Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away. She
was not herself,—she was not anything. She was something that is going to
be—soon—soon—very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.
She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a
verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all vague and
indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart.
She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover to
Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London had been a
vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a sleep.
And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark,
rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small,
rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the
shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and
living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to awake from its anæsthetic sleep.
“Let us go forward, shall we?” said Birkin. He wanted to be at
the tip of their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that
glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and turned their
faces to the unfathomed night in front.
They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. In the complete
obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where a great rope was
coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the ship, near the black,
unpierced space ahead. There they sat down, folded together, folded round with
the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed
they had crept right into each other, and become one substance. It was very
cold, and the darkness was palpable.
One of the ship’s crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not
really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He felt
their presence, and stopped, unsure—then bent forward. When his face was
near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he withdrew like a
phantom. And they watched him without making any sound.
They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky, no
earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping motion,
they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark,
fathomless space.
They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that had
been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of this pure
trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship’s prow cleaved on,
with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night, without knowing,
without seeing, only surging on.
In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over everything.
In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to glow on her heart the
effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her heart was full of the most
wonderful light, golden like honey of darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a
light which was not shed on the world, only on the unknown paradise towards
which she was going, a sweetness of habitation, a delight of living quite
unknown, but hers infallibly. In her transport she lifted her face suddenly to
him, and he touched it with his lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face
was, it was like kissing a flower that grows near the surf.
But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she knew. To
him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was falling through a gulf
of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the chasm between the
worlds. The world was torn in two, and he was plunging like an unlit star
through the ineffable rift. What was beyond was not yet for him. He was overcome
by the trajectory.
In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against her
fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the profound
night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the unknown. This was
the first time that an utter and absolute peace had entered his heart, now, in
this final transit out of life.
When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up. How stiff
and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet the paradisal glow on her
heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in his, this was the all-in-all.
They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness. This
was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the peace of his. It
was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not quite the old world. For the
peace and the bliss in their hearts was enduring.
Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into
the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw,
half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow
underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big,
pallid, mystic letters “OSTEND,” standing in the darkness. Everybody
was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air,
porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their
colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long,
low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all
the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and
spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in
peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then
scrawling a chalk-mark.
It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter coming
behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night again—ah,
a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman agitation through the
dark-grey air, spectres were running along the darkness between the train.
“Köln—Berlin—” Ursula made out on the boards hung on
the high train on one side.
“Here we are,” said Birkin. And on her side she saw:
“Elsass—Lothringen—Luxembourg, Metz—Basle.”
“That was it, Basle!”
The porter came up.
“À Bâle—deuxième classe?—Voilà!” And he clambered
into the high train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them
taken. But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was
tipped.
“Nous avons encore—?” said Birkin, looking at his watch
and at the porter.
“Encore une demi-heure.” With which, in his blue blouse, he
disappeared. He was ugly and insolent.
“Come,” said Birkin. “It is cold. Let us eat.”
There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery coffee, and
ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were such a wide bite that it
almost dislocated Ursula’s jaw; and they walked beside the high trains. It
was all so strange, so extremely desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt
grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere—grey, dreary nowhere.
At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made out
the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent. They pulled up
surprisingly soon—Bruges! Then on through the level darkness, with
glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and deserted high-roads. She
sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He pale, immobile like a revenant
himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his
eyes opened again, dark as the darkness outside.
A flash of a few lights on the darkness—Ghent station! A few more
spectres moving outside on the platform—then the bell—then motion
again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come out of a
farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She thought of the
Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she
projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one
travelled through æons. The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the
intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she
remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled
with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two
pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face—and now when
she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger—was so
great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing
in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.
They were at Brussels—half an hour for breakfast. They got down. On
the great station clock it said six o’clock. They had coffee and rolls and
honey in the vast desert refreshment room, so dreary, always so dreary, dirty,
so spacious, such desolation of space. But she washed her face and hands in hot
water, and combed her hair—that was a blessing.
Soon they were in the train again and moving on. The greyness of dawn began.
There were several people in the compartment, large florid Belgian business-men
with long brown beards, talking incessantly in an ugly French she was too tired
to follow.
It seemed the train ran by degrees out of the darkness into a faint light,
then beat after beat into the day. Ah, how weary it was! Faintly, the trees
showed, like shadows. Then a house, white, had a curious distinctness. How was
it? Then she saw a village—there were always houses passing.
This was an old world she was still journeying through, winter-heavy and
dreary. There was plough-land and pasture, and copses of bare trees, copses of
bushes, and homesteads naked and work-bare. No new earth had come to pass.
She looked at Birkin’s face. It was white and still and eternal, too
eternal. She linked her fingers imploringly in his, under the cover of her rug.
His fingers responded, his eyes looked back at her. How dark, like a night, his
eyes were, like another world beyond! Oh, if he were the world as well, if only
the world were he! If only he could call a world into being, that should be
their own world!
The Belgians left, the train ran on, through Luxembourg, through
Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz. But she was blind, she could see no more. Her
soul did not look out.
They came at last to Basle, to the hotel. It was all a drifting trance, from
which she never came to. They went out in the morning, before the train
departed. She saw the street, the river, she stood on the bridge. But it all
meant nothing. She remembered some shops—one full of pictures, one with
orange velvet and ermine. But what did these signify?—nothing.
She was not at ease till they were in the train again. Then she was
relieved. So long as they were moving onwards, she was satisfied. They came to
Zürich, then, before very long, ran under the mountains, that were deep in snow.
At last she was drawing near. This was the other world now.
Innsbruck was wonderful, deep in snow, and evening. They drove in an open
sledge over the snow: the train had been so hot and stifling. And the hotel,
with the golden light glowing under the porch, seemed like a home.
They laughed with pleasure when they were in the hall. The place seemed full
and busy.
“Do you know if Mr and Mrs Crich—English—from Paris, have
arrived?” Birkin asked in German.
The porter reflected a moment, and was just going to answer, when Ursula
caught sight of Gudrun sauntering down the stairs, wearing her dark glossy coat,
with grey fur.
“Gudrun! Gudrun!” she called, waving up the well of the
staircase. “Shu-hu!”
Gudrun looked over the rail, and immediately lost her sauntering, diffident
air. Her eyes flashed.
“Really—Ursula!” she cried. And she began to move
downstairs as Ursula ran up. They met at a turn and kissed with laughter and
exclamations inarticulate and stirring.
“But!” cried Gudrun, mortified. “We thought it was
tomorrow you were coming! I wanted to come to the station.”
“No, we’ve come today!” cried Ursula. “Isn’t
it lovely here!”
“Adorable!” said Gudrun. “Gerald’s just gone out to
get something. Ursula, aren’t you fearfully tired?”
“No, not so very. But I look a filthy sight, don’t I!”
“No, you don’t. You look almost perfectly fresh. I like that fur
cap immensely!” She glanced over Ursula, who wore a big soft coat with a
collar of deep, soft, blond fur, and a soft blond cap of fur.
“And you!” cried Ursula. “What do you think you look
like!”
Gudrun assumed an unconcerned, expressionless face.
“Do you like it?” she said.
“It’s very fine!” cried Ursula, perhaps with a touch of
satire.
“Go up—or come down,” said Birkin. For there the sisters
stood, Gudrun with her hand on Ursula’s arm, on the turn of the stairs
half way to the first landing, blocking the way and affording full entertainment
to the whole of the hall below, from the door porter to the plump Jew in black
clothes.
The two young women slowly mounted, followed by Birkin and the waiter.
“First floor?” asked Gudrun, looking back over her shoulder.
“Second Madam—the lift!” the waiter replied. And he darted
to the elevator to forestall the two women. But they ignored him, as, chattering
without heed, they set to mount the second flight. Rather chagrined, the waiter
followed.
It was curious, the delight of the sisters in each other, at this meeting.
It was as if they met in exile, and united their solitary forces against all the
world. Birkin looked on with some mistrust and wonder.
When they had bathed and changed, Gerald came in. He looked shining like the
sun on frost.
“Go with Gerald and smoke,” said Ursula to Birkin. “Gudrun
and I want to talk.”
Then the sisters sat in Gudrun’s bedroom, and talked clothes, and
experiences. Gudrun told Ursula the experience of the Birkin letter in the café.
Ursula was shocked and frightened.
“Where is the letter?” she asked.
“I kept it,” said Gudrun.
“You’ll give it me, won’t you?” she said.
But Gudrun was silent for some moments, before she replied:
“Do you really want it, Ursula?”
“I want to read it,” said Ursula.
“Certainly,” said Gudrun.
Even now, she could not admit, to Ursula, that she wanted to keep it, as a
memento, or a symbol. But Ursula knew, and was not pleased. So the subject was
switched off.
“What did you do in Paris?” asked Ursula.
“Oh,” said Gudrun laconically—“the usual things. We
had a fine party one night in Fanny Bath’s studio.”
“Did you? And you and Gerald were there! Who else? Tell me about
it.”
“Well,” said Gudrun. “There’s nothing particular to
tell. You know Fanny is frightfully in love with that painter, Billy Macfarlane.
He was there—so Fanny spared nothing, she spent very freely. It was really
remarkable! Of course, everybody got fearfully drunk—but in an interesting
way, not like that filthy London crowd. The fact is these were all people that
matter, which makes all the difference. There was a Roumanian, a fine chap. He
got completely drunk, and climbed to the top of a high studio ladder, and gave
the most marvellous address—really, Ursula, it was wonderful! He began in
French—La vie, c’est une affaire d’âmes impériales—in
a most beautiful voice—he was a fine-looking chap—but he had got into
Roumanian before he had finished, and not a soul understood. But Donald
Gilchrist was worked to a frenzy. He dashed his glass to the ground, and
declared, by God, he was glad he had been born, by God, it was a miracle to be
alive. And do you know, Ursula, so it was—” Gudrun laughed rather
hollowly.
“But how was Gerald among them all?” asked Ursula.
“Gerald! Oh, my word, he came out like a dandelion in the sun!
He’s a whole saturnalia in himself, once he is roused. I shouldn’t
like to say whose waist his arm did not go round. Really, Ursula, he seems to
reap the women like a harvest. There wasn’t one that would have resisted
him. It was too amazing! Can you understand it?”
Ursula reflected, and a dancing light came into her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I can. He is such a whole-hogger.”
“Whole-hogger! I should think so!” exclaimed Gudrun. “But
it is true, Ursula, every woman in the room was ready to surrender to him.
Chanticleer isn’t in it—even Fanny Bath, who is genuinely in
love with Billy Macfarlane! I never was more amazed in my life! And you know,
afterwards—I felt I was a whole roomful of women. I was no more myself
to him, than I was Queen Victoria. I was a whole roomful of women at once. It was
most astounding! But my eye, I’d caught a Sultan that time—”
Gudrun’s eyes were flashing, her cheek was hot, she looked strange,
exotic, satiric. Ursula was fascinated at once—and yet uneasy.
They had to get ready for dinner. Gudrun came down in a daring gown of vivid
green silk and tissue of gold, with green velvet bodice and a strange
black-and-white band round her hair. She was really brilliantly beautiful and
everybody noticed her. Gerald was in that full-blooded, gleaming state when he
was most handsome. Birkin watched them with quick, laughing, half-sinister eyes,
Ursula quite lost her head. There seemed a spell, almost a blinding spell, cast
round their table, as if they were lighted up more strongly than the rest of the
dining-room.
“Don’t you love to be in this place?” cried Gudrun.
