Women in Love

CHAPTER I.
SISTERS

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their
father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a
piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which
she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed
through their minds.

“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you really want
to get married?” Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her
face was calm and considerate.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It depends how you
mean.”

Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.

“Well,” she said, ironically, “it usually means one thing!
But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—” she darkened
slightly—“in a better position than you are in now.”

A shadow came over Ursula’s face.

“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.

“You don’t think one needs the experience of having been
married?” she asked.

“Do you think it need be an experience?” replied Ursula.

“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly.
“Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”

“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of
experience.”

Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.

“Of course,” she said, “there’s that to
consider.” This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost
angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula
stitched absorbedly.

“You wouldn’t consider a good offer?” asked Gudrun.

“I think I’ve rejected several,” said Ursula.

“Really!” Gudrun flushed dark—“But anything
really worth while? Have you really?”

“A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him
awfully,” said Ursula.

“Really! But weren’t you fearfully tempted?”

“In the abstract but not in the concrete,” said Ursula.
“When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted—oh, if I
were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted not
to.” The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.

“Isn’t it an amazing thing,” cried Gudrun, “how
strong the temptation is, not to!” They both laughed, looking at each
other. In their hearts they were frightened.

There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her
sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But
both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than
of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore
a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in
the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of
confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula’s sensitive expectancy.
The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sang-froid and
exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: “She is a smart woman.”
She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working
at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.

“I was hoping now for a man to come along,” Gudrun said,
suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace,
half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.

“So you have come home, expecting him here?” she laughed.

“Oh my dear,” cried Gudrun, strident, “I wouldn’t go
out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly
attractive individual of sufficient means—well—” she tailed
off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her.
“Don’t you find yourself getting bored?” she asked of her
sister. “Don’t you find, that things fail to materialize? Nothing
materializes! Everything withers in the bud.”

“What withers in the bud?” asked Ursula.

“Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.” There
was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.

“It does frighten one,” said Ursula, and again there was a
pause. “But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?”

“It seems to be the inevitable next step,” said Gudrun. Ursula
pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in
Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.

“I know,” she said, “it seems like that when one thinks in
the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him
coming home to one every evening, and saying ‘Hello,’ and giving one a
kiss—”

There was a blank pause.

“Yes,” said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. “It’s just
impossible. The man makes it impossible.”

“Of course there’s children—” said Ursula
doubtfully.

Gudrun’s face hardened.

“Do you really want children, Ursula?” she asked coldly.
A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.

“One feels it is still beyond one,” she said.

“Do you feel like that?” asked Gudrun. “I get no feeling
whatever from the thought of bearing children.”

Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula knitted
her brows.

“Perhaps it isn’t genuine,” she faltered. “Perhaps
one doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul—only
superficially.” A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want
to be too definite.

“When one thinks of other people’s children—” said
Ursula.

Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.

“Exactly,” she said, to close the conversation.

The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange
brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened. She lived
a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and
always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own
understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness,
something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last
integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the
womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an
intimation of something yet to come.

She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so
charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite
richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about
her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula
admired her with all her soul.

“Why did you come home, Prune?” she asked.

Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked
at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.

“Why did I come back, Ursula?” she repeated. “I have asked
myself a thousand times.”

“And don’t you know?”

“Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour
mieux sauter.”

And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.

“I know!” cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified,
and as if she did not know. “But where can one jump to?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Gudrun, somewhat superbly.
“If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”

“But isn’t it very risky?” asked Ursula.

A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun’s face.

“Ah!” she said laughing. “What is it all but words!”
And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.

“And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?” she
asked.

Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold
truthful voice, she said:

“I find myself completely out of it.”

“And father?”

Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.

“I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained,” she
said coldly.

“Yes,” wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an
end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as
if they had looked over the edge.

They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun’s cheek was flushed
with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.

“Shall we go out and look at that wedding?” she asked at length,
in a voice that was too casual.

“Yes!” cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and
leaping up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the
situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun’s nerves.

As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about
her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the
depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and
condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her.

The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a
wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid,
without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly
from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet
forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long
amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through
a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back
and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why
had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to
it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced
countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with
repulsion.

They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where
sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was
ashamed of it all.

“It is like a country in an underworld,” said Gudrun. “The
colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s
marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s really wonderful,
another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything
is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled,
everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.”

The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On the
left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with
cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of
crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark
air. Near at hand came the long rows of dwellings, approaching curved up the
hill-slope, in straight lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened
red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked
was black, trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from
the field by iron fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed
shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going
between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded
over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block, stared
after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines;
children called out names.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were
human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside?
She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat,
her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were
treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any
minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of
a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if
in the midst of some ordeal: “I want to go back, I want to go away, I want
not to know it, not to know that this exists.” Yet she must go forward.

Ursula could feel her suffering.

“You hate this, don’t you?” she asked.

“It bewilders me,” stammered Gudrun.

“You won’t stay long,” replied Ursula.

And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.

They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into
the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint
glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed
darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of
sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the
cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and
little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone
walls.

Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high banks
towards the church. There, in the lowest bend of the road, low under the trees,
stood a little group of expectant people, waiting to see the wedding. The
daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district, Thomas Crich, was getting
married to a naval officer.

“Let us go back,” said Gudrun, swerving away. “There are
all those people.”

And she hung wavering in the road.

“Never mind them,” said Ursula, “they’re all right.
They all know me, they don’t matter.”

“But must we go through them?” asked Gudrun.

“They’re quite all right, really,” said Ursula, going
forward. And together the two sisters approached the group of uneasy, watchful
common people. They were chiefly women, colliers’ wives of the more
shiftless sort. They had watchful, underworld faces.

The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight towards the gate.
The women made way for them, but barely sufficient, as if grudging to yield
ground. The sisters passed in silence through the stone gateway and up the
steps, on the red carpet, a policeman estimating their progress.

“What price the stockings!” said a voice at the back of Gudrun.
A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have
liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for
her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path, along the red carpet,
continuing in motion, in their sight.

“I won’t go into the church,” she said suddenly, with such
final decision that Ursula immediately halted, turned round, and branched off up
a small side path which led to the little private gate of the Grammar School,
whose grounds adjoined those of the church.

Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the churchyard, Ursula
sat down for a moment on the low stone wall under the laurel bushes, to rest.
Behind her, the large red building of the school rose up peacefully, the windows
all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs, before her, were the pale roofs and
tower of the old church. The sisters were hidden by the foliage.

Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted. She
was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and
thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture. But she
caused a constraint over Ursula’s nature, a certain weariness. Ursula
wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun’s
presence.

“Are we going to stay here?” asked Gudrun.

“I was only resting a minute,” said Ursula, getting up as if
rebuked. “We will stand in the corner by the fives-court, we shall see
everything from there.”

For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the churchyard, there was a
vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of violets from off the graves. Some
white daisies were out, bright as angels. In the air, the unfolding leaves of a
copper-beech were blood-red.

Punctually at eleven o’clock, the carriages began to arrive. There was
a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding
guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to the
church. They were all gay and excited because the sun was shining.

Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one as a
complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a
marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their
various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own
surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to
the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished
with, for her. There was none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the
Criches themselves began to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was
something not quite so preconcluded.

There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a
queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to
bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear,
transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features were strongly marked,
handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look. Her colourless hair was
untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from under her
blue silk hat. She looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but
heavily proud.

Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height,
well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the
strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the
same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was
something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh
and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice.
And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty
years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young,
good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister
stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. “His
totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself. “His mother is an old,
unbroken wolf.” And then she experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as
if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth. A
strange transport took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of
violent sensation. “Good God!” she exclaimed to herself, “what
is this?” And then, a moment after, she was saying assuredly, “I
shall know more of that man.” She was tortured with desire to see him
again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a
mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange
and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence,
this powerful apprehension of him. “Am I really singled out for him in
some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us
two?” she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a
muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.

The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come. Ursula
wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She
felt troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids had arrived.
Ursula watched them come up the steps. One of them she knew, a tall, slow,
reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face. This was
Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she came along, with her head
held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were
streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted forward as if
scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world. She
was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and
she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were
of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted
along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was
impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something
repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to
jeer, yet for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted
up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange
mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to
escape.

Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a little. She was the most
remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old
school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy,
nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her
soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was
the manly world that held her.

She had various intimacies of mind and soul with various men of capacity.
Ursula knew, among these men, only Rupert Birkin, who was one of the
school-inspectors of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in London. Moving
with her artist friends in different kinds of society, Gudrun had already come
to know a good many people of repute and standing. She had met Hermione twice,
but they did not take to each other. It would be queer to meet again down here
in the Midlands, where their social standing was so diverse, after they had
known each other on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances in
town. For Gudrun had been a social success, and had her friends among the slack
aristocracy that keeps touch with the arts.

Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew herself to be the social
equal, if not far the superior, of anyone she was likely to meet in Willey
Green. She knew she was accepted in the world of culture and of intellect. She
was a Kulturträger, a medium for the culture of ideas. With all that was
highest, whether in society or in thought or in public action, or even in art,
she was at one, she moved among the foremost, at home with them. No one could
put her down, no one could make mock of her, because she stood among the first,
and those that were against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or
in high association of thought and progress and understanding. So, she was
invulnerable. All her life, she had sought to make herself invulnerable,
unassailable, beyond reach of the world’s judgment.

And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking up the path to the
church, confident as she was that in every respect she stood beyond all vulgar
judgment, knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and perfect,
according to the first standards, yet she suffered a torture, under her
confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and
to despite. She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret
chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of
robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack,
a deficiency of being within her.

And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to close it up for ever.
She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was
sufficient, whole. For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built
over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common
maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit
of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the
while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of æsthetic
knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could
never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency.

If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would
be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and
triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it!
But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving. She made herself beautiful, she
strove so hard to come to that degree of beauty and advantage, when he should be
convinced. But always there was a deficiency.

He was perverse too. He fought her off, he always fought her off. The more
she strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back. And they had been
lovers now, for years. Oh, it was so wearying, so aching; she was so tired. But
still she believed in herself. She knew he was trying to leave her. She knew he
was trying to break away from her finally, to be free. But still she believed in
her strength to keep him, she believed in her own higher knowledge. His own
knowledge was high, she was the central touchstone of truth. She only needed his
conjunction with her.

And this, this conjunction with her, which was his highest fulfilment also,
with the perverseness of a wilful child he wanted to deny. With the wilfulness
of an obstinate child, he wanted to break the holy connection that was between
them.

He would be at this wedding; he was to be groom’s man. He would be in
the church, waiting. He would know when she came. She shuddered with nervous
apprehension and desire as she went through the church-door. He would be there,
surely he would see how beautiful her dress was, surely he would see how she had
made herself beautiful for him. He would understand, he would be able to see how
she was made for him, the first, how she was, for him, the highest. Surely at
last he would be able to accept his highest fate, he would not deny her.

In a little convulsion of too-tired yearning, she entered the church and
looked slowly along her cheeks for him, her slender body convulsed with
agitation. As best man, he would be standing beside the altar. She looked
slowly, deferring in her certainty.

And then, he was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were
drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached
mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final
hopelessness. It was beyond death, so utterly null, desert.

The bridegroom and the groom’s man had not yet come. There was a
growing consternation outside. Ursula felt almost responsible. She could not
bear it that the bride should arrive, and no groom. The wedding must not be a
fiasco, it must not.

But here was the bride’s carriage, adorned with ribbons and cockades.
Gaily the grey horses curvetted to their destination at the church-gate, a
laughter in the whole movement. Here was the quick of all laughter and pleasure.
The door of the carriage was thrown open, to let out the very blossom of the
day. The people on the roadway murmured faintly with the discontented murmuring
of a crowd.

The father stepped out first into the air of the morning, like a shadow. He
was a tall, thin, careworn man, with a thin black beard that was touched with
grey. He waited at the door of the carriage patiently, self-obliterated.

In the opening of the doorway was a shower of fine foliage and flowers, a
whiteness of satin and lace, and a sound of a gay voice saying:

“How do I get out?”

A ripple of satisfaction ran through the expectant people. They pressed near
to receive her, looking with zest at the stooping blond head with its flower
buds, and at the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down to the
step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming rush, and the bride like a
sudden surf-rush, floating all white beside her father in the morning shadow of
trees, her veil flowing with laughter.

“That’s done it!” she said.

She put her hand on the arm of her care-worn, sallow father, and frothing
her light draperies, proceeded over the eternal red carpet. Her father, mute and
yellowish, his black beard making him look more careworn, mounted the steps
stiffly, as if his spirit were absent; but the laughing mist of the bride went
along with him undiminished.

And no bridegroom had arrived! It was intolerable for her. Ursula, her heart
strained with anxiety, was watching the hill beyond; the white, descending road,
that should give sight of him. There was a carriage. It was running. It had just
come into sight. Yes, it was he. Ursula turned towards the bride and the people,
and, from her place of vantage, gave an inarticulate cry. She wanted to warn
them that he was coming. But her cry was inarticulate and inaudible, and she
flushed deeply, between her desire and her wincing confusion.

The carriage rattled down the hill, and drew near. There was a shout from
the people. The bride, who had just reached the top of the steps, turned round
gaily to see what was the commotion. She saw a confusion among the people, a cab
pulling up, and her lover dropping out of the carriage, and dodging among the
horses and into the crowd.

“Tibs! Tibs!” she cried in her sudden, mocking excitement,
standing high on the path in the sunlight and waving her bouquet. He, dodging
with his hat in his hand, had not heard.

“Tibs!” she cried again, looking down to him.

He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her father standing on the
path above him. A queer, startled look went over his face. He hesitated for a
moment. Then he gathered himself together for a leap, to overtake her.

“Ah-h-h!” came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the reflex, she
started, turned and fled, scudding with an unthinkable swift beating of her
white feet and fraying of her white garments, towards the church. Like a hound
the young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging past her father, his
supple haunches working like those of a hound that bears down on the quarry.

“Ay, after her!” cried the vulgar women below, carried suddenly
into the sport.

She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was steadying herself to turn
the angle of the church. She glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and
challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey stone buttress. In
another instant the bridegroom, bent forward as he ran, had caught the angle of
the silent stone with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his supple,
strong loins vanishing in pursuit.

Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst from the crowd at the
gate. And then Ursula noticed again the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr
Crich, waiting suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face the
flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round to look behind him, at
the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at once came forward and joined him.

“We’ll bring up the rear,” said Birkin, a faint smile on
his face.

“Ay!” replied the father laconically. And the two men turned
together up the path.

Birkin was as thin as Mr Crich, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow
but nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which came only from
self-consciousness. Although he was dressed correctly for his part, yet there
was an innate incongruity which caused a slight ridiculousness in his
appearance. His nature was clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the
conventional occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common idea,
travestied himself.

He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously commonplace.
And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself
quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a
verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his
onlookers for the moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness.

Now he spoke quite easily and pleasantly to Mr Crich, as they walked along
the path; he played with situations like a man on a tight-rope: but always on a
tight-rope, pretending nothing but ease.

“I’m sorry we are so late,” he was saying. “We
couldn’t find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button our
boots. But you were to the moment.”

“We are usually to time,” said Mr Crich.

“And I’m always late,” said Birkin. “But today I was
really punctual, only accidentally not so. I’m sorry.”

