mistress, mistress, reptile mistress, your eye is very dark, very bright, and it never softens, although you watch. She knows, she knows well enough to come for food, yet she sees me not. Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything. Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, reptile mistress. Ticking bread into her curved, gaping, toothless mouth. She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, but she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her. She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak, snake-like she draws at my finger while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, you are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, dapper beside her, and ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look. His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt, proud face, his low forehead, his skinny neck, his long-scaled, striving legs. So striving, striving, are all more delicate than she, and he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, nipping her ankles, which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, and with a grim, reptile determination, cold, voiceless age after age behind him, serpents long obstinacy of horizontal persistence. Little old man scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, parting his steel-trap face so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, and hanging grimly on, letting go at last as she drags away, and closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap stoic, ageless, handsome face, alas, what a fool he looks at in this scuffle, and how he feels it. The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, the immune, the animate, enveloped in isolation, forerunner. Now look at him. Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescent saw him crucified into sex, doomed in the long crucifixion of desire to seek his consummation beyond himself, divided into passionate duality, he, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself in his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house inhabiting Osiris, the mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, and he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail of that mud-huffle of his slowly rambling spouse, like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, but with more than bovine grim earth-denk persistence, suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, roaming over the sods, or, if it happened to show, at her pointed heavy tail beneath the low-dropping backboard of her shell. There two shells like doomed boats bumping, hers huge, his small, their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, and stumbling mixed up in one another, in the race of love. Two tortoises, she huge, he small. And she seems earthly apathetic, and he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the mare tortoise. While I, I pity Monsieur. He pesters her and torments her, said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I? What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, conceptionless. His black, sad, lidded eye sees but beholds not as her earthen mound moves on, but he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin. Nails studded that shake beneath her shell and drags at these with his beak, drags and drags and bites while she pulls herself free and rows her dull mound along. End of Louis et al. Section 5 of Tortises by D. H. Lawrence This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Nima. Tortise gallantry. Making his advances, he does not look at her, nor sniff at her. No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin that work beneath her while she sprawls along in her ungainly pace, her folds of skin that work in row beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls and catches her trouser legs in his beak suddenly, or her skinny limb, and strange and grimly drags at her like a dog, only agelessly silent with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim gruesome gallantry to which he is doomed, dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation and doomed to partiality, partial being, ache and want of being, want, self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself onto her. Born to walk alone, forerunner, now suddenly distracted into this mazy sidetrack, this awkward harrowing pursuit, this grim necessity from within. Does she know as she moves eternally slowly away, or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, all knowledgeless? The awful concussion and the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, driven after eons of pristine, fork-god-like singleness and oneness, at the end of some mysterious red-hot iron, driven away from himself into her tracks, forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, little gentleman, sorry plight, we ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, we will go on to the end. End of Tortoise Gallantry Section 6 of Tortises by D. H. Lawrence I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, out of life's unfathomable dawn, far off, so far, like a madness under the horizon's dawning rim. Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise, in extremis. Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off and finished in ourselves as we began, as we went on to the end? We were not left rounded off and finished in ourselves as we began, as he certainly began, so perfectly alone. A far was an audible scream, or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the newborn, a scream, a yell, a shout, a peon, a death agony, a birth cry, a submission. All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War cry, triumph, acute delight, death scream reptilian. Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane, the male soul's membrane, torn with a shriek half music, half horror, crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving beneath the hovel wall of that dense female, mounted in tents, spread eagle, out reaching out of the shell in tortoise nakedness. Long neck and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread eagle over her house rough, in the deep secret, all penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, reaching in gripping tents, more reaching anguish and uttermost tension, till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap and oh, opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck and giving that fragile yell, that scream, superaudible, from his pink cleft old man's mouth giving up the ghost or screaming in Pentecost receiving the ghost. His scream and his moment subsidence, the moment of eternal silence, yet unreleased and after the moment the sudden startling jerk of coition and at once the inexpressible faint yell and so on till the last plasm of my body was melted back to the primeval rudiments of life and the secret. Oh, he tups and screams time after time that frail torn scream after each jerk the longish interval, the tortoise eternity, age-long reptilian persistence, heartthrob, slow heartthrob, persistent for the next spasm. I remember when I was a boy I heard the scream of a frog which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an upstarting snake. I remember when I first heard bullfrogs break into sound in the spring. I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night cry loudly beyond the lake of waters. I remember the first time out of a bush in the darkness the nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul. I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight. I remember the heifer in a heat, blurting and blurting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible. I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird amorous cats. I remember the scream of a terrified injured horse, the sheet lightning and running away from the sound of a woman in the labor, something like an owl hooting and listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, the first wail of an infant, and my mother singing to herself, and the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier who has long since drunk himself to death. The first elements of foreign speech on wild dark lips. And more than all these, and less than all these, this last, strange, faint coition yell of the male tortoise at extremity, tiny from under the very edge of the farthest, far off horizon of life. The cross, the wheel on which our silence first is broken. Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviability, our deep silence tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the compliment, singing and calling and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn to become whole again after long seeking for what is lost. The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris cry of abandonment. That which is whole, torn asunder. That which is in part finding its whole again throughout the universe. End of tortoise shout. End of tortoises by D. H. Lawrence.