“Isn’t the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything?
It is simply marvellous. One really does feel übermenschlich—more than
human.”
“One does,” cried Ursula. “But isn’t that partly the
being out of England?”
“Oh, of course,” cried Gudrun. “One could never feel like
this in England, for the simple reason that the damper is never lifted off
one, there. It is quite impossible really to let go, in England, of that I am
assured.”
And she turned again to the food she was eating. She was fluttering with
vivid intensity.
“It’s quite true,” said Gerald, “it never is quite
the same in England. But perhaps we don’t want it to be—perhaps
it’s like bringing the light a little too near the powder-magazine, to let
go altogether, in England. One is afraid what might happen, if everybody
else let go.”
“My God!” cried Gudrun. “But wouldn’t it be
wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of
fireworks.”
“It couldn’t,” said Ursula. “They are all too damp,
the powder is damp in them.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Gerald.
“Nor I,” said Birkin. “When the English really begin to go
off, en masse, it’ll be time to shut your ears and run.”
“They never will,” said Ursula.
“We’ll see,” he replied.
“Isn’t it marvellous,” said Gudrun, “how thankful
one can be, to be out of one’s country. I cannot believe myself, I am so
transported, the moment I set foot on a foreign shore. I say to myself ‘Here
steps a new creature into life.’”
“Don’t be too hard on poor old England,” said Gerald.
“Though we curse it, we love it really.”
To Ursula, there seemed a fund of cynicism in these words.
“We may,” said Birkin. “But it’s a damnably
uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a
complication of diseases, for which there is no hope.”
Gudrun looked at him with dilated dark eyes.
“You think there is no hope?” she asked, in her pertinent
fashion.
But Birkin backed away. He would not answer such a question.
“Any hope of England’s becoming real? God knows. It’s a
great actual unreality now, an aggregation into unreality. It might be real, if
there were no Englishmen.”
“You think the English will have to disappear?” persisted
Gudrun. It was strange, her pointed interest in his answer. It might have been
her own fate she was inquiring after. Her dark, dilated eyes rested on Birkin,
as if she could conjure the truth of the future out of him, as out of some
instrument of divination.
He was pale. Then, reluctantly, he answered:
“Well—what else is in front of them, but disappearance?
They’ve got to disappear from their own special brand of Englishness,
anyhow.”
Gudrun watched him as if in a hypnotic state, her eyes wide and fixed on
him.
“But in what way do you mean, disappear?—” she persisted.
“Yes, do you mean a change of heart?” put in Gerald.
“I don’t mean anything, why should I?” said Birkin.
“I’m an Englishman, and I’ve paid the price of it. I
can’t talk about England—I can only speak for myself.”
“Yes,” said Gudrun slowly, “you love England immensely,
immensely, Rupert.”
“And leave her,” he replied.
“No, not for good. You’ll come back,” said Gerald, nodding
sagely.
“They say the lice crawl off a dying body,” said Birkin, with a
glare of bitterness. “So I leave England.”
“Ah, but you’ll come back,” said Gudrun, with a sardonic
smile.
“Tant pis pour moi,” he replied.
“Isn’t he angry with his mother country!” laughed Gerald,
amused.
“Ah, a patriot!” said Gudrun, with something like a sneer.
Birkin refused to answer any more.
Gudrun watched him still for a few seconds. Then she turned away. It was
finished, her spell of divination in him. She felt already purely cynical. She
looked at Gerald. He was wonderful like a piece of radium to her. She felt she
could consume herself and know all, by means of this fatal, living metal. She
smiled to herself at her fancy. And what would she do with herself, when she had
destroyed herself? For if spirit, if integral being is destructible, Matter is
indestructible.
He was looking bright and abstracted, puzzled, for the moment. She stretched
out her beautiful arm, with its fluff of green tulle, and touched his chin with
her subtle, artist’s fingers.
“What are they then?” she asked, with a strange, knowing smile.
“What?” he replied, his eyes suddenly dilating with wonder.
“Your thoughts.”
Gerald looked like a man coming awake.
“I think I had none,” he said.
“Really!” she said, with grave laughter in her voice.
And to Birkin it was as if she killed Gerald, with that touch.
“Ah but,” cried Gudrun, “let us drink to
Britannia—let us drink to Britannia.”
It seemed there was wild despair in her voice. Gerald laughed, and filled
the glasses.
“I think Rupert means,” he said, “that nationally all
Englishmen must die, so that they can exist individually and—”
“Super-nationally—” put in Gudrun, with a slight ironic
grimace, raising her glass.
The next day, they descended at the tiny railway station of Hohenhausen, at
the end of the tiny valley railway. It was snow everywhere, a white, perfect
cradle of snow, new and frozen, sweeping up on either side, black crags, and
white sweeps of silver towards the blue pale heavens.
As they stepped out on the naked platform, with only snow around and above,
Gudrun shrank as if it chilled her heart.
“My God, Jerry,” she said, turning to Gerald with sudden
intimacy, “you’ve done it now.”
“What?”
She made a faint gesture, indicating the world on either hand.
“Look at it!”
She seemed afraid to go on. He laughed.
They were in the heart of the mountains. From high above, on either side,
swept down the white fold of snow, so that one seemed small and tiny in a valley
of pure concrete heaven, all strangely radiant and changeless and silent.
“It makes one feel so small and alone,” said Ursula, turning to
Birkin and laying her hand on his arm.
“You’re not sorry you’ve come, are you?” said Gerald
to Gudrun.
She looked doubtful. They went out of the station between banks of snow.
“Ah,” said Gerald, sniffing the air in elation, “this is
perfect. There’s our sledge. We’ll walk a bit—we’ll run
up the road.”
Gudrun, always doubtful, dropped her heavy coat on the sledge, as he did
his, and they set off. Suddenly she threw up her head and set off scudding along
the road of snow, pulling her cap down over her ears. Her blue, bright dress
fluttered in the wind, her thick scarlet stockings were brilliant above the
whiteness. Gerald watched her: she seemed to be rushing towards her fate, and
leaving him behind. He let her get some distance, then, loosening his limbs, he
went after her.
Everywhere was deep and silent snow. Great snow-eaves weighed down the
broad-roofed Tyrolese houses, that were sunk to the window-sashes in snow.
Peasant-women, full-skirted, wearing each a cross-over shawl, and thick
snow-boots, turned in the way to look at the soft, determined girl running with
such heavy fleetness from the man, who was overtaking her, but not gaining any
power over her.
They passed the inn with its painted shutters and balcony, a few cottages,
half buried in the snow; then the snow-buried silent sawmill by the roofed
bridge, which crossed the hidden stream, over which they ran into the very depth
of the untouched sheets of snow. It was a silence and a sheer whiteness
exhilarating to madness. But the perfect silence was most terrifying, isolating
the soul, surrounding the heart with frozen air.
“It’s a marvellous place, for all that,” said Gudrun,
looking into his eyes with a strange, meaning look. His soul leapt.
“Good,” he said.
A fierce electric energy seemed to flow over all his limbs, his muscles were
surcharged, his hands felt hard with strength. They walked along rapidly up the
snow-road, that was marked by withered branches of trees stuck in at intervals.
He and she were separate, like opposite poles of one fierce energy. But they
felt powerful enough to leap over the confines of life into the forbidden
places, and back again.
Birkin and Ursula were running along also, over the snow. He had disposed of
the luggage, and they had a little start of the sledges. Ursula was excited and
happy, but she kept turning suddenly to catch hold of Birkin’s arm, to
make sure of him.
“This is something I never expected,” she said. “It is a
different world, here.”
They went on into a snow meadow. There they were overtaken by the sledge,
that came tinkling through the silence. It was another mile before they came
upon Gudrun and Gerald on the steep up-climb, beside the pink, half-buried
shrine.
Then they passed into a gulley, where were walls of black rock and a river
filled with snow, and a still blue sky above. Through a covered bridge they
went, drumming roughly over the boards, crossing the snow-bed once more, then
slowly up and up, the horses walking swiftly, the driver cracking his long whip
as he walked beside, and calling his strange wild hue-hue!, the walls of
rock passing slowly by, till they emerged again between slopes and masses of snow.
Up and up, gradually they went, through the cold shadow-radiance of the afternoon,
silenced by the imminence of the mountains, the luminous, dazing sides of snow
that rose above them and fell away beneath.
They came forth at last in a little high table-land of snow, where stood the
last peaks of snow like the heart petals of an open rose. In the midst of the
last deserted valleys of heaven stood a lonely building with brown wooden walls
and white heavy roof, deep and deserted in the waste of snow, like a dream. It
stood like a rock that had rolled down from the last steep slopes, a rock that
had taken the form of a house, and was now half-buried. It was unbelievable that
one could live there uncrushed by all this terrible waste of whiteness and
silence and clear, upper, ringing cold.
Yet the sledges ran up in fine style, people came to the door laughing and
excited, the floor of the hostel rang hollow, the passage was wet with snow, it
was a real, warm interior.
The newcomers tramped up the bare wooden stairs, following the serving
woman. Gudrun and Gerald took the first bedroom. In a moment they found
themselves alone in a bare, smallish, close-shut room that was all of
golden-coloured wood, floor, walls, ceiling, door, all of the same warm gold
panelling of oiled pine. There was a window opposite the door, but low down,
because the roof sloped. Under the slope of the ceiling were the table with
wash-hand bowl and jug, and across, another table with mirror. On either side
the door were two beds piled high with an enormous blue-checked overbolster,
enormous.
This was all—no cupboard, none of the amenities of life. Here they
were shut up together in this cell of golden-coloured wood, with two blue
checked beds. They looked at each other and laughed, frightened by this naked
nearness of isolation.
A man knocked and came in with the luggage. He was a sturdy fellow with
flattish cheek-bones, rather pale, and with coarse fair moustache. Gudrun
watched him put down the bags, in silence, then tramp heavily out.
“It isn’t too rough, is it?” Gerald asked.
The bedroom was not very warm, and she shivered slightly.
“It is wonderful,” she equivocated. “Look at the colour of
this panelling—it’s wonderful, like being inside a nut.”
He was standing watching her, feeling his short-cut moustache, leaning back
slightly and watching her with his keen, undaunted eyes, dominated by the
constant passion, that was like a doom upon him.
She went and crouched down in front of the window, curious.
“Oh, but this—!” she cried involuntarily, almost in pain.
In front was a valley shut in under the sky, the last huge slopes of snow
and black rock, and at the end, like the navel of the earth, a white-folded
wall, and two peaks glimmering in the late light. Straight in front ran the
cradle of silent snow, between the great slopes that were fringed with a little
roughness of pine-trees, like hair, round the base. But the cradle of snow ran
on to the eternal closing-in, where the walls of snow and rock rose
impenetrable, and the mountain peaks above were in heaven immediate. This was
the centre, the knot, the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the
skies, pure, unapproachable, impassable.
It filled Gudrun with a strange rapture. She crouched in front of the
window, clenching her face in her hands, in a sort of trance. At last she had
arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her venture and
settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was gone.
Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder. Already he felt
he was alone. She was gone. She was completely gone, and there was icy vapour
round his heart. He saw the blind valley, the great cul-de-sac of snow and
mountain peaks, under the heaven. And there was no way out. The terrible silence
and cold and the glamorous whiteness of the dusk wrapped him round, and she
remained crouching before the window, as at a shrine, a shadow.