The two men were gone, there was nothing more to see, for the time. Ursula
was left thinking about Birkin. He piqued her, attracted her, and annoyed her.

She wanted to know him more. She had spoken with him once or twice, but only
in his official capacity as inspector. She thought he seemed to acknowledge some
kinship between her and him, a natural, tacit understanding, a using of the same
language. But there had been no time for the understanding to develop. And
something kept her from him, as well as attracted her to him. There was a
certain hostility, a hidden ultimate reserve in him, cold and inaccessible.

Yet she wanted to know him.

“What do you think of Rupert Birkin?” she asked, a little
reluctantly, of Gudrun. She did not want to discuss him.

“What do I think of Rupert Birkin?” repeated Gudrun. “I
think he’s attractive—decidedly attractive. What I can’t stand
about him is his way with other people—his way of treating any little fool
as if she were his greatest consideration. One feels so awfully sold,
oneself.”

“Why does he do it?” said Ursula.

“Because he has no real critical faculty—of people, at all
events,” said Gudrun. “I tell you, he treats any little fool as he
treats me or you—and it’s such an insult.”

“Oh, it is,” said Ursula. “One must discriminate.”

“One must discriminate,” repeated Gudrun. “But he’s
a wonderful chap, in other respects—a marvellous personality. But you
can’t trust him.”

“Yes,” said Ursula vaguely. She was always forced to assent to
Gudrun’s pronouncements, even when she was not in accord altogether.

The sisters sat silent, waiting for the wedding party to come out. Gudrun
was impatient of talk. She wanted to think about Gerald Crich. She wanted to see
if the strong feeling she had got from him was real. She wanted to have herself
ready.

Inside the church, the wedding was going on. Hermione Roddice was thinking
only of Birkin. He stood near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards
him. She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be sure he was near her,
if she did not touch him. Yet she stood subjected through the wedding service.

She had suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that still she was dazed.
Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia, tormented by his potential absence from
her. She had awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she stood
bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face, that seemed spiritual,
like the angels, but which came from torture, gave her a certain poignancy that
tore his heart with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face of an
almost demoniacal ecstatic. Feeling him looking, she lifted her face and sought
his eyes, her own beautiful grey eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided
her look, she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing at her heart going
on. And he too was tortured with shame, and ultimate dislike, and with acute
pity for her, because he did not want to meet her eyes, he did not want to
receive her flare of recognition.

The bride and bridegroom were married, the party went into the vestry.
Hermione crowded involuntarily up against Birkin, to touch him. And he endured
it.

Outside, Gudrun and Ursula listened for their father’s playing on the
organ. He would enjoy playing a wedding march. Now the married pair were coming!
The bells were ringing, making the air shake. Ursula wondered if the trees and
the flowers could feel the vibration, and what they thought of it, this strange
motion in the air. The bride was quite demure on the arm of the bridegroom, who
stared up into the sky before him, shutting and opening his eyes unconsciously,
as if he were neither here nor there. He looked rather comical, blinking and
trying to be in the scene, when emotionally he was violated by his exposure to a
crowd. He looked a typical naval officer, manly, and up to his duty.

Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt, triumphant look, like the fallen
angels restored, yet still subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm.
And he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it were his fate,
without question.

Gerald Crich came, fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of
energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening
through his amiable, almost happy appearance. Gudrun rose sharply and went away.
She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to know this strange, sharp
inoculation that had changed the whole temper of her blood.

CHAPTER II.
SHORTLANDS

The Brangwens went home to Beldover, the wedding-party gathered at
Shortlands, the Criches’ home. It was a long, low old house, a sort of
manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little
lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a
park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the
water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery
valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene
was rural and picturesque, very peaceful, and the house had a charm of its own.

It was crowded now with the family and the wedding guests. The father, who
was not well, withdrew to rest. Gerald was host. He stood in the homely entrance
hall, friendly and easy, attending to the men. He seemed to take pleasure in his
social functions, he smiled, and was abundant in hospitality.

The women wandered about in a little confusion, chased hither and thither by
the three married daughters of the house. All the while there could be heard the
characteristic, imperious voice of one Crich woman or another calling
“Helen, come here a minute,” “Marjory, I want
you—here.” “Oh, I say, Mrs Witham—.” There was a
great rustling of skirts, swift glimpses of smartly-dressed women, a child
danced through the hall and back again, a maidservant came and went hurriedly.

Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups, chatting, smoking, pretending
to pay no heed to the rustling animation of the women’s world. But they
could not really talk, because of the glassy ravel of women’s excited,
cold laughter and running voices. They waited, uneasy, suspended, rather bored.
But Gerald remained as if genial and happy, unaware that he was waiting or
unoccupied, knowing himself the very pivot of the occasion.

Suddenly Mrs Crich came noiselessly into the room, peering about with her
strong, clear face. She was still wearing her hat, and her sac coat of blue
silk.

“What is it, mother?” said Gerald.

“Nothing, nothing!” she answered vaguely. And she went straight
towards Birkin, who was talking to a Crich brother-in-law.

“How do you do, Mr Birkin,” she said, in her low voice, that
seemed to take no count of her guests. She held out her hand to him.

“Oh Mrs Crich,” replied Birkin, in his readily-changing voice,
“I couldn’t come to you before.”

“I don’t know half the people here,” she said, in her low
voice. Her son-in-law moved uneasily away.

“And you don’t like strangers?” laughed Birkin. “I
myself can never see why one should take account of people, just because they
happen to be in the room with one: why should I know they are there?”

“Why indeed, why indeed!” said Mrs Crich, in her low, tense
voice. “Except that they are there. I don’t know people
whom I find in the house. The children introduce them to me—‘Mother, this
is Mr So-and-so.’ I am no further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own
name?—and what have I to do with either him or his name?”

She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was flattered too that she
came to talk to him, for she took hardly any notice of anybody. He looked down
at her tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he was afraid to look into
her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed instead how her hair looped in slack,
slovenly strands over her rather beautiful ears, which were not quite clean.
Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her,
rather than to the rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was
always well washed, at any rate at the neck and ears.

He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was tense, feeling that he
and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like
enemies within the camp of the other people. He resembled a deer, that throws
one ear back upon the trail behind, and one ear forward, to know what is ahead.

“People don’t really matter,” he said, rather unwilling to
continue.

The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark interrogation, as if doubting
his sincerity.

“How do you mean, matter?” she asked sharply.

“Not many people are anything at all,” he answered, forced to go
deeper than he wanted to. “They jingle and giggle. It would be much better
if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don’t exist, they
aren’t there.”

She watched him steadily while he spoke.

“But we didn’t imagine them,” she said sharply.

“There’s nothing to imagine, that’s why they don’t
exist.”

“Well,” she said, “I would hardly go as far as that. There
they are, whether they exist or no. It doesn’t rest with me to decide on
their existence. I only know that I can’t be expected to take count of
them all. You can’t expect me to know them, just because they happen to be
there. As far as I go they might as well not be there.”

“Exactly,” he replied.

“Mightn’t they?” she asked again.

“Just as well,” he repeated. And there was a little pause.

“Except that they are there, and that’s a nuisance,” she
said. “There are my sons-in-law,” she went on, in a sort of
monologue. “Now Laura’s got married, there’s another. And I
really don’t know John from James yet. They come up to me and call me
mother. I know what they will say—‘how are you, mother?’ I ought to say,
‘I am not your mother, in any sense.’ But what is the use? There they are. I
have had children of my own. I suppose I know them from another woman’s
children.”

“One would suppose so,” he said.

She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was
talking to him. And she lost her thread.

She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was
looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons.

“Are my children all there?” she asked him abruptly.

He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps.

“I scarcely know them, except Gerald,” he replied.

“Gerald!” she exclaimed. “He’s the most wanting of
them all. You’d never think it, to look at him now, would you?”

“No,” said Birkin.

The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for some
time.

“Ay,” she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that
sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And
Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned on her traces.

“I should like him to have a friend,” she said. “He has
never had a friend.”

Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue, and watching heavily. He
could not understand them. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he said
to himself, almost flippantly.

Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was Cain’s cry. And
Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he was Cain, either, although he had slain
his brother. There was such a thing as pure accident, and the consequences did
not attach to one, even though one had killed one’s brother in such wise.
Gerald as a boy had accidentally killed his brother. What then? Why seek to draw
a brand and a curse across the life that had caused the accident? A man can live
by accident, and die by accident. Or can he not? Is every man’s life
subject to pure accident, is it only the race, the genus, the species, that has
a universal reference? Or is this not true, is there no such thing as pure
accident? Has everything that happens a universal significance? Has it? Birkin,
pondering as he stood there, had forgotten Mrs Crich, as she had forgotten him.

He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident. It all hung
together, in the deepest sense.

Just as he had decided this, one of the Crich daughters came up, saying:

“Won’t you come and take your hat off, mother dear? We shall be
sitting down to eat in a minute, and it’s a formal occasion, darling,
isn’t it?” She drew her arm through her mother’s, and they
went away. Birkin immediately went to talk to the nearest man.

The gong sounded for the luncheon. The men looked up, but no move was made
to the dining-room. The women of the house seemed not to feel that the sound had
meaning for them. Five minutes passed by. The elderly manservant, Crowther,
appeared in the doorway exasperatedly. He looked with appeal at Gerald. The
latter took up a large, curved conch shell, that lay on a shelf, and without
reference to anybody, blew a shattering blast. It was a strange rousing noise,
that made the heart beat. The summons was almost magical. Everybody came
running, as if at a signal. And then the crowd in one impulse moved to the
dining-room.

Gerald waited a moment, for his sister to play hostess. He knew his mother
would pay no attention to her duties. But his sister merely crowded to her seat.
Therefore the young man, slightly too dictatorial, directed the guests to their
places.

There was a moment’s lull, as everybody looked at the hors
d’oeuvres that were being handed round. And out of this lull, a girl of
thirteen or fourteen, with her long hair down her back, said in a calm,
self-possessed voice:

“Gerald, you forget father, when you make that unearthly noise.”

“Do I?” he answered. And then, to the company, “Father is
lying down, he is not quite well.”

“How is he, really?” called one of the married daughters,
peeping round the immense wedding cake that towered up in the middle of the
table shedding its artificial flowers.

“He has no pain, but he feels tired,” replied Winifred, the girl
with the hair down her back.

The wine was filled, and everybody was talking boisterously. At the far end
of the table sat the mother, with her loosely-looped hair. She had Birkin for a
neighbour. Sometimes she glanced fiercely down the rows of faces, bending
forwards and staring unceremoniously. And she would say in a low voice to
Birkin:

“Who is that young man?”

“I don’t know,” Birkin answered discreetly.

“Have I seen him before?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I haven’t,” he replied. And she
was satisfied. Her eyes closed wearily, a peace came over her face, she looked
like a queen in repose. Then she started, a little social smile came on her
face, for a moment she looked the pleasant hostess. For a moment she bent
graciously, as if everyone were welcome and delightful. And then immediately the
shadow came back, a sullen, eagle look was on her face, she glanced from under
her brows like a sinister creature at bay, hating them all.

“Mother,” called Diana, a handsome girl a little older than
Winifred, “I may have wine, mayn’t I?”

“Yes, you may have wine,” replied the mother automatically, for
she was perfectly indifferent to the question.

And Diana beckoned to the footman to fill her glass.

“Gerald shouldn’t forbid me,” she said calmly, to the
company at large.

“All right, Di,” said her brother amiably. And she glanced
challenge at him as she drank from her glass.

There was a strange freedom, that almost amounted to anarchy, in the house.
It was rather a resistance to authority, than liberty. Gerald had some command,
by mere force of personality, not because of any granted position. There was a
quality in his voice, amiable but dominant, that cowed the others, who were all
younger than he.

Hermione was having a discussion with the bridegroom about nationality.

“No,” she said, “I think that the appeal to patriotism is
a mistake. It is like one house of business rivalling another house of
business.”

“Well you can hardly say that, can you?” exclaimed Gerald, who
had a real passion for discussion. “You couldn’t call a race a
business concern, could you?—and nationality roughly corresponds to race,
I think. I think it is meant to.”

There was a moment’s pause. Gerald and Hermione were always strangely
but politely and evenly inimical.

“Do you think race corresponds with nationality?” she asked
musingly, with expressionless indecision.

Birkin knew she was waiting for him to participate. And dutifully he spoke
up.

“I think Gerald is right—race is the essential element in
nationality, in Europe at least,” he said.

Again Hermione paused, as if to allow this statement to cool. Then she said
with strange assumption of authority:

“Yes, but even so, is the patriotic appeal an appeal to the racial
instinct? Is it not rather an appeal to the proprietory instinct, the commercial
instinct? And isn’t this what we mean by nationality?”

“Probably,” said Birkin, who felt that such a discussion was out
of place and out of time.

But Gerald was now on the scent of argument.

“A race may have its commercial aspect,” he said. “In fact
it must. It is like a family. You must make provision. And to make provision you
have got to strive against other families, other nations. I don’t see why
you shouldn’t.”

Again Hermione made a pause, domineering and cold, before she replied:
“Yes, I think it is always wrong to provoke a spirit of rivalry. It makes
bad blood. And bad blood accumulates.”

“But you can’t do away with the spirit of emulation
altogether?” said Gerald. “It is one of the necessary incentives to
production and improvement.”

“Yes,” came Hermione’s sauntering response. “I think
you can do away with it.”

“I must say,” said Birkin, “I detest the spirit of
emulation.” Hermione was biting a piece of bread, pulling it from between
her teeth with her fingers, in a slow, slightly derisive movement. She turned to
Birkin.

“You do hate it, yes,” she said, intimate and gratified.

“Detest it,” he repeated.

“Yes,” she murmured, assured and satisfied.

“But,” Gerald insisted, “you don’t allow one man to
take away his neighbour’s living, so why should you allow one nation to
take away the living from another nation?”

There was a long slow murmur from Hermione before she broke into speech,
saying with a laconic indifference:

“It is not always a question of possessions, is it? It is not all a
question of goods?”

Gerald was nettled by this implication of vulgar materialism.

“Yes, more or less,” he retorted. “If I go and take a
man’s hat from off his head, that hat becomes a symbol of that man’s
liberty. When he fights me for his hat, he is fighting me for his
liberty.”

Hermione was nonplussed.

“Yes,” she said, irritated. “But that way of arguing by
imaginary instances is not supposed to be genuine, is it? A man does not
come and take my hat from off my head, does he?”

“Only because the law prevents him,” said Gerald.

“Not only,” said Birkin. “Ninety-nine men out of a hundred
don’t want my hat.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Gerald.

“Or the hat,” laughed the bridegroom.

“And if he does want my hat, such as it is,” said Birkin,
“why, surely it is open to me to decide, which is a greater loss to me, my
hat, or my liberty as a free and indifferent man. If I am compelled to offer
fight, I lose the latter. It is a question which is worth more to me, my
pleasant liberty of conduct, or my hat.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, watching Birkin strangely.
“Yes.”

“But would you let somebody come and snatch your hat off your
head?” the bride asked of Hermione.

The face of the tall straight woman turned slowly and as if drugged to this
new speaker.

“No,” she replied, in a low inhuman tone, that seemed to contain
a chuckle. “No, I shouldn’t let anybody take my hat off my
head.”

“How would you prevent it?” asked Gerald.

“I don’t know,” replied Hermione slowly. “Probably I
should kill him.”

