And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: “There must be more money! There must be more money!” And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. “There must be more money! There must be more money!”
It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the teddy-bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over the house: “There must be more money!”
Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.
Greed animates every corridor of this feverishly sensitive house house and Lawrence’s allegorical tone and use of omniscient third person narrator communicates a palpable sense of ill fated destiny. Even the children’s toys seem contaminated by the adults’ greed.
Innocence has become swallowed up by the near neurasthenic chanting of the whispering house! The children’s susceptibility to the greedy dynamic of their parents, becomes supernaturally imprinted upon the daily reality and very fabric of their home.
If avarice drives all the adult behaviors in the narrative, then the children, and in particular the protagonist Paul, seek to re-stabilise the unsettling voices in the house through material placation. This placation comes through Paul’s attempt to reverse the ‘bad luck’ of Hester his mother, through his winnings on the horses.
Thus Paul ‘rides’ his rocking horse to ‘find’ the winner of horse races before they take place. Such a dalliance with the supernatural intentions of the horse, leads to tragedy as the horse and child frantically ‘possess’ each other, and Lawrence decisively blames the adult world for Paul’s collapse.
The child’s absent father, permanently dissatisfied mother and boy child’s frantic desire to please his restless mother, show the influence of Freud upon D H Lawrence.
A tale as unsettling as Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and just as slippery as a ghost tale , a psychological thriller..or both!