“Do you like it?” he asked, in a voice that sounded detached and
foreign. At least she might acknowledge he was with her. But she only averted
her soft, mute face a little from his gaze. And he knew that there were tears in
her eyes, her own tears, tears of her strange religion, that put him to nought.
Quite suddenly, he put his hand under her chin and lifted up her face to
him. Her dark blue eyes, in their wetness of tears, dilated as if she was
startled in her very soul. They looked at him through their tears in terror and
a little horror. His light blue eyes were keen, small-pupilled and unnatural in
their vision. Her lips parted, as she breathed with difficulty.
The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a
bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable. His knees tightened to
bronze as he hung above her soft face, whose lips parted and whose eyes dilated
in a strange violation. In the grasp of his hand her chin was unutterably soft
and silken. He felt strong as winter, his hands were living metal, invincible
and not to be turned aside. His heart rang like a bell clanging inside him.
He took her up in his arms. She was soft and inert, motionless. All the
while her eyes, in which the tears had not yet dried, were dilated as if in a
kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness. He was superhumanly strong, and
unflawed, as if invested with supernatural force.
He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness, her inert,
relaxed weight lay against his own surcharged, bronze-like limbs in a heaviness
of desirability that would destroy him, if he were not fulfilled. She moved
convulsively, recoiling away from him. His heart went up like a flame of ice, he
closed over her like steel. He would destroy her rather than be denied.
But the overweening power of his body was too much for her. She relaxed
again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium. And to him, she was
so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole
eternity of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of unsurpassable
bliss.
“My God,” he said to her, his face drawn and strange,
transfigured, “what next?”
She lay perfectly still, with a still, child-like face and dark eyes,
looking at him. She was lost, fallen right away.
“I shall always love you,” he said, looking at her.
But she did not hear. She lay, looking at him as at something she could
never understand, never: as a child looks at a grown-up person, without hope of
understanding, only submitting.
He kissed her, kissed her eyes shut, so that she could not look any more. He
wanted something now, some recognition, some sign, some admission. But she only
lay silent and child-like and remote, like a child that is overcome and cannot
understand, only feels lost. He kissed her again, giving up.
“Shall we go down and have coffee and Kuchen?” he asked.
The twilight was falling slate-blue at the window. She closed her eyes,
closed away the monotonous level of dead wonder, and opened them again to the
every-day world.
“Yes,” she said briefly, regaining her will with a click. She
went again to the window. Blue evening had fallen over the cradle of snow and
over the great pallid slopes. But in the heaven the peaks of snow were rosy,
glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly
upper-world, so lovely and beyond.
Gudrun saw all their loveliness, she knew how immortally beautiful they
were, great pistils of rose-coloured, snow-fed fire in the blue twilight of the
heaven. She could see it, she knew it, but she was not of it. She was divorced,
debarred, a soul shut out.
With a last look of remorse, she turned away, and was doing her hair. He had
unstrapped the luggage, and was waiting, watching her. She knew he was watching
her. It made her a little hasty and feverish in her precipitation.
They went downstairs, both with a strange other-world look on their faces,
and with a glow in their eyes. They saw Birkin and Ursula sitting at the long
table in a corner, waiting for them.
“How good and simple they look together,” Gudrun thought,
jealously. She envied them some spontaneity, a childish sufficiency to which she
herself could never approach. They seemed such children to her.
“Such good Kranzkuchen!” cried Ursula greedily. “So
good!”
“Right,” said Gudrun. “Can we have Kaffee mit
Kranzkuchen?” she added to the waiter.
And she seated herself on the bench beside Gerald. Birkin, looking at them,
felt a pain of tenderness for them.
“I think the place is really wonderful, Gerald,” he said;
“prachtvoll and wunderbar and wunderschön and
unbeschreiblich and all the other German adjectives.”
Gerald broke into a slight smile.
“I like it,” he said.
The tables, of white scrubbed wood, were placed round three sides of the
room, as in a Gasthaus. Birkin and Ursula sat with their backs to the wall,
which was of oiled wood, and Gerald and Gudrun sat in the corner next them, near
to the stove. It was a fairly large place, with a tiny bar, just like a country
inn, but quite simple and bare, and all of oiled wood, ceilings and walls and
floor, the only furniture being the tables and benches going round three sides,
the great green stove, and the bar and the doors on the fourth side. The windows
were double, and quite uncurtained. It was early evening.
The coffee came—hot and good—and a whole ring of cake.
“A whole Kuchen!” cried Ursula. “They give you more than
us! I want some of yours.”
There were other people in the place, ten altogether, so Birkin had found
out: two artists, three students, a man and wife, and a Professor and two
daughters—all Germans. The four English people, being newcomers, sat in
their coign of vantage to watch. The Germans peeped in at the door, called a
word to the waiter, and went away again. It was not meal-time, so they did not
come into this dining-room, but betook themselves, when their boots were
changed, to the Reunionsaal.
The English visitors could hear the occasional twanging of a zither, the
strumming of a piano, snatches of laughter and shouting and singing, a faint
vibration of voices. The whole building being of wood, it seemed to carry every
sound, like a drum, but instead of increasing each particular noise, it
decreased it, so that the sound of the zither seemed tiny, as if a diminutive
zither were playing somewhere, and it seemed the piano must be a small one, like
a little spinet.
The host came when the coffee was finished. He was a Tyrolese, broad, rather
flat-cheeked, with a pale, pock-marked skin and flourishing moustaches.
“Would you like to go to the Reunionsaal to be introduced to the other
ladies and gentlemen?” he asked, bending forward and smiling, showing his
large, strong teeth. His blue eyes went quickly from one to the other—he
was not quite sure of his ground with these English people. He was unhappy too
because he spoke no English and he was not sure whether to try his French.
“Shall we go to the Reunionsaal, and be introduced to the other
people?” repeated Gerald, laughing.
There was a moment’s hesitation.
“I suppose we’d better—better break the ice,” said
Birkin.
The women rose, rather flushed. And the Wirt’s black, beetle-like,
broad-shouldered figure went on ignominiously in front, towards the noise. He
opened the door and ushered the four strangers into the play-room.
Instantly a silence fell, a slight embarrassment came over the company. The
newcomers had a sense of many blond faces looking their way. Then, the host was
bowing to a short, energetic-looking man with large moustaches, and saying in a
low voice:
“Herr Professor, darf ich vorstellen—”
The Herr Professor was prompt and energetic. He bowed low to the English
people, smiling, and began to be a comrade at once.
“Nehmen die Herrschaften teil an unserer Unterhaltung?” he said,
with a vigorous suavity, his voice curling up in the question.
The four English people smiled, lounging with an attentive uneasiness in the
middle of the room. Gerald, who was spokesman, said that they would willingly
take part in the entertainment. Gudrun and Ursula, laughing, excited, felt the
eyes of all the men upon them, and they lifted their heads and looked nowhere,
and felt royal.
The Professor announced the names of those present, sans cérémonie. There
was a bowing to the wrong people and to the right people. Everybody was there,
except the man and wife. The two tall, clear-skinned, athletic daughters of the
professor, with their plain-cut, dark blue blouses and loden skirts, their
rather long, strong necks, their clear blue eyes and carefully banded hair, and
their blushes, bowed and stood back; the three students bowed very low, in the
humble hope of making an impression of extreme good-breeding; then there was a
thin, dark-skinned man with full eyes, an odd creature, like a child, and like a
troll, quick, detached; he bowed slightly; his companion, a large fair young
man, stylishly dressed, blushed to the eyes and bowed very low.
It was over.
“Herr Loerke was giving us a recitation in the Cologne dialect,”
said the Professor.
“He must forgive us for interrupting him,” said Gerald,
“we should like very much to hear it.”
There was instantly a bowing and an offering of seats. Gudrun and Ursula,
Gerald and Birkin sat in the deep sofas against the wall. The room was of naked
oiled panelling, like the rest of the house. It had a piano, sofas and chairs,
and a couple of tables with books and magazines. In its complete absence of
decoration, save for the big, blue stove, it was cosy and pleasant.
Herr Loerke was the little man with the boyish figure, and the round, full,
sensitive-looking head, and the quick, full eyes, like a mouse’s. He
glanced swiftly from one to the other of the strangers, and held himself aloof.
“Please go on with the recitation,” said the Professor, suavely,
with his slight authority. Loerke, who was sitting hunched on the piano stool,
blinked and did not answer.
“It would be a great pleasure,” said Ursula, who had been
getting the sentence ready, in German, for some minutes.
Then, suddenly, the small, unresponding man swung aside, towards his
previous audience and broke forth, exactly as he had broken off; in a
controlled, mocking voice, giving an imitation of a quarrel between an old
Cologne woman and a railway guard.
His body was slight and unformed, like a boy’s, but his voice was
mature, sardonic, its movement had the flexibility of essential energy, and of a
mocking penetrating understanding. Gudrun could not understand a word of his
monologue, but she was spell-bound, watching him. He must be an artist, nobody
else could have such fine adjustment and singleness. The Germans were doubled up
with laughter, hearing his strange droll words, his droll phrases of dialect.
And in the midst of their paroxysms, they glanced with deference at the four
English strangers, the elect. Gudrun and Ursula were forced to laugh. The room
rang with shouts of laughter. The blue eyes of the Professor’s daughters
were swimming over with laughter-tears, their clear cheeks were flushed crimson
with mirth, their father broke out in the most astonishing peals of hilarity,
the students bowed their heads on their knees in excess of joy. Ursula looked
round amazed, the laughter was bubbling out of her involuntarily. She looked at
Gudrun. Gudrun looked at her, and the two sisters burst out laughing, carried
away. Loerke glanced at them swiftly, with his full eyes. Birkin was sniggering
involuntarily. Gerald Crich sat erect, with a glistening look of amusement on
his face. And the laughter crashed out again, in wild paroxysms, the
Professor’s daughters were reduced to shaking helplessness, the veins of
the Professor’s neck were swollen, his face was purple, he was strangled
in ultimate, silent spasms of laughter. The students were shouting
half-articulated words that tailed off in helpless explosions. Then suddenly the
rapid patter of the artist ceased, there were little whoops of subsiding mirth,
Ursula and Gudrun were wiping their eyes, and the Professor was crying loudly.
“Das war ausgezeichnet, das war famos—”
“Wirklich famos,” echoed his exhausted daughters, faintly.
“And we couldn’t understand it,” cried Ursula.
“Oh leider, leider!” cried the Professor.
“You couldn’t understand it?” cried the Students, let
loose at last in speech with the newcomers. “Ja, das ist wirklich schade,
das ist schade, gnädige Frau. Wissen Sie—”
The mixture was made, the newcomers were stirred into the party, like new
ingredients, the whole room was alive. Gerald was in his element, he talked
freely and excitedly, his face glistened with a strange amusement. Perhaps even
Birkin, in the end, would break forth. He was shy and withheld, though full of
attention.
Ursula was prevailed upon to sing “Annie Lowrie,” as the
Professor called it. There was a hush of extreme deference. She had never
been so flattered in her life. Gudrun accompanied her on the piano, playing from
memory.
Ursula had a beautiful ringing voice, but usually no confidence, she spoiled
everything. This evening she felt conceited and untrammelled. Birkin was well in
the background, she shone almost in reaction, the Germans made her feel fine and
infallible, she was liberated into overweening self-confidence. She felt like a
bird flying in the air, as her voice soared out, enjoying herself extremely in
the balance and flight of the song, like the motion of a bird’s wings that
is up in the wind, sliding and playing on the air, she played with
sentimentality, supported by rapturous attention. She was very happy, singing
that song by herself, full of a conceit of emotion and power, working upon all
those people, and upon herself, exerting herself with gratification, giving
immeasurable gratification to the Germans.