There was a strange chuckle in her tone, a dangerous and convincing humour
in her bearing.

“Of course,” said Gerald, “I can see Rupert’s point.
It is a question to him whether his hat or his peace of mind is more
important.”

“Peace of body,” said Birkin.

“Well, as you like there,” replied Gerald. “But how are
you going to decide this for a nation?”

“Heaven preserve me,” laughed Birkin.

“Yes, but suppose you have to?” Gerald persisted.

“Then it is the same. If the national crown-piece is an old hat, then
the thieving gent may have it.”

“But can the national or racial hat be an old hat?” insisted
Gerald.

“Pretty well bound to be, I believe,” said Birkin.

“I’m not so sure,” said Gerald.

“I don’t agree, Rupert,” said Hermione.

“All right,” said Birkin.

“I’m all for the old national hat,” laughed Gerald.

“And a fool you look in it,” cried Diana, his pert sister who
was just in her teens.

“Oh, we’re quite out of our depths with these old hats,”
cried Laura Crich. “Dry up now, Gerald. We’re going to drink toasts.
Let us drink toasts. Toasts—glasses, glasses—now then, toasts!
Speech! Speech!”

Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched his glass being
filled with champagne. The bubbles broke at the rim, the man withdrew, and
feeling a sudden thirst at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin drank up his
glass. A queer little tension in the room roused him. He felt a sharp
constraint.

“Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?” he asked himself. And
he decided that, according to the vulgar phrase, he had done it
“accidentally on purpose.” He looked round at the hired footman. And
the hired footman came, with a silent step of cold servant-like disapprobation.
Birkin decided that he detested toasts, and footmen, and assemblies, and mankind
altogether, in most of its aspects. Then he rose to make a speech. But he was
somehow disgusted.

At length it was over, the meal. Several men strolled out into the garden.
There was a lawn, and flower-beds, and at the boundary an iron fence shutting
off the little field or park. The view was pleasant; a highroad curving round
the edge of a low lake, under the trees. In the spring air, the water gleamed
and the opposite woods were purplish with new life. Charming Jersey cattle came
to the fence, breathing hoarsely from their velvet muzzles at the human beings,
expecting perhaps a crust.

Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet hotness on his hand.

“Pretty cattle, very pretty,” said Marshall, one of the
brothers-in-law. “They give the best milk you can have.”

“Yes,” said Birkin.

“Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!” said Marshall, in a queer
high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of laughter
in his stomach.

“Who won the race, Lupton?” he called to the bridegroom, to hide
the fact that he was laughing.

The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth.

“The race?” he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile came over his
face. He did not want to say anything about the flight to the church door.
“We got there together. At least she touched first, but I had my hand on
her shoulder.”

“What’s this?” asked Gerald.

Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the bridegroom.

“H’m!” said Gerald, in disapproval. “What made you
late then?”

“Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,” said
Birkin, “and then he hadn’t got a button-hook.”

“Oh God!” cried Marshall. “The immortality of the soul on
your wedding day! Hadn’t you got anything better to occupy your
mind?”

“What’s wrong with it?” asked the bridegroom, a
clean-shaven naval man, flushing sensitively.

“Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. The
immortality of the soul!” repeated the brother-in-law, with most killing
emphasis.

But he fell quite flat.

“And what did you decide?” asked Gerald, at once pricking up his
ears at the thought of a metaphysical discussion.

“You don’t want a soul today, my boy,” said Marshall.
“It’d be in your road.”

“Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,” cried Gerald,
with sudden impatience.

“By God, I’m willing,” said Marshall, in a temper.
“Too much bloody soul and talk altogether—”

He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him with angry eyes, that
grew gradually calm and amiable as the stoutly-built form of the other man
passed into the distance.

“There’s one thing, Lupton,” said Gerald, turning suddenly
to the bridegroom. “Laura won’t have brought such a fool into the
family as Lottie did.”

“Comfort yourself with that,” laughed Birkin.

“I take no notice of them,” laughed the bridegroom.

“What about this race then—who began it?” Gerald asked.

“We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard steps when our
cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting towards her. And she fled. But why do you
look so cross? Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?”

“It does, rather,” said Gerald. “If you’re doing a
thing, do it properly, and if you’re not going to do it properly, leave it
alone.”

“Very nice aphorism,” said Birkin.

“Don’t you agree?” asked Gerald.

“Quite,” said Birkin. “Only it bores me rather, when you
become aphoristic.”

“Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your own way,”
said Gerald.

“No. I want them out of the way, and you’re always shoving them
in it.”

Gerald smiled grimly at this humorism. Then he made a little gesture of
dismissal, with his eyebrows.

“You don’t believe in having any standard of behaviour at all,
do you?” he challenged Birkin, censoriously.

“Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for
the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he
likes.”

“But what do you mean by being himself?” said Gerald. “Is
that an aphorism or a cliché?”

“I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good
form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a
masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act
spontaneously on one’s impulses—and it’s the only really
gentlemanly thing to do—provided you’re fit to do it.”

“You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?” asked
Gerald.

“Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do expect that
of.”

“Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations
here, at any rate. You think people should just do as they like.”

“I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely
individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they
only like to do the collective thing.”

“And I,” said Gerald grimly, “shouldn’t like to be
in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it.
We should have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five
minutes.”

“That means you would like to be cutting everybody’s
throat,” said Birkin.

“How does that follow?” asked Gerald crossly.

“No man,” said Birkin, “cuts another man’s throat
unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a
complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee.
And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man
who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.”

“Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,” said Gerald to Birkin.
“As a matter of fact, none of us wants our throat cut, and most other
people would like to cut it for us—some time or other—”

“It’s a nasty view of things, Gerald,” said Birkin,
“and no wonder you are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.”

“How am I afraid of myself?” said Gerald; “and I
don’t think I am unhappy.”

“You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and
imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,” Birkin said.

“How do you make that out?” said Gerald.

“From you,” said Birkin.

There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near
to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them
into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either
hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going
apart were a trivial occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial
occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each
other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their
relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so
unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not
the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their
disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed
friendliness.

CHAPTER III.
CLASS-ROOM

A school-day was drawing to a close. In the class-room the last lesson was
in progress, peaceful and still. It was elementary botany. The desks were
littered with catkins, hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching.
But the sky had come overdark, as the end of the afternoon approached: there was
scarcely light to draw any more. Ursula stood in front of the class, leading the
children by questions to understand the structure and the meaning of the
catkins.

A heavy, copper-coloured beam of light came in at the west window, gilding
the outlines of the children’s heads with red gold, and falling on the
wall opposite in a rich, ruddy illumination. Ursula, however, was scarcely
conscious of it. She was busy, the end of the day was here, the work went on as
a peaceful tide that is at flood, hushed to retire.

This day had gone by like so many more, in an activity that was like a
trance. At the end there was a little haste, to finish what was in hand. She was
pressing the children with questions, so that they should know all they were to
know, by the time the gong went. She stood in shadow in front of the class, with
catkins in her hand, and she leaned towards the children, absorbed in the
passion of instruction.

She heard, but did not notice the click of the door. Suddenly she started.
She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a
man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It
startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed,
subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.

“Did I startle you?” said Birkin, shaking hands with her.
“I thought you had heard me come in.”

“No,” she faltered, scarcely able to speak. He laughed, saying
he was sorry. She wondered why it amused him.

“It is so dark,” he said. “Shall we have the light?”

And moving aside, he switched on the strong electric lights. The class-room
was distinct and hard, a strange place after the soft dim magic that filled it
before he came. Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula. Her eyes were round
and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered slightly. She looked like one who
is suddenly wakened. There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of
dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in
his heart, irresponsible.

“You are doing catkins?” he asked, picking up a piece of hazel
from a scholar’s desk in front of him. “Are they as far out as this?
I hadn’t noticed them this year.”

He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.

“The red ones too!” he said, looking at the flickers of crimson
that came from the female bud.

Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars’ books. Ursula
watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the
activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence,
watching him move in another, concentrated world. His presence was so quiet,
almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.

Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker
of his voice.

“Give them some crayons, won’t you?” he said, “so
that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow.
I’d chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the
yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to
emphasise.”

“I haven’t any crayons,” said Ursula.

“There will be some somewhere—red and yellow, that’s all
you want.”

Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.

“It will make the books untidy,” she said to Birkin, flushing
deeply.

“Not very,” he said. “You must mark in these things
obviously. It’s the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective
impression to record. What’s the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of
the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to
the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a
face—two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth—so—” And he
drew a figure on the blackboard.

At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the door.
It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her.

“I saw your car,” she said to him. “Do you mind my coming
to find you? I wanted to see you when you were on duty.”

She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave a
short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all the class,
had been watching the little scene between the lovers.

“How do you do, Miss Brangwen,” sang Hermione, in her low, odd,
singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. “Do you
mind my coming in?”

Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if summing
her up.

“Oh no,” said Ursula.

“Are you sure?” repeated Hermione, with complete sang-froid,
and an odd, half-bullying effrontery.

“Oh no, I like it awfully,” laughed Ursula, a little bit excited
and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close
to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?

This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.

“What are you doing?” she sang, in her casual, inquisitive
fashion.

“Catkins,” he replied.

“Really!” she said. “And what do you learn about
them?” She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if
making game of the whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by
Birkin’s attention to it.

She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of
greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and
the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of
fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting,
made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and
strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.

“Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have
you ever noticed them?” he asked her. And he came close and pointed them
out to her, on the sprig she held.

“No,” she replied. “What are they?”

“Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins,
they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.”

“Do they, do they!” repeated Hermione, looking closely.

“From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen
from the long danglers.”

“Little red flames, little red flames,” murmured Hermione to
herself. And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of
which the red flickers of the stigma issued.

“Aren’t they beautiful? I think they’re so
beautiful,” she said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red
filaments with her long, white finger.

“Had you never noticed them before?” he asked.

“No, never before,” she replied.

“And now you will always see them,” he said.

“Now I shall always see them,” she repeated. “Thank you so
much for showing me. I think they’re so beautiful—little red
flames—”

Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were
suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost
mystic-passionate attraction for her.

The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was
dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her hand, her
elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything.
Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the brilliantly-lighted room
on to the grey, colourless outside, where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula
put away her things in the cupboard.

At length Hermione rose and came near to her.

“Your sister has come home?” she said.

“Yes,” said Ursula.

“And does she like being back in Beldover?”

“No,” said Ursula.

“No, I wonder she can bear it. It takes all my strength, to bear the
ugliness of this district, when I stay here. Won’t you come and see me?
Won’t you come with your sister to stay at Breadalby for a few
days?—do—”

“Thank you very much,” said Ursula.

“Then I will write to you,” said Hermione. “You think your
sister will come? I should be so glad. I think she is wonderful. I think some of
her work is really wonderful. I have two water-wagtails, carved in wood, and
painted—perhaps you have seen it?”

“No,” said Ursula.

“I think it is perfectly wonderful—like a flash of
instinct.”

“Her little carvings are strange,” said Ursula.

“Perfectly beautiful—full of primitive passion—”

“Isn’t it queer that she always likes little things?—she
must always work small things, that one can put between one’s hands, birds
and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses,
and see the world that way—why is it, do you think?”

Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long, detached scrutinising gaze
that excited the younger woman.

“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “It is curious. The little
things seem to be more subtle to her—”

“But they aren’t, are they? A mouse isn’t any more subtle
than a lion, is it?”

Again Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long scrutiny, as if she were
following some train of thought of her own, and barely attending to the
other’s speech.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Rupert, Rupert,” she sang mildly, calling him to her. He
approached in silence.

“Are little things more subtle than big things?” she asked, with
the odd grunt of laughter in her voice, as if she were making game of him in the
question.

“Dunno,” he said.

“I hate subtleties,” said Ursula.

Hermione looked at her slowly.

“Do you?” she said.

“I always think they are a sign of weakness,” said Ursula, up in
arms, as if her prestige were threatened.

Hermione took no notice. Suddenly her face puckered, her brow was knit with
thought, she seemed twisted in troublesome effort for utterance.

“Do you really think, Rupert,” she asked, as if Ursula were not
present, “do you really think it is worth while? Do you really think the
children are better for being roused to consciousness?”

A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was hollow-cheeked and
pale, almost unearthly. And the woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing
question tortured him on the quick.

“They are not roused to consciousness,” he said.
“Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.”

“But do you think they are better for having it quickened, stimulated?
Isn’t it better that they should remain unconscious of the hazel,
isn’t it better that they should see as a whole, without all this pulling
to pieces, all this knowledge?”

“Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know, that the little red
flowers are there, putting out for the pollen?” he asked harshly. His
voice was brutal, scornful, cruel.

Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted. He hung silent in
irritation.

“I don’t know,” she replied, balancing mildly. “I
don’t know.”

“But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,” he
broke out. She slowly looked at him.

“Is it?” she said.

“To know, that is your all, that is your life—you have only
this, this knowledge,” he cried. “There is only one tree, there is
only one fruit, in your mouth.”

Again she was some time silent.

“Is there?” she said at last, with the same untouched calm. And
then in a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness: “What fruit, Rupert?”

“The eternal apple,” he replied in exasperation, hating his own
metaphors.

“Yes,” she said. There was a look of exhaustion about her. For
some moments there was silence. Then, pulling herself together with a convulsed
movement, Hermione resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice:

“But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the children are better,
richer, happier, for all this knowledge; do you really think they are? Or is it
better to leave them untouched, spontaneous. Hadn’t they better be
animals, simple animals, crude, violent, anything, rather than this
self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.”

They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she
resumed, “Hadn’t they better be anything than grow up crippled,
crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings—so thrown
back—so turned back on themselves—incapable—” Hermione
clenched her fist like one in a trance—“of any spontaneous action,
always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away.”

Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she
resumed her queer rhapsody—“never carried away, out of themselves,
always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn’t
anything better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all,
than this, this nothingness—”

“But do you think it is knowledge that makes us unliving and
self-conscious?” he asked irritably.

She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.

“Yes,” she said. She paused, watching him all the while, her
eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness.
It irritated him bitterly. “It is the mind,” she said, “and
that is death.” She raised her eyes slowly to him: “Isn’t the
mind—” she said, with the convulsed movement of her body,
“isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity,
all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before
they have a chance to live?”

“Not because they have too much mind, but too little,” he said
brutally.

“Are you sure?” she cried. “It seems to me the reverse.
They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.”

“Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,” he cried.

But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic
interrogation.

“When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but
knowledge?” she asked pathetically. “If I know about the flower,
don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we
exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for
this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What
does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.”

“You are merely making words,” he said; “knowledge means
everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You
don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal
functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely
secondary—and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.
What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours
for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts—you want
them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes
place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won’t be
conscious of what actually is: you want the lie that will match the
rest of your furniture.”

Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered
with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other.

“It’s all that Lady of Shalott business,” he said, in his
strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air.
“You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal
understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it.
There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all
your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge.
You want a life of pure sensation and ‘passion.’”

He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury
and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.

“But your passion is a lie,” he went on violently. “It
isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You
want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in
your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark
sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your
conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.”

He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she
suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to
kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in
him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking.

“Spontaneous!” he cried. “You and spontaneity! You, the
most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be verily
deliberately spontaneous—that’s you. Because you want to have
everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You
want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked
like a nut. For you’ll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in
its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous,
passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is
pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal
actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it
all mental.”

There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the
unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems,
in the light of his words. She was pale and abstracted.