At the end, the Germans were all touched with admiring, delicious
melancholy, they praised her in soft, reverent voices, they could not say too
much.
“Wie schön, wie rührend! Ach, die Schottischen Lieder, sie haben so
viel Stimmung! Aber die gnädige Frau hat eine wunderbare Stimme; die gnädige
Frau ist wirklich eine Künstlerin, aber wirklich!”
She was dilated and brilliant, like a flower in the morning sun. She felt
Birkin looking at her, as if he were jealous of her, and her breasts thrilled,
her veins were all golden. She was as happy as the sun that has just opened
above clouds. And everybody seemed so admiring and radiant, it was perfect.
After dinner she wanted to go out for a minute, to look at the world. The
company tried to dissuade her—it was so terribly cold. But just to look,
she said.
They all four wrapped up warmly, and found themselves in a vague,
unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made
strange shadows before the stars. It was indeed cold, bruisingly, frighteningly,
unnaturally cold. Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed
conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.
Yet it was wonderful, an intoxication, a silence of dim, unrealised snow, of
the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the
flashing stars. She could see Orion sloping up. How wonderful he was, wonderful
enough to make one cry aloud.
And all around was this cradle of snow, and there was firm snow underfoot,
that struck with heavy cold through her boot-soles. It was night, and silence.
She imagined she could hear the stars. She imagined distinctly she could hear
the celestial, musical motion of the stars, quite near at hand. She seemed like
a bird flying amongst their harmonious motion.
And she clung close to Birkin. Suddenly she realised she did not know what
he was thinking. She did not know where he was ranging.
“My love!” she said, stopping to look at him.
His face was pale, his eyes dark, there was a faint spark of starlight on
them. And he saw her face soft and upturned to him, very near. He kissed her
softly.
“What then?” he asked.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Too much,” he answered quietly.
She clung a little closer.
“Not too much,” she pleaded.
“Far too much,” he said, almost sadly.
“And does it make you sad, that I am everything to you?” she
asked, wistful. He held her close to him, kissing her, and saying, scarcely
audible:
“No, but I feel like a beggar—I feel poor.”
She was silent, looking at the stars now. Then she kissed him.
“Don’t be a beggar,” she pleaded, wistfully. “It
isn’t ignominious that you love me.”
“It is ignominious to feel poor, isn’t it?” he replied.
“Why? Why should it be?” she asked. He only stood still, in the
terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round
with his arms.
“I couldn’t bear this cold, eternal place without you,” he
said. “I couldn’t bear it, it would kill the quick of my
life.”
She kissed him again, suddenly.
“Do you hate it?” she asked, puzzled, wondering.
“If I couldn’t come near to you, if you weren’t here, I
should hate it. I couldn’t bear it,” he answered.
“But the people are nice,” she said.
“I mean the stillness, the cold, the frozen eternality,” he
said.
She wondered. Then her spirit came home to him, nestling unconscious in him.
“Yes, it is good we are warm and together,” she said.
And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel glowing
out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a cluster of yellow
berries. It seemed like a bunch of sun-sparks, tiny and orange in the midst of
the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow of a peak, blotting out the stars,
like a ghost.
They drew near to their home. They saw a man come from the dark building,
with a lighted lantern which swung golden, and made that his dark feet walked in
a halo of snow. He was a small, dark figure in the darkened snow. He unlatched
the door of an outhouse. A smell of cows, hot, animal, almost like beef, came
out on the heavily cold air. There was a glimpse of two cattle in their dark
stalls, then the door was shut again, and not a chink of light showed. It had
reminded Ursula again of home, of the Marsh, of her childhood, and of the
journey to Brussels, and, strangely, of Anton Skrebensky.
Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could
she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of
snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic
lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light.
There was a shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was
as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides
could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide
which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from
the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the
murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that
memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should
‘remember’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without
any recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just
come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do
with parents and antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no
father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery,
she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper
notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of reality, where she
had never existed before.
Even Gudrun was a separate unit, separate, separate, having nothing to do
with this self, this Ursula, in her new world of reality. That old shadow-world,
the actuality of the past—ah, let it go! She rose free on the wings of her
new condition.
Gudrun and Gerald had not come in. They had walked up the valley straight in
front of the house, not like Ursula and Birkin, on to the little hill at the
right. Gudrun was driven by a strange desire. She wanted to plunge on and on,
till she came to the end of the valley of snow. Then she wanted to climb the
wall of white finality, climb over, into the peaks that sprang up like sharp
petals in the heart of the frozen, mysterious navel of the world. She felt that
there, over the strange blind, terrible wall of rocky snow, there in the navel
of the mystic world, among the final cluster of peaks, there, in the infolded
navel of it all, was her consummation. If she could but come there, alone, and
pass into the infolded navel of eternal snow and of uprising, immortal peaks of
snow and rock, she would be a oneness with all, she would be herself the
eternal, infinite silence, the sleeping, timeless, frozen centre of the All.
They went back to the house, to the Reunionsaal. She was curious to see what
was going on. The men there made her alert, roused her curiosity. It was a new
taste of life for her, they were so prostrate before her, yet so full of life.
The party was boisterous; they were dancing all together, dancing the
Schuhplatteln, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner
in the air at the crisis. The Germans were all proficient—they were from
Munich chiefly. Gerald also was quite passable. There were three zithers
twanging away in a corner. It was a scene of great animation and confusion. The
Professor was initiating Ursula into the dance, stamping, clapping, and swinging
her high, with amazing force and zest. When the crisis came even Birkin was
behaving manfully with one of the Professor’s fresh, strong daughters, who
was exceedingly happy. Everybody was dancing, there was the most boisterous
turmoil.
Gudrun looked on with delight. The solid wooden floor resounded to the
knocking heels of the men, the air quivered with the clapping hands and the
zither music, there was a golden dust about the hanging lamps.
Suddenly the dance finished, Loerke and the students rushed out to bring in
drinks. There was an excited clamour of voices, a clinking of mug-lids, a great
crying of “Prosit—Prosit!” Loerke was everywhere at once, like
a gnome, suggesting drinks for the women, making an obscure, slightly risky joke
with the men, confusing and mystifying the waiter.
He wanted very much to dance with Gudrun. From the first moment he had seen
her, he wanted to make a connection with her. Instinctively she felt this, and
she waited for him to come up. But a kind of sulkiness kept him away from her,
so she thought he disliked her.
“Will you schuhplätteln, gnädige Frau?” said the large, fair
youth, Loerke’s companion. He was too soft, too humble for Gudrun’s
taste. But she wanted to dance, and the fair youth, who was called Leitner, was
handsome enough in his uneasy, slightly abject fashion, a humility that covered
a certain fear. She accepted him as a partner.
The zithers sounded out again, the dance began. Gerald led them, laughing,
with one of the Professor’s daughters. Ursula danced with one of the
students, Birkin with the other daughter of the Professor, the Professor with
Frau Kramer, and the rest of the men danced together, with quite as much zest as
if they had had women partners.
Because Gudrun had danced with the well-built, soft youth, his companion,
Loerke, was more pettish and exasperated than ever, and would not even notice
her existence in the room. This piqued her, but she made up to herself by
dancing with the Professor, who was strong as a mature, well-seasoned bull, and
as full of coarse energy. She could not bear him, critically, and yet she
enjoyed being rushed through the dance, and tossed up into the air, on his
coarse, powerful impetus. The Professor enjoyed it too, he eyed her with
strange, large blue eyes, full of galvanic fire. She hated him for the seasoned,
semi-paternal animalism with which he regarded her, but she admired his weight
of strength.
The room was charged with excitement and strong, animal emotion. Loerke was
kept away from Gudrun, to whom he wanted to speak, as by a hedge of thorns, and
he felt a sardonic ruthless hatred for this young love-companion, Leitner, who
was his penniless dependent. He mocked the youth, with an acid ridicule, that
made Leitner red in the face and impotent with resentment.
Gerald, who had now got the dance perfectly, was dancing again with the
younger of the Professor’s daughters, who was almost dying of virgin
excitement, because she thought Gerald so handsome, so superb. He had her in his
power, as if she were a palpitating bird, a fluttering, flushing, bewildered
creature. And it made him smile, as she shrank convulsively between his hands,
violently, when he must throw her into the air. At the end, she was so overcome
with prostrate love for him, that she could scarcely speak sensibly at all.
Birkin was dancing with Ursula. There were odd little fires playing in his
eyes, he seemed to have turned into something wicked and flickering, mocking,
suggestive, quite impossible. Ursula was frightened of him, and fascinated.
Clear, before her eyes, as in a vision, she could see the sardonic, licentious
mockery of his eyes, he moved towards her with subtle, animal, indifferent
approach. The strangeness of his hands, which came quick and cunning, inevitably
to the vital place beneath her breasts, and, lifting with mocking, suggestive
impulse, carried her through the air as if without strength, through blackmagic,
made her swoon with fear. For a moment she revolted, it was horrible. She would
break the spell. But before the resolution had formed she had submitted again,
yielded to her fear. He knew all the time what he was doing, she could see it in
his smiling, concentrated eyes. It was his responsibility, she would leave it to
him.
When they were alone in the darkness, she felt the strange, licentiousness
of him hovering upon her. She was troubled and repelled. Why should he turn like
this?
“What is it?” she asked in dread.
But his face only glistened on her, unknown, horrible. And yet she was
fascinated. Her impulse was to repel him violently, break from this spell of
mocking brutishness. But she was too fascinated, she wanted to submit, she
wanted to know. What would he do to her?
He was so attractive, and so repulsive at one. The sardonic suggestivity
that flickered over his face and looked from his narrowed eyes, made her want to
hide, to hide herself away from him and watch him from somewhere unseen.
“Why are you like this?” she demanded again, rousing against him
with sudden force and animosity.
The flickering fires in his eyes concentrated as he looked into her eyes.
Then the lids drooped with a faint motion of satiric contempt. Then they rose
again to the same remorseless suggestivity. And she gave way, he might do as he
would. His licentiousness was repulsively attractive. But he was
self-responsible, she would see what it was.
They might do as they liked—this she realised as she went to sleep.
How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading?
Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he was so
unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be
so soulful and spiritual, now to be so—she balked at her own thoughts and
memories: then she added—so bestial? So bestial, they two!—so
degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be
bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was
bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing
she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She
was free, when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her.
Gudrun, who had been watching Gerald in the Reunionsaal, suddenly thought:
“He should have all the women he can—it is his nature. It is
absurd to call him monogamous—he is naturally promiscuous. That is his
nature.”
The thought came to her involuntarily. It shocked her somewhat. It was as if
she had seen some new Mene! Mene! upon the wall. Yet it was merely true.
A voice seemed to have spoken it to her so clearly, that for the moment she
believed in inspiration.
“It is really true,” she said to herself again.
She knew quite well she had believed it all along. She knew it implicitly.
But she must keep it dark—almost from herself. She must keep it completely
secret. It was knowledge for her alone, and scarcely even to be admitted to
herself.
The deep resolve formed in her, to combat him. One of them must triumph over
the other. Which should it be? Her soul steeled itself with strength. Almost she
laughed within herself, at her confidence. It woke a certain keen, half
contemptuous pity, tenderness for him: she was so ruthless.
Everybody retired early. The Professor and Loerke went into a small lounge
to drink. They both watched Gudrun go along the landing by the railing upstairs.
“Ein schönes Frauenzimmer,” said the Professor.
“Ja!” asserted Loerke, shortly.
Gerald walked with his queer, long wolf-steps across the bedroom to the
window, stooped and looked out, then rose again, and turned to Gudrun, his eyes
sharp with an abstract smile. He seemed very tall to her, she saw the glisten of
his whitish eyebrows, that met between his brows.
“How do you like it?” he said.
He seemed to be laughing inside himself, quite unconsciously. She looked at
him. He was a phenomenon to her, not a human being: a sort of creature, greedy.
“I like it very much,” she replied.
“Who do you like best downstairs?” he asked, standing tall and
glistening above her, with his glistening stiff hair erect.
“Who do I like best?” she repeated, wanting to answer his
question, and finding it difficult to collect herself. “Why I don’t
know, I don’t know enough about them yet, to be able to say. Who do
you like best?”
“Oh, I don’t care—I don’t like or dislike any of
them. It doesn’t matter about me. I wanted to know about you.”
“But why?” she asked, going rather pale. The abstract,
unconscious smile in his eyes was intensified.
“I wanted to know,” he said.
She turned aside, breaking the spell. In some strange way, she felt he was
getting power over her.
“Well, I can’t tell you already,” she said.
She went to the mirror to take out the hairpins from her hair. She stood
before the mirror every night for some minutes, brushing her fine dark hair. It
was part of the inevitable ritual of her life.
He followed her, and stood behind her. She was busy with bent head, taking
out the pins and shaking her warm hair loose. When she looked up, she saw him in
the glass standing behind her, watching unconsciously, not consciously seeing
her, and yet watching, with finepupilled eyes that seemed to smile, and which
were not really smiling.
She started. It took all her courage for her to continue brushing her hair,
as usual, for her to pretend she was at her ease. She was far, far from being at
her ease with him. She beat her brains wildly for something to say to him.
“What are your plans for tomorrow?” she asked nonchalantly,
whilst her heart was beating so furiously, her eyes were so bright with strange
nervousness, she felt he could not but observe. But she knew also that he was
completely blind, blind as a wolf looking at her. It was a strange battle
between her ordinary consciousness and his uncanny, black-art consciousness.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “what would you like to
do?”
He spoke emptily, his mind was sunk away.
“Oh,” she said, with easy protestation, “I’m ready
for anything—anything will be fine for me, I’m sure.”
And to herself she was saying: “God, why am I so nervous—why are
you so nervous, you fool. If he sees it I’m done for forever—you
know you’re done for forever, if he sees the absurd state you’re
in.”
And she smiled to herself as if it were all child’s play. Meanwhile
her heart was plunging, she was almost fainting. She could see him, in the
mirror, as he stood there behind her, tall and over-arching—blond and
terribly frightening. She glanced at his reflection with furtive eyes, willing
to give anything to save him from knowing she could see him. He did not know she
could see his reflection. He was looking unconsciously, glisteningly down at her
head, from which the hair fell loose, as she brushed it with wild, nervous hand.
She held her head aside and brushed and brushed her hair madly. For her life,
she could not turn round and face him. For her life, she could not. And
the knowledge made her almost sink to the ground in a faint, helpless, spent.
She was aware of his frightening, impending figure standing close behind her,
she was aware of his hard, strong, unyielding chest, close upon her back. And
she felt she could not bear it any more, in a few minutes she would fall down at
his feet, grovelling at his feet, and letting him destroy her.
The thought pricked up all her sharp intelligence and presence of mind. She
dared not turn round to him—and there he stood motionless, unbroken.
Summoning all her strength, she said, in a full, resonant, nonchalant voice,
that was forced out with all her remaining self-control:
“Oh, would you mind looking in that bag behind there and giving me
my—”
Here her power fell inert. “My what—my what—?” she
screamed in silence to herself.
But he had started round, surprised and startled that she should ask him to
look in her bag, which she always kept so very private to herself.
She turned now, her face white, her dark eyes blazing with uncanny,
overwrought excitement. She saw him stooping to the bag, undoing the loosely
buckled strap, unattentive.
“Your what?” he asked.
“Oh, a little enamel box—yellow—with a design of a
cormorant plucking her breast—”
She went towards him, stooping her beautiful, bare arm, and deftly turned
some of her things, disclosing the box, which was exquisitely painted.
“That is it, see,” she said, taking it from under his eyes.
And he was baffled now. He was left to fasten up the bag, whilst she swiftly
did up her hair for the night, and sat down to unfasten her shoes. She would not
turn her back to him any more.
He was baffled, frustrated, but unconscious. She had the whip hand over him
now. She knew he had not realised her terrible panic. Her heart was beating
heavily still. Fool, fool that she was, to get into such a state! How she
thanked God for Gerald’s obtuse blindness. Thank God he could see nothing.
She sat slowly unlacing her shoes, and he too commenced to undress. Thank
God that crisis was over. She felt almost fond of him now, almost in love with
him.
“Ah, Gerald,” she laughed, caressively, teasingly, “Ah,
what a fine game you played with the Professor’s
daughter—didn’t you now?”
“What game?” he asked, looking round.
“Isn’t she in love with you—oh dear, isn’t
she in love with you!” said Gudrun, in her gayest, most attractive mood.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Shouldn’t think so!” she teased. “Why the poor girl
is lying at this moment overwhelmed, dying with love for you. She thinks
you’re wonderful—oh marvellous, beyond what man has ever been.
really, isn’t it funny?”
“Why funny, what is funny?” he asked.
“Why to see you working it on her,” she said, with a half
reproach that confused the male conceit in him. “Really Gerald, the poor
girl—!”
“I did nothing to her,” he said.
“Oh, it was too shameful, the way you simply swept her off her
feet.”
“That was Schuhplatteln,” he replied, with a bright grin.
“Ha—ha—ha!” laughed Gudrun.
Her mockery quivered through his muscles with curious re-echoes. When he
slept he seemed to crouch down in the bed, lapped up in his own strength, that
yet was hollow.
And Gudrun slept strongly, a victorious sleep. Suddenly, she was almost
fiercely awake. The small timber room glowed with the dawn, that came upwards
from the low window. She could see down the valley when she lifted her head: the
snow with a pinkish, half-revealed magic, the fringe of pine-trees at the bottom
of the slope. And one tiny figure moved over the vaguely-illuminated space.
She glanced at his watch; it was seven o’clock. He was still
completely asleep. And she was so hard awake, it was almost frightening—a
hard, metallic wakefulness. She lay looking at him.
He slept in the subjection of his own health and defeat. She was overcome by
a sincere regard for him. Till now, she was afraid before him. She lay and
thought about him, what he was, what he represented in the world. A fine,
independent will, he had. She thought of the revolution he had worked in the
mines, in so short a time. She knew that, if he were confronted with any
problem, any hard actual difficulty, he would overcome it. If he laid hold of
any idea, he would carry it through. He had the faculty of making order out of
confusion. Only let him grip hold of a situation, and he would bring to pass an
inevitable conclusion.
For a few moments she was borne away on the wild wings of ambition. Gerald,
with his force of will and his power for comprehending the actual world, should
be set to solve the problems of the day, the problem of industrialism in the
modern world. She knew he would, in the course of time, effect the changes he
desired, he could re-organise the industrial system. She knew he could do it. As
an instrument, in these things, he was marvellous, she had never seen any man
with his potentiality. He was unaware of it, but she knew.
He only needed to be hitched on, he needed that his hand should be set to
the task, because he was so unconscious. And this she could do. She would marry
him, he would go into Parliament in the Conservative interest, he would clear up
the great muddle of labour and industry. He was so superbly fearless, masterful,
he knew that every problem could be worked out, in life as in geometry. And he
would care neither about himself nor about anything but the pure working out of
the problem. He was very pure, really.
Her heart beat fast, she flew away on wings of elation, imagining a future.
He would be a Napoleon of peace, or a Bismarck—and she the woman behind
him. She had read Bismarck’s letters, and had been deeply moved by them.
And Gerald would be freer, more dauntless than Bismarck.
But even as she lay in fictitious transport, bathed in the strange, false
sunshine of hope in life, something seemed to snap in her, and a terrible
cynicism began to gain upon her, blowing in like a wind. Everything turned to
irony with her: the last flavour of everything was ironical. When she felt her
pang of undeniable reality, this was when she knew the hard irony of hopes and
ideas.
She lay and looked at him, as he slept. He was sheerly beautiful, he was a
perfect instrument. To her mind, he was a pure, inhuman, almost superhuman
instrument. His instrumentality appealed so strongly to her, she wished she were
God, to use him as a tool.
And at the same instant, came the ironical question: “What for?”
She thought of the colliers’ wives, with their linoleum and their lace
curtains and their little girls in high-laced boots. She thought of the wives
and daughters of the pit-managers, their tennis-parties, and their terrible
struggles to be superior each to the other, in the social scale. There was
Shortlands with its meaningless distinction, the meaningless crowd of the
Criches. There was London, the House of Commons, the extant social world. My
God!
Young as she was, Gudrun had touched the whole pulse of social England. She
had no ideas of rising in the world. She knew, with the perfect cynicism of
cruel youth, that to rise in the world meant to have one outside show instead of
another, the advance was like having a spurious half-crown instead of a spurious
penny. The whole coinage of valuation was spurious. Yet of course, her cynicism
knew well enough that, in a world where spurious coin was current, a bad
sovereign was better than a bad farthing. But rich and poor, she despised both
alike.
Already she mocked at herself for her dreams. They could be fulfilled easily
enough. But she recognised too well, in her spirit, the mockery of her own
impulses. What did she care, that Gerald had created a richly-paying industry
out of an old worn-out concern? What did she care? The worn-out concern and the
rapid, splendidly organised industry, they were bad money. Yet of course, she
cared a great deal, outwardly—and outwardly was all that mattered, for
inwardly was a bad joke.
Everything was intrinsically a piece of irony to her. She leaned over Gerald
and said in her heart, with compassion:
“Oh, my dear, my dear, the game isn’t worth even you. You are a
fine thing really—why should you be used on such a poor show!”
Her heart was breaking with pity and grief for him. And at the same moment,
a grimace came over her mouth, of mocking irony at her own unspoken tirade. Ah,
what a farce it was! She thought of Parnell and Katherine O’Shea. Parnell!
After all, who can take the nationalisation of Ireland seriously? Who can take
political Ireland really seriously, whatever it does? And who can take political
England seriously? Who can? Who can care a straw, really, how the old patched-up
Constitution is tinkered at any more? Who cares a button for our national ideas,
any more than for our national bowler hat? Aha, it is all old hat, it is all old
bowler hat!
That’s all it is, Gerald, my young hero. At any rate we’ll spare
ourselves the nausea of stirring the old broth any more. You be beautiful, my
Gerald, and reckless. There are perfect moments. Wake up, Gerald, wake up,
convince me of the perfect moments. Oh, convince me, I need it.
He opened his eyes, and looked at her. She greeted him with a mocking,
enigmatic smile in which was a poignant gaiety. Over his face went the
reflection of the smile, he smiled, too, purely unconsciously.
That filled her with extraordinary delight, to see the smile cross his face,
reflected from her face. She remembered that was how a baby smiled. It filled
her with extraordinary radiant delight.
“You’ve done it,” she said.
“What?” he asked, dazed.
“Convinced me.”