“But do you really want sensuality?” she asked, puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.

“Yes,” he said, “that and nothing else, at this point. It
is a fulfilment—the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your
head—the dark involuntary being. It is death to one’s self—but
it is the coming into being of another.”

“But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?” she
asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.

“In the blood,” he answered; “when the mind and the known
world is drowned in darkness everything must go—there must be the deluge.
Then you find yourself a palpable body of darkness, a demon—”

“But why should I be a demon—?” she asked.

“‘Woman wailing for her demon lover’—” he
quoted—“why, I don’t know.”

Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.

“He is such a dreadful satanist, isn’t he?” she drawled to
Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure
ridicule. The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The
laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if
he were a neuter.

“No,” he said. “You are the real devil who won’t let
life exist.”

She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious.

“You know all about it, don’t you?” she said, with slow,
cold, cunning mockery.

“Enough,” he replied, his face fixing fine and clear like steel.
A horrible despair, and at the same time a sense of release, liberation, came
over Hermione. She turned with a pleasant intimacy to Ursula.

“You are sure you will come to Breadalby?” she said, urging.

“Yes, I should like to very much,” replied Ursula.

Hermione looked down at her, gratified, reflecting, and strangely absent, as
if possessed, as if not quite there.

“I’m so glad,” she said, pulling herself together.
“Some time in about a fortnight. Yes? I will write to you here, at the
school, shall I? Yes. And you’ll be sure to come? Yes. I shall be so glad.
Good-bye! Good-bye!”

Hermione held out her hand and looked into the eyes of the other woman. She
knew Ursula as an immediate rival, and the knowledge strangely exhilarated her.
Also she was taking leave. It always gave her a sense of strength, advantage, to
be departing and leaving the other behind. Moreover she was taking the man with
her, if only in hate.

Birkin stood aside, fixed and unreal. But now, when it was his turn to bid
good-bye, he began to speak again.

“There’s the whole difference in the world,” he said,
“between the actual sensual being, and the vicious mental-deliberate
profligacy our lot goes in for. In our night-time, there’s always the
electricity switched on, we watch ourselves, we get it all in the head, really.
You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse
into unknowingness, and give up your volition. You’ve got to do it.
You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being.

“But we have got such a conceit of ourselves—that’s where
it is. We are so conceited, and so unproud. We’ve got no pride,
we’re all conceit, so conceited in our own papier-maché realised selves.
We’d rather die than give up our little self-righteous self-opinionated
self-will.”

There was silence in the room. Both women were hostile and resentful. He
sounded as if he were addressing a meeting. Hermione merely paid no attention,
stood with her shoulders tight in a shrug of dislike.

Ursula was watching him as if furtively, not really aware of what she was
seeing. There was a great physical attractiveness in him—a curious hidden
richness, that came through his thinness and his pallor like another voice,
conveying another knowledge of him. It was in the curves of his brows and his
chin, rich, fine, exquisite curves, the powerful beauty of life itself. She
could not say what it was. But there was a sense of richness and of liberty.

“But we are sensual enough, without making ourselves so, aren’t
we?” she asked, turning to him with a certain golden laughter flickering
under her greenish eyes, like a challenge. And immediately the queer, careless,
terribly attractive smile came over his eyes and brows, though his mouth did not
relax.

“No,” he said, “we aren’t. We’re too full of
ourselves.”

“Surely it isn’t a matter of conceit,” she cried.

“That and nothing else.”

She was frankly puzzled.

“Don’t you think that people are most conceited of all about
their sensual powers?” she asked.

“That’s why they aren’t sensual—only
sensuous—which is another matter. They’re always aware of
themselves—and they’re so conceited, that rather than release
themselves, and live in another world, from another centre,
they’d—”

“You want your tea, don’t you,” said Hermione, turning to
Ursula with a gracious kindliness. “You’ve worked all
day—”

Birkin stopped short. A spasm of anger and chagrin went over Ursula. His
face set. And he bade good-bye, as if he had ceased to notice her.

They were gone. Ursula stood looking at the door for some moments. Then she
put out the lights. And having done so, she sat down again in her chair,
absorbed and lost. And then she began to cry, bitterly, bitterly weeping: but
whether for misery or joy, she never knew.

CHAPTER IV.
DIVER

The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a soft drizzling rain that
held off at times. In one of the intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk,
going towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and translucent, the birds
sang sharply on the young twigs, the earth would be quickening and hastening in
growth. The two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle rush
of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the black-thorn was in blossom,
white and wet, its tiny amber grains burning faintly in the white smoke of
blossom. Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high hedges glowed
like living shadows, hovering nearer, coming into creation. The morning was full
of a new creation.

When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary,
stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric
activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one
against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, issuing from the lake.

The two girls drifted swiftly along. In front of them, at the corner of the
lake, near the road, was a mossy boat-house under a walnut tree, and a little
landing-stage where a boat was moored, wavering like a shadow on the still grey
water, below the green, decayed poles. All was shadowy with coming summer.

Suddenly, from the boat-house, a white figure ran out, frightening in its
swift sharp transit, across the old landing-stage. It launched in a white arc
through the air, there was a bursting of the water, and among the smooth ripples
a swimmer was making out to space, in a centre of faintly heaving motion. The
whole otherworld, wet and remote, he had to himself. He could move into the pure
translucency of the grey, uncreated water.

Gudrun stood by the stone wall, watching.

“How I envy him,” she said, in low, desirous tones.

“Ugh!” shivered Ursula. “So cold!”

“Yes, but how good, how really fine, to swim out there!” The
sisters stood watching the swimmer move further into the grey, moist, full space
of the water, pulsing with his own small, invading motion, and arched over with
mist and dim woods.

“Don’t you wish it were you?” asked Gudrun, looking at
Ursula.

“I do,” said Ursula. “But I’m not
sure—it’s so wet.”

“No,” said Gudrun, reluctantly. She stood watching the motion on
the bosom of the water, as if fascinated. He, having swum a certain distance,
turned round and was swimming on his back, looking along the water at the two
girls by the wall. In the faint wash of motion, they could see his ruddy face,
and could feel him watching them.

“It is Gerald Crich,” said Ursula.

“I know,” replied Gudrun.

And she stood motionless gazing over the water at the face which washed up
and down on the flood, as he swam steadily. From his separate element he saw
them and he exulted to himself because of his own advantage, his possession of a
world to himself. He was immune and perfect. He loved his own vigorous,
thrusting motion, and the violent impulse of the very cold water against his
limbs, buoying him up. He could see the girls watching him a way off, outside,
and that pleased him. He lifted his arm from the water, in a sign to them.

“He is waving,” said Ursula.

“Yes,” replied Gudrun. They watched him. He waved again, with a
strange movement of recognition across the difference.

“Like a Nibelung,” laughed Ursula. Gudrun said nothing, only
stood still looking over the water.

Gerald suddenly turned, and was swimming away swiftly, with a side stroke.
He was alone now, alone and immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all
to himself. He exulted in his isolation in the new element, unquestioned and
unconditioned. He was happy, thrusting with his legs and all his body, without
bond or connection anywhere, just himself in the watery world.

Gudrun envied him almost painfully. Even this momentary possession of pure
isolation and fluidity seemed to her so terribly desirable that she felt herself
as if damned, out there on the high-road.

“God, what it is to be a man!” she cried.

“What?” exclaimed Ursula in surprise.

“The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!” cried Gudrun,
strangely flushed and brilliant. “You’re a man, you want to do a
thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front
of her.”

Ursula wondered what was in Gudrun’s mind, to occasion this outburst.
She could not understand.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” cried Gudrun, in swift refutation. “But
supposing I did. Supposing I want to swim up that water. It is impossible, it is
one of the impossibilities of life, for me to take my clothes off now and jump
in. But isn’t it ridiculous, doesn’t it simply prevent our
living!”

She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was puzzled.

The two sisters went on, up the road. They were passing between the trees
just below Shortlands. They looked up at the long, low house, dim and glamorous
in the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the windows. Gudrun seemed
to be studying it closely.

“Don’t you think it’s attractive, Ursula?” asked
Gudrun.

“Very,” said Ursula. “Very peaceful and charming.”

“It has form, too—it has a period.”

“What period?”

“Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane
Austen, don’t you think?”

Ursula laughed.

“Don’t you think so?” repeated Gudrun.

“Perhaps. But I don’t think the Criches fit the period. I know
Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is
making all kinds of latest improvements.”

Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.

“Of course,” she said, “that’s quite
inevitable.”

“Quite,” laughed Ursula. “He is several generations of
youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of
the neck, and fairly flings them along. He’ll have to die soon, when
he’s made every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to
improve. He’s got go, anyhow.”

“Certainly, he’s got go,” said Gudrun. “In fact
I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing
is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?”

“Oh I know,” said Ursula. “It goes in applying the latest
appliances!”

“Exactly,” said Gudrun.

“You know he shot his brother?” said Ursula.

“Shot his brother?” cried Gudrun, frowning as if in
disapprobation.

“Didn’t you know? Oh yes!—I thought you knew. He and his
brother were playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the
gun, and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn’t it a
horrible story?”

“How fearful!” cried Gudrun. “But it is long ago?”

“Oh yes, they were quite boys,” said Ursula. “I think it
is one of the most horrible stories I know.”

“And he of course did not know that the gun was loaded?”

“Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in the stable
for years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off, and of course, no one imagined
it was loaded. But isn’t it dreadful, that it should happen?”

“Frightful!” cried Gudrun. “And isn’t it horrible
too to think of such a thing happening to one, when one was a child, and having
to carry the responsibility of it all through one’s life. Imagine it, two
boys playing together—then this comes upon them, for no reason
whatever—out of the air. Ursula, it’s very frightening! Oh,
it’s one of the things I can’t bear. Murder, that is thinkable,
because there’s a will behind it. But a thing like that to happen to
one—”

“Perhaps there was an unconscious will behind it,” said Ursula.
“This playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it,
don’t you think?”

“Desire!” said Gudrun, coldly, stiffening a little. “I
can’t see that they were even playing at killing. I suppose one boy said
to the other, ‘You look down the barrel while I pull the trigger, and see what
happens.’ It seems to me the purest form of accident.”

“No,” said Ursula. “I couldn’t pull the trigger of
the emptiest gun in the world, not if some-one were looking down the barrel. One
instinctively doesn’t do it—one can’t.”

Gudrun was silent for some moments, in sharp disagreement.

“Of course,” she said coldly. “If one is a woman, and
grown up, one’s instinct prevents one. But I cannot see how that applies
to a couple of boys playing together.”

Her voice was cold and angry.

“Yes,” persisted Ursula. At that moment they heard a
woman’s voice a few yards off say loudly:

“Oh damn the thing!” They went forward and saw Laura Crich and
Hermione Roddice in the field on the other side of the hedge, and Laura Crich
struggling with the gate, to get out. Ursula at once hurried up and helped to
lift the gate.

“Thanks so much,” said Laura, looking up flushed and
amazon-like, yet rather confused. “It isn’t right on the
hinges.”

“No,” said Ursula. “And they’re so heavy.”

“Surprising!” cried Laura.

“How do you do,” sang Hermione, from out of the field, the
moment she could make her voice heard. “It’s nice now. Are you going
for a walk? Yes. Isn’t the young green beautiful? So beautiful—quite
burning. Good morning—good morning—you’ll come and see
me?—thank you so much—next week—yes—good-bye, g-o-o-d
b-y-e.”

Gudrun and Ursula stood and watched her slowly waving her head up and down,
and waving her hand slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile,
making a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to
her eyes. Then they moved off, as if they had been dismissed like inferiors. The
four women parted.

As soon as they had gone far enough, Ursula said, her cheeks burning,

“I do think she’s impudent.”

“Who, Hermione Roddice?” asked Gudrun. “Why?”

“The way she treats one—impudence!”

“Why, Ursula, what did you notice that was so impudent?” asked
Gudrun rather coldly.

“Her whole manner. Oh, it’s impossible, the way she tries to
bully one. Pure bullying. She’s an impudent woman. ‘You’ll come and
see me,’ as if we should be falling over ourselves for the privilege.”

“I can’t understand, Ursula, what you are so much put out
about,” said Gudrun, in some exasperation. “One knows those women
are impudent—these free women who have emancipated themselves from the
aristocracy.”

“But it is so unnecessary—so vulgar,” cried Ursula.

“No, I don’t see it. And if I did—pour moi, elle
n’existe pas. I don’t grant her the power to be impudent to
me.”

“Do you think she likes you?” asked Ursula.

“Well, no, I shouldn’t think she did.”

“Then why does she ask you to go to Breadalby and stay with
her?”

Gudrun lifted her shoulders in a low shrug.

“After all, she’s got the sense to know we’re not just the
ordinary run,” said Gudrun. “Whatever she is, she’s not a
fool. And I’d rather have somebody I detested, than the ordinary woman who
keeps to her own set. Hermione Roddice does risk herself in some
respects.”

Ursula pondered this for a time.

“I doubt it,” she replied. “Really she risks nothing. I
suppose we ought to admire her for knowing she can invite us—school
teachers—and risk nothing.”

“Precisely!” said Gudrun. “Think of the myriads of women
that daren’t do it. She makes the most of her
privileges—that’s something. I suppose, really, we should do the
same, in her place.”

“No,” said Ursula. “No. It would bore me. I couldn’t
spend my time playing her games. It’s infra dig.”

The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that
came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against
the other.

“Of course,” cried Ursula suddenly, “she ought to thank
her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand
times more beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand
times more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a
flower, always old, thought-out; and we are more intelligent than most
people.”

“Undoubtedly!” said Gudrun.

“And it ought to be admitted, simply,” said Ursula.

“Certainly it ought,” said Gudrun. “But you’ll find
that the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly
commonplace and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece
of humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic creation of
her—”

“How awful!” cried Ursula.

“Yes, Ursula, it is awful, in most respects. You daren’t be
anything that isn’t amazingly à terre, so much à terre that
it is the artistic creation of ordinariness.”

“It’s very dull to create oneself into nothing better,”
laughed Ursula.

“Very dull!” retorted Gudrun. “Really Ursula, it is dull,
that’s just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and make speeches like
Corneille, after it.”

Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her own cleverness.

“Strut,” said Ursula. “One wants to strut, to be a swan
among geese.”

“Exactly,” cried Gudrun, “a swan among geese.”

“They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling,” cried Ursula,
with mocking laughter. “And I don’t feel a bit like a humble and
pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese—I can’t
help it. They make one feel so. And I don’t care what they think
of me. Je m’en fiche.”

Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain envy and dislike.

“Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all—just
all,” she said.

The sisters went home again, to read and talk and work, and wait for Monday,
for school. Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the
beginning and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of the holidays.
This was a whole life! Sometimes she had periods of tight horror, when it seemed
to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than
this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was active, her life like a
shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground.

CHAPTER V.
IN THE TRAIN

One day at this time Birkin was called to London. He was not very fixed in
his abode. He had rooms in Nottingham, because his work lay chiefly in that
town. But often he was in London, or in Oxford. He moved about a great deal, his
life seemed uncertain, without any definite rhythm, any organic meaning.

On the platform of the railway station he saw Gerald Crich, reading a
newspaper, and evidently waiting for the train. Birkin stood some distance off,
among the people. It was against his instinct to approach anybody.

From time to time, in a manner characteristic of him, Gerald lifted his head
and looked round. Even though he was reading the newspaper closely, he must keep
a watchful eye on his external surroundings. There seemed to be a dual
consciousness running in him. He was thinking vigorously of something he read in
the newspaper, and at the same time his eye ran over the surfaces of the life
round him, and he missed nothing. Birkin, who was watching him, was irritated by
his duality. He noticed too, that Gerald seemed always to be at bay against
everybody, in spite of his queer, genial, social manner when roused.

Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial look flash on to
Gerald’s face, at seeing Gerald approaching with hand outstretched.

“Hallo, Rupert, where are you going?”

“London. So are you, I suppose.”

“Yes—”

Gerald’s eyes went over Birkin’s face in curiosity.

“We’ll travel together if you like,” he said.

“Don’t you usually go first?” asked Birkin.

“I can’t stand the crowd,” replied Gerald. “But
third’ll be all right. There’s a restaurant car, we can have some
tea.”

The two men looked at the station clock, having nothing further to say.

“What were you reading in the paper?” Birkin asked.

Gerald looked at him quickly.

“Isn’t it funny, what they do put in the
newspapers,” he said. “Here are two leaders—” he
held out his Daily Telegraph, “full of the ordinary newspaper
cant—” he scanned the columns down—“and then
there’s this little—I dunno what you’d call it, essay,
almost—appearing with the leaders, and saying there must arise a man
who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to
life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country
in ruin—”

“I suppose that’s a bit of newspaper cant, as well,” said
Birkin.

“It sounds as if the man meant it, and quite genuinely,” said
Gerald.

“Give it to me,” said Birkin, holding out his hand for the
paper.

The train came, and they went on board, sitting on either side a little
table, by the window, in the restaurant car. Birkin glanced over his paper, then
looked up at Gerald, who was waiting for him.

“I believe the man means it,” he said, “as far as he means
anything.”

“And do you think it’s true? Do you think we really want a new
gospel?” asked Gerald.

Birkin shrugged his shoulders.

“I think the people who say they want a new religion are the last to
accept anything new. They want novelty right enough. But to stare straight at
this life that we’ve brought upon ourselves, and reject it, absolutely
smash up the old idols of ourselves, that we sh’ll never do. You’ve
got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will
appear—even in the self.”

Gerald watched him closely.

“You think we ought to break up this life, just start and let
fly?” he asked.

“This life. Yes I do. We’ve got to bust it completely, or
shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won’t expand any
more.”

There was a queer little smile in Gerald’s eyes, a look of amusement,
calm and curious.

“And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you mean, reform the whole
order of society?” he asked.

Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He too was impatient of
the conversation.

“I don’t propose at all,” he replied. “When we
really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any
sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for
self-important people.”

The little smile began to die out of Gerald’s eyes, and he said,
looking with a cool stare at Birkin:

“So you really think things are very bad?”

“Completely bad.”

The smile appeared again.

“In what way?”

“Every way,” said Birkin. “We are such dreary liars. Our
one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and
straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch
of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a
pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your
up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby
Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.”

Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade.

“Would you have us live without houses—return to nature?”
he asked.

“I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to
do—and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything
else, there would be something else.”

Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.

“Don’t you think the collier’s pianoforte, as you call it,
is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the
collier’s life?”

“Higher!” cried Birkin. “Yes. Amazing heights of upright
grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier’s eyes.
He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist,
several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He
lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the
human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you
are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines.
If you can produce coal to cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five
thousand times more important than if you cooked only your own dinner.”

“I suppose I am,” laughed Gerald.

“Can’t you see,” said Birkin, “that to help my
neighbour to eat is no more than eating myself. ‘I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we
eat, you eat, they eat’—and what then? Why should every man decline the
whole verb. First person singular is enough for me.”

“You’ve got to start with material things,” said Gerald.
Which statement Birkin ignored.

“And we’ve got to live for something, we’re not just
cattle that can graze and have done with it,” said Gerald.

“Tell me,” said Birkin. “What do you live for?”

Gerald’s face went baffled.

“What do I live for?” he repeated. “I suppose I live to
work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from
that, I live because I am living.”

“And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of
coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all the coal we want,
and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and
eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and we’re
listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte—what then? What
then, when you’ve made a real fair start with your material things?”

Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking humour of the other man.
But he was cogitating too.

“We haven’t got there yet,” he replied. “A good many
people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook it.”

“So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?” said
Birkin, mocking at Gerald.

“Something like that,” said Gerald.

Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness,
even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible
ethics of productivity.

“Gerald,” he said, “I rather hate you.”

“I know you do,” said Gerald. “Why do you?”

Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.

“I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,” he
said at last. “Do you ever consciously detest me—hate me with mystic
hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.”

Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite
know what to say.

“I may, of course, hate you sometimes,” he said. “But
I’m not aware of it—never acutely aware of it, that is.”

“So much the worse,” said Birkin.

Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not quite make him out.

“So much the worse, is it?” he repeated.

There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on.
In Birkin’s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the
brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather
calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.

Suddenly Birkin’s eyes looked straight and overpowering into those of
the other man.

“What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?”
he asked.

Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think what his friend was getting
at. Was he poking fun, or not?

“At this moment, I couldn’t say off-hand,” he replied,
with faintly ironic humour.

“Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?”
Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness.

“Of my own life?” said Gerald.

“Yes.”

There was a really puzzled pause.

“I can’t say,” said Gerald. “It hasn’t been,
so far.”

“What has your life been, so far?”

“Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting
experiences—and making things go.”

Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.

“I find,” he said, “that one needs some one really pure
single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. But I
don’t really love anybody—not now.”

“Have you ever really loved anybody?” asked Gerald.

“Yes and no,” replied Birkin.

“Not finally?” said Gerald.

“Finally—finally—no,” said Birkin.

“Nor I,” said Gerald.

“And do you want to?” said Birkin.

Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of
the other man.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I do—I want to love,” said Birkin.

“You do?”

“Yes. I want the finality of love.”

“The finality of love,” repeated Gerald. And he waited for a
moment.

“Just one woman?” he added. The evening light, flooding yellow
along the fields, lit up Birkin’s face with a tense, abstract
steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it out.

“Yes, one woman,” said Birkin.

But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident.

“I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever
make my life,” said Gerald.

“Not the centre and core of it—the love between you and a
woman?” asked Birkin.

Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the
other man.

“I never quite feel it that way,” he said.

“You don’t? Then wherein does life centre, for you?”

“I don’t know—that’s what I want somebody to tell
me. As far as I can make out, it doesn’t centre at all. It is artificially
held together by the social mechanism.”

Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.

“I know,” he said, “it just doesn’t centre. The old
ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only
this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there
isn’t anything else.”

“And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s
nothing?” said Gerald.

“Pretty well that—seeing there’s no God.”

“Then we’re hard put to it,” said Gerald. And he turned to
look out of the window at the flying, golden landscape.

Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and soldierly his face was, with
a certain courage to be indifferent.

“You think its heavy odds against us?” said Birkin.

“If we’ve got to make our life up out of a woman, one woman,
woman only, yes, I do,” said Gerald. “I don’t believe I shall
ever make up my life, at that rate.”

Birkin watched him almost angrily.

“You are a born unbeliever,” he said.

“I only feel what I feel,” said Gerald. And he looked again at
Birkin almost sardonically, with his blue, manly, sharp-lighted eyes.
Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became
troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

“It troubles me very much, Gerald,” he said, wrinkling his
brows.

“I can see it does,” said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in a
manly, quick, soldierly laugh.

Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he
wanted to be within his sphere of influence. There was something very congenial
to him in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice. He felt
that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other
man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth
and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the
rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real
content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better.

Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be fond of him without
taking him seriously. And this made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on,
he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: “Well, if
mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this
beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which
informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but
just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will
only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is
expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is,
in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative
utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t
embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead
letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as
quick as possible.”

Gerald interrupted him by asking,

“Where are you staying in London?”

Birkin looked up.

“With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there
when I like.”

“Good idea—have a place more or less your own,” said
Gerald.

“Yes. But I don’t care for it much. I’m tired of the
people I am bound to find there.”

“What kind of people?”

“Art—music—London Bohemia—the most pettifogging
calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent
people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the
world—perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and
negation—but negatively something, at any rate.”

“What are they?—painters, musicians?”

“Painters, musicians, writers—hangers-on, models, advanced young
people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to
nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and
girls who are living their own lives, as they say.”

“All loose?” said Gerald.

Birkin could see his curiosity roused.

“In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their shockingness, all
on one note.”

He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were lit up with a little
flame of curious desire. He saw too how good-looking he was. Gerald was
attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a
keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful passivity in all
his body, his moulding.

“We might see something of each other—I am in London for two or
three days,” said Gerald.

“Yes,” said Birkin, “I don’t want to go to the
theatre, or the music hall—you’d better come round to the flat, and
see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd.”

“Thanks—I should like to,” laughed Gerald. “What are
you doing tonight?”

“I promised to meet Halliday at the Pompadour. It’s a bad place,
but there is nowhere else.”

“Where is it?” asked Gerald.

“Piccadilly Circus.”

“Oh yes—well, shall I come round there?”

“By all means, it might amuse you.”

The evening was falling. They had passed Bedford. Birkin watched the
country, and was filled with a sort of hopelessness. He always felt this, on
approaching London.

His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an
illness.

“‘Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles—’”

he was murmuring to himself, like a man condemned to death. Gerald, who was
very subtly alert, wary in all his senses, leaned forward and asked smilingly:

“What were you saying?” Birkin glanced at him, laughed, and
repeated:

“‘Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles,
Over pastures where the something something sheep
Half asleep—’”

Gerald also looked now at the country. And Birkin, who, for some reason was
now tired and dispirited, said to him:

“I always feel doomed when the train is running into London. I feel
such a despair, so hopeless, as if it were the end of the world.”

“Really!” said Gerald. “And does the end of the world
frighten you?”

Birkin lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It does while it hangs
imminent and doesn’t fall. But people give me a bad feeling—very
bad.”

There was a roused glad smile in Gerald’s eyes.

“Do they?” he said. And he watched the other man critically.

In a few minutes the train was running through the disgrace of outspread
London. Everybody in the carriage was on the alert, waiting to escape. At last
they were under the huge arch of the station, in the tremendous shadow of the
town. Birkin shut himself together—he was in now.

The two men went together in a taxi-cab.

“Don’t you feel like one of the damned?” asked Birkin, as
they sat in a little, swiftly-running enclosure, and watched the hideous great
street.

“No,” laughed Gerald.

“It is real death,” said Birkin.

CHAPTER VI.
CRÈME DE MENTHE

They met again in the café several hours later. Gerald went through the push
doors into the large, lofty room where the faces and heads of the drinkers
showed dimly through the haze of smoke, reflected more dimly, and repeated ad
infinitum in the great mirrors on the walls, so that one seemed to enter a
vague, dim world of shadowy drinkers humming within an atmosphere of blue
tobacco smoke. There was, however, the red plush of the seats to give substance
within the bubble of pleasure.

Gerald moved in his slow, observant, glistening-attentive motion down
between the tables and the people whose shadowy faces looked up as he passed. He
seemed to be entering in some strange element, passing into an illuminated new
region, among a host of licentious souls. He was pleased, and entertained. He
looked over all the dim, evanescent, strangely illuminated faces that bent
across the tables. Then he saw Birkin rise and signal to him.

At Birkin’s table was a girl with dark, soft, fluffy hair cut short in
the artist fashion, hanging level and full almost like the Egyptian
princess’s. She was small and delicately made, with warm colouring and
large, dark hostile eyes. There was a delicacy, almost a beauty in all her form,
and at the same time a certain attractive grossness of spirit, that made a
little spark leap instantly alight in Gerald’s eyes.

Birkin, who looked muted, unreal, his presence left out, introduced her as
Miss Darrington. She gave her hand with a sudden, unwilling movement, looking
all the while at Gerald with a dark, exposed stare. A glow came over him as he
sat down.

The waiter appeared. Gerald glanced at the glasses of the other two. Birkin
was drinking something green, Miss Darrington had a small liqueur glass that was
empty save for a tiny drop.

“Won’t you have some more—?”

“Brandy,” she said, sipping her last drop and putting down the
glass. The waiter disappeared.

“No,” she said to Birkin. “He doesn’t know I’m
back. He’ll be terrified when he sees me here.”

She spoke her r’s like w’s, lisping with a slightly babyish
pronunciation which was at once affected and true to her character. Her voice
was dull and toneless.

“Where is he then?” asked Birkin.

“He’s doing a private show at Lady Snellgrove’s,”
said the girl. “Warens is there too.”

There was a pause.

“Well, then,” said Birkin, in a dispassionate protective manner,
“what do you intend to do?”

The girl paused sullenly. She hated the question.

“I don’t intend to do anything,” she replied. “I
shall look for some sittings tomorrow.”

“Who shall you go to?” asked Birkin.

“I shall go to Bentley’s first. But I believe he’s angwy
with me for running away.”

“That is from the Madonna?”

“Yes. And then if he doesn’t want me, I know I can get work with
Carmarthen.”

“Carmarthen?”

“Lord Carmarthen—he does photographs.”

“Chiffon and shoulders—”

“Yes. But he’s awfully decent.” There was a pause.

“And what are you going to do about Julius?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I shall just ignore him.”

“You’ve done with him altogether?” But she turned aside
her face sullenly, and did not answer the question.

Another young man came hurrying up to the table.

“Hallo Birkin! Hallo Pussum, when did you come back?” he said
eagerly.

“Today.”

“Does Halliday know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care either.”

“Ha-ha! The wind still sits in that quarter, does it? Do you mind if I
come over to this table?”

“I’m talking to Wupert, do you mind?” she replied, coolly
and yet appealingly, like a child.

“Open confession—good for the soul, eh?” said the young
man. “Well, so long.”

And giving a sharp look at Birkin and at Gerald, the young man moved off,
with a swing of his coat skirts.

All this time Gerald had been completely ignored. And yet he felt that the
girl was physically aware of his proximity. He waited, listened, and tried to
piece together the conversation.

“Are you staying at the flat?” the girl asked, of Birkin.

“For three days,” replied Birkin. “And you?”

“I don’t know yet. I can always go to Bertha’s.”
There was a silence.

Suddenly the girl turned to Gerald, and said, in a rather formal, polite
voice, with the distant manner of a woman who accepts her position as a social
inferior, yet assumes intimate camaraderie with the male she addresses:

“Do you know London well?”

“I can hardly say,” he laughed. “I’ve been up a good
many times, but I was never in this place before.”

“You’re not an artist, then?” she said, in a tone that
placed him an outsider.

“No,” he replied.

“He’s a soldier, and an explorer, and a Napoleon of
industry,” said Birkin, giving Gerald his credentials for Bohemia.

“Are you a soldier?” asked the girl, with a cold yet lively
curiosity.

“No, I resigned my commission,” said Gerald, “some years
ago.”

“He was in the last war,” said Birkin.

“Were you really?” said the girl.

“And then he explored the Amazon,” said Birkin, “and now
he is ruling over coal-mines.”

The girl looked at Gerald with steady, calm curiosity. He laughed, hearing
himself described. He felt proud too, full of male strength. His blue, keen eyes
were lit up with laughter, his ruddy face, with its sharp fair hair, was full of
satisfaction, and glowing with life. He piqued her.

“How long are you staying?” she asked him.

“A day or two,” he replied. “But there is no particular
hurry.”