And she bent down, kissing him passionately, passionately, so that he was
bewildered. He did not ask her of what he had convinced her, though he meant to.
He was glad she was kissing him. She seemed to be feeling for his very heart to
touch the quick of him. And he wanted her to touch the quick of his being, he
wanted that most of all.
Outside, somebody was singing, in a manly, reckless handsome voice:
“Mach mir auf, mach mir auf, du Stolze,
Mach mir ein Feuer von Holze.
Vom Regen bin ich nass
Vom Regen bin ich nass—”
Gudrun knew that that song would sound through her eternity, sung in a
manly, reckless, mocking voice. It marked one of her supreme moments, the
supreme pangs of her nervous gratification. There it was, fixed in eternity for
her.
The day came fine and bluish. There was a light wind blowing among the
mountain tops, keen as a rapier where it touched, carrying with it a fine dust
of snow-powder. Gerald went out with the fine, blind face of a man who is in his
state of fulfilment. Gudrun and he were in perfect static unity this morning,
but unseeing and unwitting. They went out with a toboggan, leaving Ursula and
Birkin to follow.
Gudrun was all scarlet and royal blue—a scarlet jersey and cap, and a
royal blue skirt and stockings. She went gaily over the white snow, with Gerald
beside her, in white and grey, pulling the little toboggan. They grew small in
the distance of snow, climbing the steep slope.
For Gudrun herself, she seemed to pass altogether into the whiteness of the
snow, she became a pure, thoughtless crystal. When she reached the top of the
slope, in the wind, she looked round, and saw peak beyond peak of rock and snow,
bluish, transcendent in heaven. And it seemed to her like a garden, with the
peaks for pure flowers, and her heart gathering them. She had no separate
consciousness for Gerald.
She held on to him as they went sheering down over the keen slope. She felt
as if her senses were being whetted on some fine grindstone, that was keen as
flame. The snow sprinted on either side, like sparks from a blade that is being
sharpened, the whiteness round about ran swifter, swifter, in pure flame the
white slope flew against her, and she fused like one molten, dancing globule,
rushed through a white intensity. Then there was a great swerve at the bottom,
when they swung as it were in a fall to earth, in the diminishing motion.
They came to rest. But when she rose to her feet, she could not stand. She
gave a strange cry, turned and clung to him, sinking her face on his breast,
fainting in him. Utter oblivion came over her, as she lay for a few moments
abandoned against him.
“What is it?” he was saying. “Was it too much for
you?”
But she heard nothing.
When she came to, she stood up and looked round, astonished. Her face was
white, her eyes brilliant and large.
“What is it?” he repeated. “Did it upset you?”
She looked at him with her brilliant eyes that seemed to have undergone some
transfiguration, and she laughed, with a terrible merriment.
“No,” she cried, with triumphant joy. “It was the complete
moment of my life.”
And she looked at him with her dazzling, overweening laughter, like one
possessed. A fine blade seemed to enter his heart, but he did not care, or take
any notice.
But they climbed up the slope again, and they flew down through the white
flame again, splendidly, splendidly. Gudrun was laughing and flashing, powdered
with snow-crystals, Gerald worked perfectly. He felt he could guide the toboggan
to a hair-breadth, almost he could make it pierce into the air and right into
the very heart of the sky. It seemed to him the flying sledge was but his
strength spread out, he had but to move his arms, the motion was his own. They
explored the great slopes, to find another slide. He felt there must be
something better than they had known. And he found what he desired, a perfect
long, fierce sweep, sheering past the foot of a rock and into the trees at the
base. It was dangerous, he knew. But then he knew also he would direct the
sledge between his fingers.
The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing,
skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life
itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman
abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.
Gerald’s eyes became hard and strange, and as he went by on his skis
he was more like some powerful, fateful sigh than a man, his muscles elastic in
a perfect, soaring trajectory, his body projected in pure flight, mindless,
soulless, whirling along one perfect line of force.
Luckily there came a day of snow, when they must all stay indoors: otherwise
Birkin said, they would all lose their faculties, and begin to utter themselves
in cries and shrieks, like some strange, unknown species of snow-creatures.
It happened in the afternoon that Ursula sat in the Reunionsaal talking
to Loerke. The latter had seemed unhappy lately. He was lively and full of
mischievous humour, as usual.
But Ursula had thought he was sulky about something. His partner, too, the
big, fair, good-looking youth, was ill at ease, going about as if he belonged to
nowhere, and was kept in some sort of subjection, against which he was
rebelling.
Loerke had hardly talked to Gudrun. His associate, on the other hand, had
paid her constantly a soft, over-deferential attention. Gudrun wanted to talk to
Loerke. He was a sculptor, and she wanted to hear his view of his art. And his
figure attracted her. There was the look of a little wastrel about him, that
intrigued her, and an old man’s look, that interested her, and then,
beside this, an uncanny singleness, a quality of being by himself, not in
contact with anybody else, that marked out an artist to her. He was a chatterer,
a magpie, a maker of mischievous word-jokes, that were sometimes very clever,
but which often were not. And she could see in his brown, gnome’s eyes,
the black look of inorganic misery, which lay behind all his small buffoonery.
His figure interested her—the figure of a boy, almost a street arab.
He made no attempt to conceal it. He always wore a simple loden suit, with knee
breeches. His legs were thin, and he made no attempt to disguise the fact: which
was of itself remarkable, in a German. And he never ingratiated himself
anywhere, not in the slightest, but kept to himself, for all his apparent
playfulness.
Leitner, his companion, was a great sportsman, very handsome with his big
limbs and his blue eyes. Loerke would go toboganning or skating, in little
snatches, but he was indifferent. And his fine, thin nostrils, the nostrils of a
pure-bred street arab, would quiver with contempt at Leitner’s splothering
gymnastic displays. It was evident that the two men who had travelled and lived
together, sharing the same bedroom, had now reached the stage of loathing.
Leitner hated Loerke with an injured, writhing, impotent hatred, and Loerke
treated Leitner with a fine-quivering contempt and sarcasm. Soon the two would
have to go apart.
Already they were rarely together. Leitner ran attaching himself to somebody
or other, always deferring, Loerke was a good deal alone. Out of doors he wore a
Westphalian cap, a close brown-velvet head with big brown velvet flaps down over
his ears, so that he looked like a lop-eared rabbit, or a troll. His face was
brown-red, with a dry, bright skin, that seemed to crinkle with his mobile
expressions. His eyes were arresting—brown, full, like a rabbit’s,
or like a troll’s, or like the eyes of a lost being, having a strange,
dumb, depraved look of knowledge, and a quick spark of uncanny fire. Whenever
Gudrun had tried to talk to him he had shied away unresponsive, looking at her
with his watchful dark eyes, but entering into no relation with her. He had made
her feel that her slow French and her slower German, were hateful to him. As for
his own inadequate English, he was much too awkward to try it at all. But he
understood a good deal of what was said, nevertheless. And Gudrun, piqued, left
him alone.
This afternoon, however, she came into the lounge as he was talking to
Ursula. His fine, black hair somehow reminded her of a bat, thin as it was on
his full, sensitive-looking head, and worn away at the temples. He sat hunched
up, as if his spirit were bat-like. And Gudrun could see he was making some slow
confidence to Ursula, unwilling, a slow, grudging, scanty self-revelation. She
went and sat by her sister.
He looked at her, then looked away again, as if he took no notice of her.
But as a matter of fact, she interested him deeply.
“Isn’t it interesting, Prune,” said Ursula, turning to her
sister, “Herr Loerke is doing a great frieze for a factory in Cologne, for
the outside, the street.”
She looked at him, at his thin, brown, nervous hands, that were prehensile,
and somehow like talons, like “griffes,” inhuman.
“What in?” she asked.
“Aus was?” repeated Ursula.
“Granit,” he replied.
It had become immediately a laconic series of question and answer between
fellow craftsmen.
“What is the relief?” asked Gudrun.
“Alto relievo.”
“And at what height?”
It was very interesting to Gudrun to think of his making the great granite
frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne. She got from him some notion of
the design. It was a representation of a fair, with peasants and artisans in an
orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously
in roundabouts, gaping at shows, kissing and staggering and rolling in knots,
swinging in swing-boats, and firing down shooting galleries, a frenzy of chaotic
motion.
There was a swift discussion of technicalities. Gudrun was very much
impressed.
“But how wonderful, to have such a factory!” cried Ursula.
“Is the whole building fine?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “The frieze is part of the whole
architecture. Yes, it is a colossal thing.”
Then he seemed to stiffen, shrugged his shoulders, and went on:
“Sculpture and architecture must go together. The day for irrelevant
statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always
part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff,
since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our
art—our factory-area our Parthenon, ecco!”
Ursula pondered.
“I suppose,” she said, “there is no need for our great
works to be so hideous.”
Instantly he broke into motion.
“There you are!” he cried, “there you are! There is not
only no need for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the
work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In
the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will
wither the work as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines,
the very act of labour. Whereas the machinery and the acts of labour are
extremely, maddeningly beautiful. But this will be the end of our civilisation,
when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their
senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. Then we shall
see the hammer used only for smashing, then we shall see it. Yet here we
are—we have the opportunity to make beautiful factories, beautiful
machine-houses—we have the opportunity—”
Gudrun could only partly understand. She could have cried with vexation.
“What does he say?” she asked Ursula. And Ursula translated,
stammering and brief. Loerke watched Gudrun’s face, to see her judgment.
“And do you think then,” said Gudrun, “that art should
serve industry?”
“Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted
religion,” he said.
“But does your fair interpret industry?” she asked him.
“Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is
fulfilling the counterpart of labour—the machine works him, instead of he
the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.”
“But is there nothing but work—mechanical work?” said
Gudrun.
“Nothing but work!” he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two
darknesses, with needle-points of light. “No, it is nothing but this,
serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is
all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs
us.”
Gudrun quivered and flushed. For some reason she was almost in tears.
“No, I have not worked for hunger,” she replied, “but I
have worked!”
“Travaillé—lavorato?” he asked. “E che
lavoro—che lavoro? Quel travail est-ce que vous avez fait?”
He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign
language when he spoke to her.
“You have never worked as the world works,” he said to her, with
sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said. “I have. And I do—I work now for my
daily bread.”
He paused, looked at her steadily, then dropped the subject entirely. She
seemed to him to be trifling.
“But have you ever worked as the world works?” Ursula asked him.
He looked at her untrustful.
“Yes,” he replied, with a surly bark. “I have known what
it was to lie in bed for three days, because I had nothing to eat.”
Gudrun was looking at him with large, grave eyes, that seemed to draw the
confession from him as the marrow from his bones. All his nature held him back
from confessing. And yet her large, grave eyes upon him seemed to open some
valve in his veins, and involuntarily he was telling.
“My father was a man who did not like work, and we had no mother. We
lived in Austria, Polish Austria. How did we live? Ha!—somehow! Mostly in
a room with three other families—one set in each corner—and the W.C.
in the middle of the room—a pan with a plank on it—ha! I had two
brothers and a sister—and there might be a woman with my father. He was a
free being, in his way—would fight with any man in the town—a
garrison town—and was a little man too. But he wouldn’t work for
anybody—set his heart against it, and wouldn’t.”
“And how did you live then?” asked Ursula.
He looked at her—then, suddenly, at Gudrun.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“Enough,” she replied.
Their eyes met for a moment. Then he looked away. He would say no more.
“And how did you become a sculptor?” asked Ursula.
“How did I become a sculptor—” he paused.
“Dunque—” he resumed, in a changed manner, and beginning
to speak French—“I became old enough—I used to steal from the
market-place. Later I went to work—imprinted the stamp on clay bottles,
before they were baked. It was an earthenware-bottle factory. There I began
making models. One day, I had had enough. I lay in the sun and did not go to
work. Then I walked to Munich—then I walked to Italy—begging,
begging everything.”
“The Italians were very good to me—they were good and honourable
to me. From Bozen to Rome, almost every night I had a meal and a bed, perhaps of
straw, with some peasant. I love the Italian people, with all my heart.
“Dunque, adesso—maintenant—I earn a thousand pounds
in a year, or I earn two thousand—”
He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence.
Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the sun,
drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair—and at the thick,
coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile, rather shapeless
mouth.
“How old are you?” she asked.
He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.
“Wie alt?” he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one
of his reticencies.
“How old are you?” he replied, without answering.
“I am twenty-six,” she answered.
“Twenty-six,” he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused.
Then he said:
“Und Ihr Herr Gemahl, wie alt ist er?”
“Who?” asked Gudrun.
“Your husband,” said Ursula, with a certain irony.
“I haven’t got a husband,” said Gudrun in English. In
German she answered,
“He is thirty-one.”
But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious eyes.
Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like one of the
“little people’ who have no soul, who has found his mate in a human
being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him,
fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or a brown seal, had
begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was unconscious of, his
tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending her living motion. He did not
know his own power. He did not know how, with his full, submerged, watchful
eyes, he could look into her and see her, what she was, see her secrets. He
would only want her to be herself—he knew her verily, with a subconscious,
sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes.
To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody else
had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he,
with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all
illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he
cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest
attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical
and momentaneous. There was only his work.
It was curious too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier life,
attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her, in the idea of
a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through school and university.
A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in her for this mud-child. He
seemed to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond
him.
Ursula too was attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain
homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior,
false, a vulgarism.
Both Birkin and Gerald disliked him, Gerald ignoring him with some contempt,
Birkin exasperated.
“What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?”
Gerald asked.
“God alone knows,” replied Birkin, “unless it’s some
sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over
them.”
Gerald looked up in surprise.
“Does he make an appeal to them?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” replied Birkin. “He is the perfectly subjected
being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a
current of air towards a vacuum.”
“Funny they should rush to that,” said Gerald.
“Makes one mad, too,” said Birkin. “But he has the
fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the
darkness that he is.”
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
“What do women want, at the bottom?” he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
“God knows,” he said. “Some satisfaction in basic
repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of
darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.”
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere
was blind today, horribly blind.
“And what is the end?” he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
“I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke,
he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I
can go.”
“Yes, but stages further in what?” cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
“Stages further in social hatred,” he said. “He lives like
a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless
pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He
hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a
Jew—or part Jewish.”
“Probably,” said Gerald.
“He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.”
“But why does anybody care about him?” cried Gerald.
“Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to
explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.”
Still Gerald stood and stared at the blind haze of snow outside.
“I don’t understand your terms, really,” he said, in a
flat, doomed voice. “But it sounds a rum sort of desire.”
“I suppose we want the same,” said Birkin. “Only we want
to take a quick jump downwards, in a sort of ecstasy—and he ebbs with the
stream, the sewer stream.”
Meanwhile Gudrun and Ursula waited for the next opportunity to talk to
Loerke. It was no use beginning when the men were there. Then they could get
into no touch with the isolated little sculptor. He had to be alone with them.
And he preferred Ursula to be there, as a sort of transmitter to Gudrun.
“Do you do nothing but architectural sculpture?” Gudrun asked
him one evening.
“Not now,” he replied. “I have done all sorts—except
portraits—I never did portraits. But other things—”
“What kind of things?” asked Gudrun.
He paused a moment, then rose, and went out of the room. He returned almost
immediately with a little roll of paper, which he handed to her. She unrolled
it. It was a photogravure reproduction of a statuette, signed F. Loerke.
“That is quite an early thing—not mechanical,” he said,
“more popular.”
The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great
naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways
on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little
abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided,
half covering her hands.
Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of
a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side
of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other,
as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked
flank of the horse.
The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive,
magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and
terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power.
Gudrun went pale, and a darkness came over her eyes, like shame, she looked
up with a certain supplication, almost slave-like. He glanced at her, and jerked
his head a little.
“How big is it?” she asked, in a toneless voice, persisting in
appearing casual and unaffected.
“How big?” he replied, glancing again at her. “Without
pedestal—so high—” he measured with his hand—“with
pedestal, so—”
He looked at her steadily. There was a little brusque, turgid contempt for
her in his swift gesture, and she seemed to cringe a little.
“And what is it done in?” she asked, throwing back her head and
looking at him with affected coldness.
He still gazed at her steadily, and his dominance was not shaken.
“Bronze—green bronze.”
“Green bronze!” repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his challenge.
She was thinking of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and
cold in green bronze.
“Yes, beautiful,” she murmured, looking up at him with a certain
dark homage.
He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant.
“Why,” said Ursula, “did you make the horse so stiff? It
is as stiff as a block.”
“Stiff?” he repeated, in arms at once.
“Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are
sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.”
He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference,
as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody.
“Wissen Sie,” he said, with an insulting patience and
condescension in his voice, “that horse is a certain form, part of a whole
form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a
friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see—it is part of
a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.”
Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from
the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied,
hotly, flushing and lifting her face.
“But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.”
He lifted his shoulders in another shrug.
“As you like—it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.”
Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of
this, any more of Ursula’s foolish persistence in giving herself away.
“What do you mean by ‘it is a picture of a horse?’” she cried at
her sister. “What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in
your head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea
altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a
horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn’t a horse,
that it is a falsity of your own make-up.”
Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came.
“But why does he have this idea of a horse?” she said. “I
know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really—”
Loerke snorted with rage.
“A picture of myself!” he repeated, in derision. “Wissen
sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of
art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with
anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and
other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two
different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other
is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion
everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action,
with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.”
“That is quite true,” cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of
rhapsody. “The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have
nothing to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing
to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.”
Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head
ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively,
and murmured,
“Ja—so ist es, so ist es.”
Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a
hole into them both.
“It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made
me,” she replied flatly. “The horse is a picture of your own stock,
stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then
ignored.”
He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not
trouble to answer this last charge.
Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an
insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But
then—fools must be suffered, if not gladly.
But Ursula was persistent too.
“As for your world of art and your world of reality,” she
replied, “you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear to
know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff,
hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say ‘it’s the
world of art.’ The world of art is only the truth about the real world,
that’s all—but you are too far gone to see it.”
She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike
of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood
looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was
undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his
last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted
her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing
violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief.
The others maintained a dead silence, letting the display of Ursula’s
obtrusiveness pass by. Then Gudrun asked, in a voice that was quite cool and
casual, as if resuming a casual conversation:
“Was the girl a model?”
“Nein, sie war kein Modell. Sie war eine kleine Malschülerin.”
“An art-student!” replied Gudrun.
And how the situation revealed itself to her! She saw the girl art-student,
unformed and of pernicious recklessness, too young, her straight flaxen hair cut
short, hanging just into her neck, curving inwards slightly, because it was
rather thick; and Loerke, the well-known master-sculptor, and the girl, probably
well-brought-up, and of good family, thinking herself so great to be his
mistress. Oh how well she knew the common callousness of it all. Dresden, Paris,
or London, what did it matter? She knew it.
“Where is she now?” Ursula asked.
Loerke raised his shoulders, to convey his complete ignorance and
indifference.
“That is already six years ago,” he said; “she will be
twenty-three years old, no more good.”
Gerald had picked up the picture and was looking at it. It attracted him
also. He saw on the pedestal, that the piece was called “Lady
Godiva.”
“But this isn’t Lady Godiva,” he said, smiling
good-humouredly. “She was the middle-aged wife of some Earl or other, who
covered herself with her long hair.”
“À la Maud Allan,” said Gudrun with a mocking grimace.
“Why Maud Allan?” he replied. “Isn’t it so? I always
thought the legend was that.”
“Yes, Gerald dear, I’m quite sure you’ve got the legend
perfectly.”
She was laughing at him, with a little, mock-caressive contempt.
“To be sure, I’d rather see the woman than the hair,” he
laughed in return.
“Wouldn’t you just!” mocked Gudrun.
Ursula rose and went away, leaving the three together.
Gudrun took the picture again from Gerald, and sat looking at it closely.
“Of course,” she said, turning to tease Loerke now, “you
understood your little Malschülerin.”
He raised his eyebrows and his shoulders in a complacent shrug.
“The little girl?” asked Gerald, pointing to the figure.
Gudrun was sitting with the picture in her lap. She looked up at Gerald,
full into his eyes, so that he seemed to be blinded.
“Didn’t he understand her!” she said to Gerald, in a
slightly mocking, humorous playfulness. “You’ve only to look at the
feet—aren’t they darling, so pretty and tender—oh,
they’re really wonderful, they are really—”
She lifted her eyes slowly, with a hot, flaming look into Loerke’s
eyes. His soul was filled with her burning recognition, he seemed to grow more
uppish and lordly.
Gerald looked at the small, sculptured feet. They were turned together, half
covering each other in pathetic shyness and fear. He looked at them a long time,
fascinated. Then, in some pain, he put the picture away from him. He felt full
of barrenness.
“What was her name?” Gudrun asked Loerke.
“Annette von Weck,” Loerke replied reminiscent. “Ja, sie
war hübsch. She was pretty—but she was tiresome. She was a
nuisance,—not for a minute would she keep still—not until I’d
slapped her hard and made her cry—then she’d sit for five
minutes.”
He was thinking over the work, his work, the all important to him.
“Did you really slap her?” asked Gudrun, coolly.
He glanced back at her, reading her challenge.
“Yes, I did,” he said, nonchalant, “harder than I have
ever beat anything in my life. I had to, I had to. It was the only way I got the
work done.”
Gudrun watched him with large, dark-filled eyes, for some moments. She
seemed to be considering his very soul. Then she looked down, in silence.
“Why did you have such a young Godiva then?” asked Gerald.
“She is so small, besides, on the horse—not big enough for
it—such a child.”
A queer spasm went over Loerke’s face.
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t like them any bigger, any
older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—after
that, they are no use to me.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Why not?” asked Gerald.
Loerke shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t find them interesting—or beautiful—they are
no good to me, for my work.”
“Do you mean to say a woman isn’t beautiful after she is
twenty?” asked Gerald.
“For me, no. Before twenty, she is small and fresh and tender and
slight. After that—let her be what she likes, she has nothing for me. The
Venus of Milo is a bourgeoise—so are they all.”
“And you don’t care for women at all after twenty?” asked
Gerald.
“They are no good to me, they are of no use in my art,” Loerke
repeated impatiently. “I don’t find them beautiful.”
“You are an epicure,” said Gerald, with a slight sarcastic
laugh.
“And what about men?” asked Gudrun suddenly.
“Yes, they are good at all ages,” replied Loerke. “A man
should be big and powerful—whether he is old or young is of no account, so
he has the size, something of massiveness and—and stupid form.”
Ursula went out alone into the world of pure, new snow. But the dazzling
whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly
strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb.
Suddenly she wanted to go away. It occurred to her, like a miracle, that she
might go away into another world. She had felt so doomed up here in the eternal
snow, as if there were no beyond.