Still she stared into his face with that slow, full gaze which was so
curious and so exciting to him. He was acutely and delightfully conscious of
himself, of his own attractiveness. He felt full of strength, able to give off a
sort of electric power. And he was aware of her dark, hot-looking eyes upon him.
She had beautiful eyes, dark, fully-opened, hot, naked in their looking at him.
And on them there seemed to float a film of disintegration, a sort of misery and
sullenness, like oil on water. She wore no hat in the heated café, her loose,
simple jumper was strung on a string round her neck. But it was made of rich
peach-coloured crêpe-de-chine, that hung heavily and softly from her young
throat and her slender wrists. Her appearance was simple and complete, really
beautiful, because of her regularity and form, her soft dark hair falling full
and level on either side of her head, her straight, small, softened features,
Egyptian in the slight fulness of their curves, her slender neck and the simple,
rich-coloured smock hanging on her slender shoulders. She was very still, almost
null, in her manner, apart and watchful.

She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her,
an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt
that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and
voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the
strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in her separation, given.

They talked banalities for some time. Suddenly Birkin said:

“There’s Julius!” and he half rose to his feet, motioning
to the newcomer. The girl, with a curious, almost evil motion, looked round over
her shoulder without moving her body. Gerald watched her dark, soft hair swing
over her ears. He felt her watching intensely the man who was approaching, so he
looked too. He saw a pale, full-built young man with rather long, solid fair
hair hanging from under his black hat, moving cumbrously down the room, his face
lit up with a smile at once naive and warm, and vapid. He approached towards
Birkin, with a haste of welcome.

It was not till he was quite close that he perceived the girl. He recoiled,
went pale, and said, in a high squealing voice:

“Pussum, what are you doing here?”

The café looked up like animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung
motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl
only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of
knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was limited by him.

“Why have you come back?” repeated Halliday, in the same high,
hysterical voice. “I told you not to come back.”

The girl did not answer, only stared in the same viscous, heavy fashion,
straight at him, as he stood recoiled, as if for safety, against the next table.

“You know you wanted her to come back—come and sit down,”
said Birkin to him.

“No I didn’t want her to come back, and I told her not to come
back. What have you come for, Pussum?”

“For nothing from you,” she said in a heavy voice of resentment.

“Then why have you come back at all?” cried Halliday, his voice
rising to a kind of squeal.

“She comes as she likes,” said Birkin. “Are you going to
sit down, or are you not?”

“No, I won’t sit down with Pussum,” cried Halliday.

“I won’t hurt you, you needn’t be afraid,” she said
to him, very curtly, and yet with a sort of protectiveness towards him, in her
voice.

Halliday came and sat at the table, putting his hand on his heart, and
crying:

“Oh, it’s given me such a turn! Pussum, I wish you
wouldn’t do these things. Why did you come back?”

“Not for anything from you,” she repeated.

“You’ve said that before,” he cried in a high voice.

She turned completely away from him, to Gerald Crich, whose eyes were
shining with a subtle amusement.

“Were you ever vewy much afwaid of the savages?” she asked in
her calm, dull childish voice.

“No—never very much afraid. On the whole they’re
harmless—they’re not born yet, you can’t feel really afraid of
them. You know you can manage them.”

“Do you weally? Aren’t they very fierce?”

“Not very. There aren’t many fierce things, as a matter of fact.
There aren’t many things, neither people nor animals, that have it in them
to be really dangerous.”

“Except in herds,” interrupted Birkin.

“Aren’t there really?” she said. “Oh, I thought
savages were all so dangerous, they’d have your life before you could look
round.”

“Did you?” he laughed. “They are over-rated, savages.
They’re too much like other people, not exciting, after the first
acquaintance.”

“Oh, it’s not so very wonderfully brave then, to be an
explorer?”

“No. It’s more a question of hardships than of terrors.”

“Oh! And weren’t you ever afraid?”

“In my life? I don’t know. Yes, I’m afraid of some
things—of being shut up, locked up anywhere—or being fastened.
I’m afraid of being bound hand and foot.”

She looked at him steadily with her dark eyes, that rested on him and roused
him so deeply, that it left his upper self quite calm. It was rather delicious,
to feel her drawing his self-revelations from him, as from the very innermost
dark marrow of his body. She wanted to know. And her dark eyes seemed to be
looking through into his naked organism. He felt, she was compelled to him, she
was fated to come into contact with him, must have the seeing him and knowing
him. And this roused a curious exultance. Also he felt, she must relinquish
herself into his hands, and be subject to him. She was so profane, slave-like,
watching him, absorbed by him. It was not that she was interested in what he
said; she was absorbed by his self-revelation, by him, she wanted the
secret of him, the experience of his male being.

Gerald’s face was lit up with an uncanny smile, full of light and
rousedness, yet unconscious. He sat with his arms on the table, his sunbrowned,
rather sinister hands, that were animal and yet very shapely and attractive,
pushed forward towards her. And they fascinated her. And she knew, she watched
her own fascination.

Other men had come to the table, to talk with Birkin and Halliday. Gerald
said in a low voice, apart, to Pussum:

“Where have you come back from?”

“From the country,” replied Pussum, in a very low, yet fully
resonant voice. Her face closed hard. Continually she glanced at Halliday, and
then a black flare came over her eyes. The heavy, fair young man ignored her
completely; he was really afraid of her. For some moments she would be unaware
of Gerald. He had not conquered her yet.

“And what has Halliday to do with it?” he asked, his voice still
muted.

She would not answer for some seconds. Then she said, unwillingly:

“He made me go and live with him, and now he wants to throw me over.
And yet he won’t let me go to anybody else. He wants me to live hidden in
the country. And then he says I persecute him, that he can’t get rid of
me.”

“Doesn’t know his own mind,” said Gerald.

“He hasn’t any mind, so he can’t know it,” she said.
“He waits for what somebody tells him to do. He never does anything he
wants to do himself—because he doesn’t know what he wants.
He’s a perfect baby.”

Gerald looked at Halliday for some moments, watching the soft, rather
degenerate face of the young man. Its very softness was an attraction; it was a
soft, warm, corrupt nature, into which one might plunge with gratification.

“But he has no hold over you, has he?” Gerald asked.

“You see he made me go and live with him, when I didn’t want
to,” she replied. “He came and cried to me, tears, you never saw so
many, saying he couldn’t bear it unless I went back to him. And he
wouldn’t go away, he would have stayed for ever. He made me go back. Then
every time he behaves in this fashion. And now I’m going to have a baby,
he wants to give me a hundred pounds and send me into the country, so that he
would never see me nor hear of me again. But I’m not going to do it,
after—”

A queer look came over Gerald’s face.

“Are you going to have a child?” he asked incredulous. It
seemed, to look at her, impossible, she was so young and so far in spirit from
any childbearing.

She looked full into his face, and her dark, inchoate eyes had now a furtive
look, and a look of a knowledge of evil, dark and indomitable. A flame ran
secretly to his heart.

“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it beastly?”

“Don’t you want it?” he asked.

“I don’t,” she replied emphatically.

“But—” he said, “how long have you known?”

“Ten weeks,” she said.

All the time she kept her dark, inchoate eyes full upon him. He remained
silent, thinking. Then, switching off and becoming cold, he asked, in a voice
full of considerate kindness:

“Is there anything we can eat here? Is there anything you would
like?”

“Yes,” she said, “I should adore some oysters.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll have oysters.”
And he beckoned to the waiter.

Halliday took no notice, until the little plate was set before her. Then
suddenly he cried:

“Pussum, you can’t eat oysters when you’re drinking
brandy.”

“What has it go to do with you?” she asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” he cried. “But you can’t eat
oysters when you’re drinking brandy.”

“I’m not drinking brandy,” she replied, and she sprinkled
the last drops of her liqueur over his face. He gave an odd squeal. She sat
looking at him, as if indifferent.

“Pussum, why do you do that?” he cried in panic. He gave Gerald
the impression that he was terrified of her, and that he loved his terror. He
seemed to relish his own horror and hatred of her, turn it over and extract
every flavour from it, in real panic. Gerald thought him a strange fool, and yet
piquant.

“But Pussum,” said another man, in a very small, quick Eton
voice, “you promised not to hurt him.”

“I haven’t hurt him,” she answered.

“What will you drink?” the young man asked. He was dark, and
smooth-skinned, and full of a stealthy vigour.

“I don’t like porter, Maxim,” she replied.

“You must ask for champagne,” came the whispering, gentlemanly
voice of the other.

Gerald suddenly realised that this was a hint to him.

“Shall we have champagne?” he asked, laughing.

“Yes please, dwy,” she lisped childishly.

Gerald watched her eating the oysters. She was delicate and finicking in her
eating, her fingers were fine and seemed very sensitive in the tips, so she put
her food apart with fine, small motions, she ate carefully, delicately. It
pleased him very much to see her, and it irritated Birkin. They were all
drinking champagne. Maxim, the prim young Russian with the smooth, warm-coloured
face and black, oiled hair was the only one who seemed to be perfectly calm and
sober. Birkin was white and abstract, unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a
constant bright, amused, cold light in his eyes, leaning a little protectively
towards the Pussum, who was very handsome, and soft, unfolded like some red
lotus in dreadful flowering nakedness, vainglorious now, flushed with wine and
with the excitement of men. Halliday looked foolish. One glass of wine was
enough to make him drunk and giggling. Yet there was always a pleasant, warm
naïveté about him, that made him attractive.

“I’m not afwaid of anything except black-beetles,” said
the Pussum, looking up suddenly and staring with her black eyes, on which there
seemed an unseeing film of flame, fully upon Gerald. He laughed dangerously,
from the blood. Her childish speech caressed his nerves, and her burning, filmed
eyes, turned now full upon him, oblivious of all her antecedents, gave him a
sort of licence.

“I’m not,” she protested. “I’m not afraid of
other things. But black-beetles—ugh!” she shuddered convulsively, as
if the very thought were too much to bear.

“Do you mean,” said Gerald, with the punctiliousness of a man
who has been drinking, “that you are afraid of the sight of a
black-beetle, or you are afraid of a black-beetle biting you, or doing you some
harm?”

“Do they bite?” cried the girl.

“How perfectly loathsome!” exclaimed Halliday.

“I don’t know,” replied Gerald, looking round the table.
“Do black-beetles bite? But that isn’t the point. Are you afraid of
their biting, or is it a metaphysical antipathy?”

The girl was looking full upon him all the time with inchoate eyes.

“Oh, I think they’re beastly, they’re horrid,” she
cried. “If I see one, it gives me the creeps all over. If one were to
crawl on me, I’m sure I should die—I’m sure I should.”

“I hope not,” whispered the young Russian.

“I’m sure I should, Maxim,” she asseverated.

“Then one won’t crawl on you,” said Gerald, smiling and
knowing. In some strange way he understood her.

“It’s metaphysical, as Gerald says,” Birkin stated.

There was a little pause of uneasiness.

“And are you afraid of nothing else, Pussum?” asked the young
Russian, in his quick, hushed, elegant manner.

“Not weally,” she said. “I am afwaid of some things, but
not weally the same. I’m not afwaid of blood.”

“Not afwaid of blood!” exclaimed a young man with a thick, pale,
jeering face, who had just come to the table and was drinking whisky.

The Pussum turned on him a sulky look of dislike, low and ugly.

“Aren’t you really afraid of blud?” the other persisted, a
sneer all over his face.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted.

“Why, have you ever seen blood, except in a dentist’s
spittoon?” jeered the young man.

“I wasn’t speaking to you,” she replied rather superbly.

“You can answer me, can’t you?” he said.

For reply, she suddenly jabbed a knife across his thick, pale hand. He
started up with a vulgar curse.

“Show’s what you are,” said the Pussum in contempt.

“Curse you,” said the young man, standing by the table and
looking down at her with acrid malevolence.

“Stop that,” said Gerald, in quick, instinctive command.

The young man stood looking down at her with sardonic contempt, a cowed,
self-conscious look on his thick, pale face. The blood began to flow from his
hand.

“Oh, how horrible, take it away!” squealed Halliday, turning
green and averting his face.

“D’you feel ill?” asked the sardonic young man, in some
concern. “Do you feel ill, Julius? Garn, it’s nothing, man,
don’t give her the pleasure of letting her think she’s performed a
feat—don’t give her the satisfaction, man—it’s just what
she wants.”

“Oh!” squealed Halliday.

“He’s going to cat, Maxim,” said the Pussum warningly. The
suave young Russian rose and took Halliday by the arm, leading him away. Birkin,
white and diminished, looked on as if he were displeased. The wounded, sardonic
young man moved away, ignoring his bleeding hand in the most conspicuous
fashion.

“He’s an awful coward, really,” said the Pussum to Gerald.
“He’s got such an influence over Julius.”

“Who is he?” asked Gerald.

“He’s a Jew, really. I can’t bear him.”

“Well, he’s quite unimportant. But what’s wrong with
Halliday?”

“Julius’s the most awful coward you’ve ever seen,”
she cried. “He always faints if I lift a knife—he’s tewwified
of me.”

“H’m!” said Gerald.

“They’re all afwaid of me,” she said. “Only the Jew
thinks he’s going to show his courage. But he’s the biggest coward
of them all, really, because he’s afwaid what people will think about
him—and Julius doesn’t care about that.”

“They’ve a lot of valour between them,” said Gerald
good-humouredly.

The Pussum looked at him with a slow, slow smile. She was very handsome,
flushed, and confident in dreadful knowledge. Two little points of light glinted
on Gerald’s eyes.

“Why do they call you Pussum, because you’re like a cat?”
he asked her.

“I expect so,” she said.

The smile grew more intense on his face.

“You are, rather; or a young, female panther.”

“Oh God, Gerald!” said Birkin, in some disgust.

They both looked uneasily at Birkin.

“You’re silent tonight, Wupert,” she said to him, with a
slight insolence, being safe with the other man.

Halliday was coming back, looking forlorn and sick.

“Pussum,” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t do these
things—Oh!” He sank in his chair with a groan.

“You’d better go home,” she said to him.

“I will go home,” he said. “But won’t you all come
along. Won’t you come round to the flat?” he said to Gerald.
“I should be so glad if you would. Do—that’ll be splendid. I
say?” He looked round for a waiter. “Get me a taxi.” Then he
groaned again. “Oh I do feel—perfectly ghastly! Pussum, you see what
you do to me.”

“Then why are you such an idiot?” she said with sullen calm.

“But I’m not an idiot! Oh, how awful! Do come, everybody, it
will be so splendid. Pussum, you are coming. What? Oh but you must come, yes,
you must. What? Oh, my dear girl, don’t make a fuss now, I feel
perfectly—Oh, it’s so ghastly—Ho!—er! Oh!”

“You know you can’t drink,” she said to him, coldly.

“I tell you it isn’t drink—it’s your disgusting
behaviour, Pussum, it’s nothing else. Oh, how awful! Libidnikov, do let us
go.”

“He’s only drunk one glass—only one glass,” came the
rapid, hushed voice of the young Russian.

They all moved off to the door. The girl kept near to Gerald, and seemed to
be at one in her motion with him. He was aware of this, and filled with
demon-satisfaction that his motion held good for two. He held her in the hollow
of his will, and she was soft, secret, invisible in her stirring there.

They crowded five of them into the taxi-cab. Halliday lurched in first, and
dropped into his seat against the other window. Then the Pussum took her place,
and Gerald sat next to her. They heard the young Russian giving orders to the
driver, then they were all seated in the dark, crowded close together, Halliday
groaning and leaning out of the window. They felt the swift, muffled motion of
the car.

The Pussum sat near to Gerald, and she seemed to become soft, subtly to
infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black,
electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness, and
concentrated at the base of his spine like a fearful source of power. Meanwhile
her voice sounded out reedy and nonchalant, as she talked indifferently with
Birkin and with Maxim. Between her and Gerald was this silence and this black,
electric comprehension in the darkness. Then she found his hand, and grasped it
in her own firm, small clasp. It was so utterly dark, and yet such a naked
statement, that rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain, he
was no longer responsible. Still her voice rang on like a bell, tinged with a
tone of mockery. And as she swung her head, her fine mane of hair just swept his
face, and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity.
But the great centre of his force held steady, a magnificent pride to him, at
the base of his spine.

They arrived at a large block of buildings, went up in a lift, and presently
a door was being opened for them by a Hindu. Gerald looked in surprise,
wondering if he were a gentleman, one of the Hindus down from Oxford, perhaps.
But no, he was the man-servant.

“Make tea, Hasan,” said Halliday.

“There is a room for me?” said Birkin.

To both of which questions the man grinned, and murmured.

He made Gerald uncertain, because, being tall and slender and reticent, he
looked like a gentleman.

“Who is your servant?” he asked of Halliday. “He looks a
swell.”

“Oh yes—that’s because he’s dressed in another
man’s clothes. He’s anything but a swell, really. We found him in
the road, starving. So I took him here, and another man gave him clothes.
He’s anything but what he seems to be—his only advantage is that he
can’t speak English and can’t understand it, so he’s perfectly
safe.”

“He’s very dirty,” said the young Russian swiftly and
silently.

Directly, the man appeared in the doorway.

“What is it?” said Halliday.

The Hindu grinned, and murmured shyly:

“Want to speak to master.”

Gerald watched curiously. The fellow in the doorway was goodlooking and
clean-limbed, his bearing was calm, he looked elegant, aristocratic. Yet he was
half a savage, grinning foolishly. Halliday went out into the corridor to speak
with him.

“What?” they heard his voice. “What? What do you say? Tell
me again. What? Want money? Want more money? But what do you want money
for?” There was the confused sound of the Hindu’s talking, then
Halliday appeared in the room, smiling also foolishly, and saying:

“He says he wants money to buy underclothing. Can anybody lend me a
shilling? Oh thanks, a shilling will do to buy all the underclothes he
wants.” He took the money from Gerald and went out into the passage again,
where they heard him saying, “You can’t want more money, you had
three and six yesterday. You mustn’t ask for any more. Bring the tea in
quickly.”

Gerald looked round the room. It was an ordinary London sitting-room in a
flat, evidently taken furnished, rather common and ugly. But there were several
negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing, the
carved negroes looked almost like the fœtus of a human being. One was a woman
sitting naked in a strange posture, and looking tortured, her abdomen stuck out.
The young Russian explained that she was sitting in child-birth, clutching the
ends of the band that hung from her neck, one in each hand, so that she could
bear down, and help labour. The strange, transfixed, rudimentary face of the
woman again reminded Gerald of a fœtus, it was also rather wonderful, conveying
the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental
consciousness.

“Aren’t they rather obscene?” he asked, disapproving.

“I don’t know,” murmured the other rapidly. “I have
never defined the obscene. I think they are very good.”

Gerald turned away. There were one or two new pictures in the room, in the
Futurist manner; there was a large piano. And these, with some ordinary London
lodging-house furniture of the better sort, completed the whole.

The Pussum had taken off her hat and coat, and was seated on the sofa. She
was evidently quite at home in the house, but uncertain, suspended. She did not
quite know her position. Her alliance for the time being was with Gerald, and
she did not know how far this was admitted by any of the men. She was
considering how she should carry off the situation. She was determined to have
her experience. Now, at this eleventh hour, she was not to be baulked. Her face
was flushed as with battle, her eye was brooding but inevitable.

The man came in with tea and a bottle of Kümmel. He set the tray on a little
table before the couch.

“Pussum,” said Halliday, “pour out the tea.”

She did not move.

“Won’t you do it?” Halliday repeated, in a state of
nervous apprehension.

“I’ve not come back here as it was before,” she said.
“I only came because the others wanted me to, not for your sake.”

“My dear Pussum, you know you are your own mistress. I don’t
want you to do anything but use the flat for your own convenience—you know
it, I’ve told you so many times.”

She did not reply, but silently, reservedly reached for the tea-pot. They
all sat round and drank tea. Gerald could feel the electric connection between
him and her so strongly, as she sat there quiet and withheld, that another set
of conditions altogether had come to pass. Her silence and her immutability
perplexed him. How was he going to come to her? And yet he felt it quite
inevitable. He trusted completely to the current that held them. His perplexity
was only superficial, new conditions reigned, the old were surpassed; here one
did as one was possessed to do, no matter what it was.

Birkin rose. It was nearly one o’clock.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “Gerald, I’ll
ring you up in the morning at your place or you ring me up here.”

“Right,” said Gerald, and Birkin went out.

When he was well gone, Halliday said in a stimulated voice, to Gerald:

“I say, won’t you stay here—oh do!”

“You can’t put everybody up,” said Gerald.

“Oh but I can, perfectly—there are three more beds besides
mine—do stay, won’t you. Everything is quite ready—there is
always somebody here—I always put people up—I love having the house
crowded.”

“But there are only two rooms,” said the Pussum, in a cold,
hostile voice, “now Rupert’s here.”

“I know there are only two rooms,” said Halliday, in his odd,
high way of speaking. “But what does that matter?”

He was smiling rather foolishly, and he spoke eagerly, with an insinuating
determination.

“Julius and I will share one room,” said the Russian in his
discreet, precise voice. Halliday and he were friends since Eton.

“It’s very simple,” said Gerald, rising and pressing back
his arms, stretching himself. Then he went again to look at one of the pictures.
Every one of his limbs was turgid with electric force, and his back was tense
like a tiger’s, with slumbering fire. He was very proud.

The Pussum rose. She gave a black look at Halliday, black and deadly, which
brought the rather foolishly pleased smile to that young man’s face. Then
she went out of the room, with a cold good-night to them all generally.

There was a brief interval, they heard a door close, then Maxim said, in his
refined voice:

“That’s all right.”

He looked significantly at Gerald, and said again, with a silent nod:

“That’s all right—you’re all right.”

Gerald looked at the smooth, ruddy, comely face, and at the strange,
significant eyes, and it seemed as if the voice of the young Russian, so small
and perfect, sounded in the blood rather than in the air.

“I’m all right then,” said Gerald.

“Yes! Yes! You’re all right,” said the Russian.

Halliday continued to smile, and to say nothing.

Suddenly the Pussum appeared again in the door, her small, childish face
looking sullen and vindictive.

“I know you want to catch me out,” came her cold, rather
resonant voice. “But I don’t care, I don’t care how much you
catch me out.”

She turned and was gone again. She had been wearing a loose dressing-gown of
purple silk, tied round her waist. She looked so small and childish and
vulnerable, almost pitiful. And yet the black looks of her eyes made Gerald feel
drowned in some potent darkness that almost frightened him.

The men lit another cigarette and talked casually.

CHAPTER VII.
FETISH

In the morning Gerald woke late. He had slept heavily. Pussum was still
asleep, sleeping childishly and pathetically. There was something small and
curled up and defenceless about her, that roused an unsatisfied flame of passion
in the young man’s blood, a devouring avid pity. He looked at her again.
But it would be too cruel to wake her. He subdued himself, and went away.

Hearing voices coming from the sitting-room, Halliday talking to Libidnikov,
he went to the door and glanced in. He had on a silk wrap of a beautiful bluish
colour, with an amethyst hem.

To his surprise he saw the two young men by the fire, stark naked. Halliday
looked up, rather pleased.

“Good-morning,” he said. “Oh—did you want
towels?” And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange,
white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and
took his former position, crouching seated before the fire on the fender.

“Don’t you love to feel the fire on your skin?” he said.

“It is rather pleasant,” said Gerald.

“How perfectly splendid it must be to be in a climate where one could
do without clothing altogether,” said Halliday.

“Yes,” said Gerald, “if there weren’t so many things
that sting and bite.”

“That’s a disadvantage,” murmured Maxim.

Gerald looked at him, and with a slight revulsion saw the human animal,
golden skinned and bare, somehow humiliating. Halliday was different. He had a
rather heavy, slack, broken beauty, white and firm. He was like a Christ in a
Pietà. The animal was not there at all, only the heavy, broken beauty. And
Gerald realised how Halliday’s eyes were beautiful too, so blue and warm
and confused, broken also in their expression. The fireglow fell on his heavy,
rather bowed shoulders, he sat slackly crouched on the fender, his face was
uplifted, weak, perhaps slightly disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of
its own.

“Of course,” said Maxim, “you’ve been in hot
countries where the people go about naked.”

“Oh really!” exclaimed Halliday. “Where?”

“South America—Amazon,” said Gerald.

“Oh but how perfectly splendid! It’s one of the things I want
most to do—to live from day to day without ever putting on any sort
of clothing whatever. If I could do that, I should feel I had lived.”

“But why?” said Gerald. “I can’t see that it makes
so much difference.”

“Oh, I think it would be perfectly splendid. I’m sure life would
be entirely another thing—entirely different, and perfectly
wonderful.”

“But why?” asked Gerald. “Why should it?”

“Oh—one would feel things instead of merely looking at them.
I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead
of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has
become much too visual—we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can
only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong.”

“Yes, that is true, that is true,” said the Russian.

Gerald glanced at him, and saw him, his suave, golden coloured body with the
black hair growing fine and freely, like tendrils, and his limbs like smooth
plant-stems. He was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one ashamed, why
did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald even dislike it, why did it seem to him
to detract from his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So
uninspired! thought Gerald.

Birkin suddenly appeared in the doorway, in white pyjamas and wet hair, and
a towel over his arm. He was aloof and white, and somehow evanescent.

“There’s the bath-room now, if you want it,” he said
generally, and was going away again, when Gerald called:

“I say, Rupert!”

“What?” The single white figure appeared again, a presence in
the room.

“What do you think of that figure there? I want to know,” Gerald
asked.

Birkin, white and strangely ghostly, went over to the carved figure of the
negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange,
clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.

“It is art,” said Birkin.

“Very beautiful, it’s very beautiful,” said the Russian.

They all drew near to look. Gerald looked at the group of men, the Russian
golden and like a water-plant, Halliday tall and heavily, brokenly beautiful,
Birkin very white and indefinite, not to be assigned, as he looked closely at
the carven woman. Strangely elated, Gerald also lifted his eyes to the face of
the wooden figure. And his heart contracted.

He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the
negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a
terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the
weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew
her.

“Why is it art?” Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.

“It conveys a complete truth,” said Birkin. “It contains
the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.”

“But you can’t call it high art,” said Gerald.

“High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in
a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a
definite sort.”

“What culture?” Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer
African thing.

“Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness,
really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It
is so sensual as to be final, supreme.”

But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas
like clothing.

“You like the wrong things, Rupert,” he said, “things
against yourself.”

“Oh, I know, this isn’t everything,” Birkin replied,
moving away.

When Gerald went back to his room from the bath, he also carried his
clothes. He was so conventional at home, that when he was really away, and on
the loose, as now, he enjoyed nothing so much as full outrageousness. So he
strode with his blue silk wrap over his arm and felt defiant.

The Pussum lay in her bed, motionless, her round, dark eyes like black,
unhappy pools. He could only see the black, bottomless pools of her eyes.
Perhaps she suffered. The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old
sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion almost of cruelty.

“You are awake now,” he said to her.

“What time is it?” came her muted voice.

She seemed to flow back, almost like liquid, from his approach, to sink
helplessly away from him. Her inchoate look of a violated slave, whose
fulfilment lies in her further and further violation, made his nerves quiver
with acutely desirable sensation. After all, his was the only will, she was the
passive substance of his will. He tingled with the subtle, biting sensation. And
then he knew, he must go away from her, there must be pure separation between
them.

It was a quiet and ordinary breakfast, the four men all looking very clean
and bathed. Gerald and the Russian were both correct and comme il faut
in appearance and manner, Birkin was gaunt and sick, and looked a failure in
his attempt to be a properly dressed man, like Gerald and Maxim. Halliday wore
tweeds and a green flannel shirt, and a rag of a tie, which was just right for
him. The Hindu brought in a great deal of soft toast, and looked exactly the
same as he had looked the night before, statically the same.

At the end of the breakfast the Pussum appeared, in a purple silk wrap with
a shimmering sash. She had recovered herself somewhat, but was mute and lifeless
still. It was a torment to her when anybody spoke to her. Her face was like a
small, fine mask, sinister too, masked with unwilling suffering. It was almost
midday. Gerald rose and went away to his business, glad to get out. But he had
not finished. He was coming back again at evening, they were all dining
together, and he had booked seats for the party, excepting Birkin, at a
music-hall.

At night they came back to the flat very late again, again flushed with
drink. Again the man-servant—who invariably disappeared between the hours
of ten and twelve at night—came in silently and inscrutably with tea,
bending in a slow, strange, leopard-like fashion to put the tray softly on the
table. His face was immutable, aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey
under the skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a slight
sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight greyness as an ash or a
corruption, in the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating,
bestial stupidity.

Again they talked cordially and rousedly together. But already a certain
friability was coming over the party, Birkin was mad with irritation, Halliday
was turning in an insane hatred against Gerald, the Pussum was becoming hard and
cold, like a flint knife, and Halliday was laying himself out to her. And her
intention, ultimately, was to capture Halliday, to have complete power over him.

In the morning they all stalked and lounged about again. But Gerald could
feel a strange hostility to himself, in the air. It roused his obstinacy, and he
stood up against it. He hung on for two more days. The result was a nasty and
insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening. Halliday turned with absurd
animosity upon Gerald, in the café. There was a row. Gerald was on the point of
knocking-in Halliday’s face; when he was filled with sudden disgust and
indifference, and he went away, leaving Halliday in a foolish state of gloating
triumph, the Pussum hard and established, and Maxim standing clear. Birkin was
absent, he had gone out of town again.

Gerald was piqued because he had left without giving the Pussum money. It
was true, she did not care whether he gave her money or not, and he knew it. But
she would have been glad of ten pounds, and he would have been very glad
to give them to her. Now he felt in a false position. He went away chewing his
lips to get at the ends of his short clipped moustache. He knew the Pussum was
merely glad to be rid of him. She had got her Halliday whom she wanted. She wanted
him completely in her power. Then she would marry him. She wanted to marry him.
She had set her will on marrying Halliday. She never wanted to hear of Gerald
again; unless, perhaps, she were in difficulty; because after all, Gerald was
what she called a man, and these others, Halliday, Libidnikov, Birkin, the whole
Bohemian set, they were only half men. But it was half men she could deal with.
She felt sure of herself with them. The real men, like Gerald, put her in her
place too much.

Still, she respected Gerald, she really respected him. She had managed to
get his address, so that she could appeal to him in time of distress. She knew
he wanted to give her money. She would perhaps write to him on that inevitable
rainy day.

CHAPTER VIII.
BREADALBY

Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the
softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. In front, it looked
over a lawn, over a few trees, down to a string of fish-ponds in the hollow of
the silent park. At the back were trees, among which were to be found the
stables, and the big kitchen garden, behind which was a wood.