Now suddenly, as by a miracle she remembered that away beyond, below her,
lay the dark fruitful earth, that towards the south there were stretches of land
dark with orange trees and cypress, grey with olives, that ilex trees lifted
wonderful plumy tufts in shadow against a blue sky. Miracle of
miracles!—this utterly silent, frozen world of the mountain-tops was not
universal! One might leave it and have done with it. One might go away.
She wanted to realise the miracle at once. She wanted at this instant to
have done with the snow-world, the terrible, static ice-built mountain tops. She
wanted to see the dark earth, to smell its earthy fecundity, to see the patient
wintry vegetation, to feel the sunshine touch a response in the buds.
She went back gladly to the house, full of hope. Birkin was reading, lying
in bed.
“Rupert,” she said, bursting in on him. “I want to go
away.”
He looked up at her slowly.
“Do you?” he replied mildly.
She sat by him and put her arms round his neck. It surprised her that he was
so little surprised.
“Don’t you?” she asked troubled.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said. “But I’m
sure I do.”
She sat up, suddenly erect.
“I hate it,” she said. “I hate the snow, and the
unnaturalness of it, the unnatural light it throws on everybody, the ghastly
glamour, the unnatural feelings it makes everybody have.”
He lay still and laughed, meditating.
“Well,” he said, “we can go away—we can go tomorrow.
We’ll go tomorrow to Verona, and find Romeo and Juliet, and sit in the
amphitheatre—shall we?”
Suddenly she hid her face against his shoulder with perplexity and shyness.
He lay so untrammelled.
“Yes,” she said softly, filled with relief. She felt her soul
had new wings, now he was so uncaring. “I shall love to be Romeo and
Juliet,” she said. “My love!”
“Though a fearfully cold wind blows in Verona,” he said,
“from out of the Alps. We shall have the smell of the snow in our
noses.”
She sat up and looked at him.
“Are you glad to go?” she asked, troubled.
His eyes were inscrutable and laughing. She hid her face against his neck,
clinging close to him, pleading:
“Don’t laugh at me—don’t laugh at me.”
“Why how’s that?” he laughed, putting his arms round her.
“Because I don’t want to be laughed at,” she whispered.
He laughed more, as he kissed her delicate, finely perfumed hair.
“Do you love me?” she whispered, in wild seriousness.
“Yes,” he answered, laughing.
Suddenly she lifted her mouth to be kissed. Her lips were taut and quivering
and strenuous, his were soft, deep and delicate. He waited a few moments in the
kiss. Then a shade of sadness went over his soul.
“Your mouth is so hard,” he said, in faint reproach.
“And yours is so soft and nice,” she said gladly.
“But why do you always grip your lips?” he asked, regretful.
“Never mind,” she said swiftly. “It is my way.”
She knew he loved her; she was sure of him. Yet she could not let go a
certain hold over herself, she could not bear him to question her. She gave
herself up in delight to being loved by him. She knew that, in spite of his joy
when she abandoned herself, he was a little bit saddened too. She could give
herself up to his activity. But she could not be herself, she dared not come
forth quite nakedly to his nakedness, abandoning all adjustment, lapsing in pure
faith with him. She abandoned herself to him, or she took hold of him and
gathered her joy of him. And she enjoyed him fully. But they were never quite
together, at the same moment, one was always a little left out. Nevertheless she
was glad in hope, glorious and free, full of life and liberty. And he was still
and soft and patient, for the time.
They made their preparations to leave the next day. First they went to
Gudrun’s room, where she and Gerald were just dressed ready for the
evening indoors.
“Prune,” said Ursula, “I think we shall go away tomorrow.
I can’t stand the snow any more. It hurts my skin and my soul.”
“Does it really hurt your soul, Ursula?” asked Gudrun, in some
surprise. “I can believe quite it hurts your skin—it is terrible.
But I thought it was admirable for the soul.”
“No, not for mine. It just injures it,” said Ursula.
“Really!” cried Gudrun.
There was a silence in the room. And Ursula and Birkin could feel that
Gudrun and Gerald were relieved by their going.
“You will go south?” said Gerald, a little ring of uneasiness in
his voice.
“Yes,” said Birkin, turning away. There was a queer, indefinable
hostility between the two men, lately. Birkin was on the whole dim and
indifferent, drifting along in a dim, easy flow, unnoticing and patient, since
he came abroad, whilst Gerald on the other hand, was intense and gripped into
white light, agonistes. The two men revoked one another.
Gerald and Gudrun were very kind to the two who were departing, solicitous
for their welfare as if they were two children. Gudrun came to Ursula’s
bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious,
and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick silk stockings, vermilion,
cornflower blue, and grey, bought in Paris. The grey ones were knitted, seamless
and heavy. Ursula was in raptures. She knew Gudrun must be feeling very
loving, to give away such treasures.
“I can’t take them from you, Prune,” she cried. “I
can’t possibly deprive you of them—the jewels.”
“Aren’t they jewels!” cried Gudrun, eyeing her gifts with
an envious eye. “Aren’t they real lambs!”
“Yes, you must keep them,” said Ursula.
“I don’t want them, I’ve got three more pairs. I
want you to keep them—I want you to have them. They’re
yours, there—”
And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under
Ursula’s pillow.
“One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely
stockings,” said Ursula.
“One does,” replied Gudrun; “the greatest joy of
all.”
And she sat down in the chair. It was evident she had come for a last talk.
Ursula, not knowing what she wanted, waited in silence.
“Do you feel, Ursula,” Gudrun began, rather sceptically,
that you are going-away-for-ever, never-to-return, sort of thing?”
“Oh, we shall come back,” said Ursula. “It isn’t a
question of train-journeys.”
“Yes, I know. But spiritually, so to speak, you are going away from us
all?”
Ursula quivered.
“I don’t know a bit what is going to happen,” she said.
“I only know we are going somewhere.”
Gudrun waited.
“And you are glad?” she asked.
Ursula meditated for a moment.
“I believe I am very glad,” she replied.
But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister’s face,
rather than the uncertain tones of her speech.
“But don’t you think you’ll want the old connection
with the world—father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England
and the world of thought—don’t you think you’ll need
that, really to make a world?”
Ursula was silent, trying to imagine.
“I think,” she said at length, involuntarily, “that Rupert
is right—one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the
old.”
Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes.
“One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,” she said.
“But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and
that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn’t to find a new world at
all, but only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.”
Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she
was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere
word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe.
“Perhaps,” she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody.
“But,” she added, “I do think that one can’t have
anything new whilst one cares for the old—do you know what I
mean?—even fighting the old is belonging to it. I know, one is tempted to
stop with the world, just to fight it. But then it isn’t worth it.”
Gudrun considered herself.
“Yes,” she said. “In a way, one is of the world if one
lives in it. But isn’t it really an illusion to think you can get out of
it? After all, a cottage in the Abruzzi, or wherever it may be, isn’t a
new world. No, the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through.”
Ursula looked away. She was so frightened of argument.
“But there can be something else, can’t there?” she said.
“One can see it through in one’s soul, long enough before it sees
itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen one’s soul, one
is something else.”
“Can one see it through in one’s soul?” asked Gudrun.
“If you mean that you can see to the end of what will happen, I
don’t agree. I really can’t agree. And anyhow, you can’t
suddenly fly off on to a new planet, because you think you can see to the end of
this.”
Ursula suddenly straightened herself.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes—one knows. One has no more
connections here. One has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet,
not to this. You’ve got to hop off.”
Gudrun reflected for a few moments. Then a smile of ridicule, almost of
contempt, came over her face.
“And what will happen when you find yourself in space?” she
cried in derision. “After all, the great ideas of the world are the same
there. You above everybody can’t get away from the fact that love, for
instance, is the supreme thing, in space as well as on earth.”
“No,” said Ursula, “it isn’t. Love is too human and
little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I
believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something
infinitely more than love. It isn’t so merely human.”
Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and
despised her sister so much, both! Then, suddenly she averted her face, saying
coldly, uglily:
“Well, I’ve got no further than love, yet.”
Over Ursula’s mind flashed the thought: “Because you never have
loved, you can’t get beyond it.”
Gudrun rose, came over to Ursula and put her arm round her neck.
“Go and find your new world, dear,” she said, her voice clanging
with false benignity. “After all, the happiest voyage is the quest of
Rupert’s Blessed Isles.”
Her arm rested round Ursula’s neck, her fingers on Ursula’s
cheek for a few moments. Ursula was supremely uncomfortable meanwhile. There was
an insult in Gudrun’s protective patronage that was really too hurting.
Feeling her sister’s resistance, Gudrun drew awkwardly away, turned over
the pillow, and disclosed the stockings again.
“Ha—ha!” she laughed, rather hollowly. “How we do
talk indeed—new worlds and old—!”
And they passed to the familiar worldly subjects.
Gerald and Birkin had walked on ahead, waiting for the sledge to overtake
them, conveying the departing guests.
“How much longer will you stay here?” asked Birkin, glancing up
at Gerald’s very red, almost blank face.
“Oh, I can’t say,” Gerald replied. “Till we get
tired of it.”
“You’re not afraid of the snow melting first?” asked
Birkin.
Gerald laughed.
“Does it melt?” he said.
“Things are all right with you then?” said Birkin.
Gerald screwed up his eyes a little.
“All right?” he said. “I never know what those common
words mean. All right and all wrong, don’t they become synonymous,
somewhere?”
“Yes, I suppose. How about going back?” asked Birkin.
“Oh, I don’t know. We may never get back. I don’t look
before and after,” said Gerald.
“Nor pine for what is not,” said Birkin.
Gerald looked into the distance, with the small-pupilled, abstract eyes of a
hawk.
“No. There’s something final about this. And Gudrun seems like
the end, to me. I don’t know—but she seems so soft, her skin like
silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it
burns the pith of my mind.” He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his
eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians.
“It blasts your soul’s eye,” he said, “and leaves you
sightless. Yet you want to be sightless, you want to be blasted,
you don’t want it any different.”
He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he braced
himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with vindictive, cowed
eyes, saying:
“Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman?
She’s so beautiful, so perfect, you find her so good, it tears you
like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot—ha, that perfection, when
you blast yourself, you blast yourself! And then—” he stopped on
the snow and suddenly opened his clenched hands—“it’s
nothing—your brain might have gone charred as rags—and—”
he looked round into the air with a queer histrionic movement “it’s
blasting—you understand what I mean—it is a great experience,
something final—and then—you’re shrivelled as if struck by
electricity.” He walked on in silence. It seemed like bragging, but like a
man in extremity bragging truthfully.
“Of course,” he resumed, “I wouldn’t not have
had it! It’s a complete experience. And she’s a wonderful woman.
But—how I hate her somewhere! It’s curious—”
Birkin looked at him, at his strange, scarcely conscious face. Gerald seemed
blank before his own words.
“But you’ve had enough now?” said Birkin. “You have
had your experience. Why work on an old wound?”
“Oh,” said Gerald, “I don’t know. It’s not
finished—”
And the two walked on.
“I’ve loved you, as well as Gudrun, don’t forget,”
said Birkin bitterly. Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly.
“Have you?” he said, with icy scepticism. “Or do you think
you have?” He was hardly responsible for what he said.
The sledge came. Gudrun dismounted and they all made their farewell. They
wanted to go apart, all of them. Birkin took his place, and the sledge drove
away leaving Gudrun and Gerald standing on the snow, waving. Something froze
Birkin’s heart, seeing them standing there in the isolation of the snow,
growing smaller and more isolated.