It was a very quiet place, some miles from the high-road, back from the
Derwent Valley, outside the show scenery. Silent and forsaken, the golden stucco
showed between the trees, the house-front looked down the park, unchanged and
unchanging.

Of late, however, Hermione had lived a good deal at the house. She had
turned away from London, away from Oxford, towards the silence of the country.
Her father was mostly absent, abroad, she was either alone in the house, with
her visitors, of whom there were always several, or she had with her her
brother, a bachelor, and a Liberal member of Parliament. He always came down
when the House was not sitting, seemed always to be present in Breadalby,
although he was most conscientious in his attendance to duty.

The summer was just coming in when Ursula and Gudrun went to stay the second
time with Hermione. Coming along in the car, after they had entered the park,
they looked across the dip, where the fish-ponds lay in silence, at the pillared
front of the house, sunny and small like an English drawing of the old school,
on the brow of the green hill, against the trees. There were small figures on
the green lawn, women in lavender and yellow moving to the shade of the
enormous, beautifully balanced cedar tree.

“Isn’t it complete!” said Gudrun. “It is as final as
an old aquatint.” She spoke with some resentment in her voice, as if she
were captivated unwillingly, as if she must admire against her will.

“Do you love it?” asked Ursula.

“I don’t love it, but in its way, I think it is quite
complete.”

The motor-car ran down the hill and up again in one breath, and they were
curving to the side door. A parlour-maid appeared, and then Hermione, coming
forward with her pale face lifted, and her hands outstretched, advancing
straight to the newcomers, her voice singing:

“Here you are—I’m so glad to see you—” she
kissed Gudrun—“so glad to see you—” she kissed Ursula
and remained with her arm round her. “Are you very tired?”

“Not at all tired,” said Ursula.

“Are you tired, Gudrun?”

“Not at all, thanks,” said Gudrun.

“No—” drawled Hermione. And she stood and looked at them.
The two girls were embarrassed because she would not move into the house, but
must have her little scene of welcome there on the path. The servants waited.

“Come in,” said Hermione at last, having fully taken in the pair
of them. Gudrun was the more beautiful and attractive, she had decided again,
Ursula was more physical, more womanly. She admired Gudrun’s dress more.
It was of green poplin, with a loose coat above it, of broad, dark-green and
dark-brown stripes. The hat was of a pale, greenish straw, the colour of new
hay, and it had a plaited ribbon of black and orange, the stockings were dark
green, the shoes black. It was a good get-up, at once fashionable and
individual. Ursula, in dark blue, was more ordinary, though she also looked
well.

Hermione herself wore a dress of prune-coloured silk, with coral beads and
coral coloured stockings. But her dress was both shabby and soiled, even rather
dirty.

“You would like to see your rooms now, wouldn’t you! Yes. We
will go up now, shall we?”

Ursula was glad when she could be left alone in her room. Hermione lingered
so long, made such a stress on one. She stood so near to one, pressing herself
near upon one, in a way that was most embarrassing and oppressive. She seemed to
hinder one’s workings.

Lunch was served on the lawn, under the great tree, whose thick, blackish
boughs came down close to the grass. There were present a young Italian woman,
slight and fashionable, a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley, a learned, dry
Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily
in a harsh, horse-laugh, there was Rupert Birkin, and then a woman secretary, a
Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty.

The food was very good, that was one thing. Gudrun, critical of everything,
gave it her full approval. Ursula loved the situation, the white table by the
cedar tree, the scent of new sunshine, the little vision of the leafy park, with
far-off deer feeding peacefully. There seemed a magic circle drawn about the
place, shutting out the present, enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees
and deer and silence, like a dream.

But in spirit she was unhappy. The talk went on like a rattle of small
artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only
emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of
verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation
that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream.

The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly sociologist,
whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly
happy. Birkin was down in the mouth. Hermione appeared, with amazing
persistence, to wish to ridicule him and make him look ignominious in the eyes
of everybody. And it was surprising how she seemed to succeed, how helpless he
seemed against her. He looked completely insignificant. Ursula and Gudrun, both
very unused, were mostly silent, listening to the slow, rhapsodic sing-song of
Hermione, or the verbal sallies of Sir Joshua, or the prattle of Fräulein, or
the responses of the other two women.

Luncheon was over, coffee was brought out on the grass, the party left the
table and sat about in lounge chairs, in the shade or in the sunshine as they
wished. Fräulein departed into the house, Hermione took up her embroidery, the
little Contessa took a book, Miss Bradley was weaving a basket out of fine
grass, and there they all were on the lawn in the early summer afternoon,
working leisurely and spattering with half-intellectual, deliberate talk.

Suddenly there was the sound of the brakes and the shutting off of a
motor-car.

“There’s Salsie!” sang Hermione, in her slow, amusing
sing-song. And laying down her work, she rose slowly, and slowly passed over the
lawn, round the bushes, out of sight.

“Who is it?” asked Gudrun.

“Mr Roddice—Miss Roddice’s brother—at least, I
suppose it’s he,” said Sir Joshua.

“Salsie, yes, it is her brother,” said the little Contessa,
lifting her head for a moment from her book, and speaking as if to give
information, in her slightly deepened, guttural English.

They all waited. And then round the bushes came the tall form of Alexander
Roddice, striding romantically like a Meredith hero who remembers Disraeli. He
was cordial with everybody, he was at once a host, with an easy, offhand
hospitality that he had learned for Hermione’s friends. He had just come
down from London, from the House. At once the atmosphere of the House of Commons
made itself felt over the lawn: the Home Secretary had said such and such a
thing, and he, Roddice, on the other hand, thought such and such a thing, and
had said so-and-so to the PM.

Now Hermione came round the bushes with Gerald Crich. He had come along with
Alexander. Gerald was presented to everybody, was kept by Hermione for a few
moments in full view, then he was led away, still by Hermione. He was evidently
her guest of the moment.

There had been a split in the Cabinet; the minister for Education had
resigned owing to adverse criticism. This started a conversation on education.

“Of course,” said Hermione, lifting her face like a rhapsodist,
“there can be no reason, no excuse for education, except the
joy and beauty of knowledge in itself.” She seemed to rumble and ruminate
with subterranean thoughts for a minute, then she proceeded: “Vocational
education isn’t education, it is the close of education.”

Gerald, on the brink of discussion, sniffed the air with delight and
prepared for action.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “But isn’t education
really like gymnastics, isn’t the end of education the production of a
well-trained, vigorous, energetic mind?”

“Just as athletics produce a healthy body, ready for anything,”
cried Miss Bradley, in hearty accord.

Gudrun looked at her in silent loathing.

“Well—” rumbled Hermione, “I don’t know. To me
the pleasure of knowing is so great, so wonderful—nothing has meant
so much to me in all life, as certain knowledge—no, I am
sure—nothing.”

“What knowledge, for example, Hermione?” asked Alexander.

Hermione lifted her face and rumbled—

“M—m—m—I don’t know . . . But one thing was
the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so
uplifted, so unbounded . . .”

Birkin looked at her in a white fury.

“What do you want to feel unbounded for?” he said sarcastically.
“You don’t want to be unbounded.”

Hermione recoiled in offence.

“Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,” said Gerald.
“It’s like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the
Pacific.”

“Silent upon a peak in Dariayn,” murmured the Italian, lifting
her face for a moment from her book.

“Not necessarily in Dariayn,” said Gerald, while Ursula began to
laugh.

Hermione waited for the dust to settle, and then she said, untouched:

“Yes, it is the greatest thing in life—to know. It is really
to be happy, to be free.”

“Knowledge is, of course, liberty,” said Mattheson.

“In compressed tabloids,” said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff
little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a
flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased her. Sir
Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind.

“What does that mean, Rupert?” sang Hermione, in a calm snub.

“You can only have knowledge, strictly,” he replied, “of
things concluded, in the past. It’s like bottling the liberty of last
summer in the bottled gooseberries.”

“Can one have knowledge only of the past?” asked the Baronet,
pointedly. “Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for
instance, knowledge of the past?”

“Yes,” said Birkin.

“There is a most beautiful thing in my book,” suddenly piped the
little Italian woman. “It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes
down the street.”

There was a general laugh in the company. Miss Bradley went and looked over
the shoulder of the Contessa.

“See!” said the Contessa.

“Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the
street,” she read.

Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the
Baronet’s, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones.

“What is the book?” asked Alexander, promptly.

“Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,” said the little foreigner,
pronouncing every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify
herself.

“An old American edition,” said Birkin.

“Ha!—of course—translated from the French,” said
Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. “Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta
les yeux dans la rue.”

He looked brightly round the company.

“I wonder what the ‘hurriedly’ was,” said Ursula.

They all began to guess.

And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large
tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly.

After tea, they were all gathered for a walk.

“Would you like to come for a walk?” said Hermione to each of
them, one by one. And they all said yes, feeling somehow like prisoners
marshalled for exercise. Birkin only refused.

“Will you come for a walk, Rupert?”

“No, Hermione.”

“But are you sure?”

“Quite sure.” There was a second’s hesitation.

“And why not?” sang Hermione’s question. It made her blood
run sharp, to be thwarted in even so trifling a matter. She intended them all to
walk with her in the park.

“Because I don’t like trooping off in a gang,” he said.

Her voice rumbled in her throat for a moment. Then she said, with a curious
stray calm:

“Then we’ll leave a little boy behind, if he’s
sulky.”

And she looked really gay, while she insulted him. But it merely made him
stiff.

She trailed off to the rest of the company, only turning to wave her
handkerchief to him, and to chuckle with laughter, singing out:

“Good-bye, good-bye, little boy.”

“Good-bye, impudent hag,” he said to himself.

They all went through the park. Hermione wanted to show them the wild
daffodils on a little slope. “This way, this way,” sang her
leisurely voice at intervals. And they had all to come this way. The daffodils
were pretty, but who could see them? Ursula was stiff all over with resentment
by this time, resentment of the whole atmosphere. Gudrun, mocking and objective,
watched and registered everything.

They looked at the shy deer, and Hermione talked to the stag, as if he too
were a boy she wanted to wheedle and fondle. He was male, so she must exert some
kind of power over him. They trailed home by the fish-ponds, and Hermione told
them about the quarrel of two male swans, who had striven for the love of the
one lady. She chuckled and laughed as she told how the ousted lover had sat with
his head buried under his wing, on the gravel.

When they arrived back at the house, Hermione stood on the lawn and sang
out, in a strange, small, high voice that carried very far:

“Rupert! Rupert!” The first syllable was high and slow, the
second dropped down. “Roo-o-opert.”

But there was no answer. A maid appeared.

“Where is Mr Birkin, Alice?” asked the mild straying voice of
Hermione. But under the straying voice, what a persistent, almost insane will!

“I think he’s in his room, madam.”

“Is he?”

Hermione went slowly up the stairs, along the corridor, singing out in her
high, small call:

“Ru-oo-pert! Ru-oo pert!”

She came to his door, and tapped, still crying: “Roo-pert.”

“Yes,” sounded his voice at last.

“What are you doing?”

The question was mild and curious.

There was no answer. Then he opened the door.

“We’ve come back,” said Hermione. “The daffodils are
so beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve seen them.”

She looked at him with her long, slow, impassive look, along her cheeks.

“Have you?” she echoed. And she remained looking at him. She was
stimulated above all things by this conflict with him, when he was like a sulky
boy, helpless, and she had him safe at Breadalby. But underneath she knew the
split was coming, and her hatred of him was subconscious and intense.

“What were you doing?” she reiterated, in her mild, indifferent
tone. He did not answer, and she made her way, almost unconsciously into his
room. He had taken a Chinese drawing of geese from the boudoir, and was copying
it, with much skill and vividness.

“You are copying the drawing,” she said, standing near the
table, and looking down at his work. “Yes. How beautifully you do it! You
like it very much, don’t you?”

“It’s a marvellous drawing,” he said.

“Is it? I’m so glad you like it, because I’ve always been
fond of it. The Chinese Ambassador gave it me.”

“I know,” he said.

“But why do you copy it?” she asked, casual and sing-song.
“Why not do something original?”

“I want to know it,” he replied. “One gets more of China,
copying this picture, than reading all the books.”

“And what do you get?”

She was at once roused, she laid as it were violent hands on him, to extract
his secrets from him. She must know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession
in her, to know all he knew. For some time he was silent, hating to answer her.
Then, compelled, he began:

“I know what centres they live from—what they perceive and
feel—the hot, stinging centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and
mud—the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose’s blood, entering
their own blood like an inoculation of corruptive fire—fire of the
cold-burning mud—the lotus mystery.”

Hermione looked at him along her narrow, pallid cheeks. Her eyes were
strange and drugged, heavy under their heavy, drooping lids. Her thin bosom
shrugged convulsively. He stared back at her, devilish and unchanging. With
another strange, sick convulsion, she turned away, as if she were sick, could
feel dissolution setting-in in her body. For with her mind she was unable to
attend to his words, he caught her, as it were, beneath all her defences, and
destroyed her with some insidious occult potency.

“Yes,” she said, as if she did not know what she were saying.
“Yes,” and she swallowed, and tried to regain her mind. But she
could not, she was witless, decentralised. Use all her will as she might, she
could not recover. She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone
in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed
out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the
tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse, that has no
presence, no connection. He remained hard and vindictive.

Hermione came down to dinner strange and sepulchral, her eyes heavy and full
of sepulchral darkness, strength. She had put on a dress of stiff old greenish
brocade, that fitted tight and made her look tall and rather terrible, ghastly.
In the gay light of the drawing-room she was uncanny and oppressive. But seated
in the half-light of the dining-room, sitting stiffly before the shaded candles
on the table, she seemed a power, a presence. She listened and attended with a
drugged attention.

The party was gay and extravagant in appearance, everybody had put on
evening dress except Birkin and Joshua Mattheson. The little Italian Contessa
wore a dress of tissue, of orange and gold and black velvet in soft wide
stripes, Gudrun was emerald green with strange net-work, Ursula was in yellow
with dull silver veiling, Miss Bradley was of grey, crimson and jet, Fräulein
März wore pale blue. It gave Hermione a sudden convulsive sensation of pleasure,
to see these rich colours under the candle-light. She was aware of the talk
going on, ceaselessly, Joshua’s voice dominating; of the ceaseless
pitter-patter of women’s light laughter and responses; of the brilliant
colours and the white table and the shadow above and below; and she seemed in a
swoon of gratification, convulsed with pleasure and yet sick, like a revenant.
She took very little part in the conversation, yet she heard it all, it was all
hers.

They all went together into the drawing-room, as if they were one family,
easily, without any attention to ceremony. Fräulein handed the coffee, everybody
smoked cigarettes, or else long warden pipes of white clay, of which a sheaf was
provided.

“Will you smoke?—cigarettes or pipe?” asked Fräulein
prettily. There was a circle of people, Sir Joshua with his eighteenth-century
appearance, Gerald the amused, handsome young Englishman, Alexander tall and the
handsome politician, democratic and lucid, Hermione strange like a long
Cassandra, and the women lurid with colour, all dutifully smoking their long
white pipes, and sitting in a half-moon in the comfortable, soft-lighted
drawing-room, round the logs that flickered on the marble hearth.

The talk was very often political or sociological, and interesting,
curiously anarchistic. There was an accumulation of powerful force in the room,
powerful and destructive. Everything seemed to be thrown into the melting pot,
and it seemed to Ursula they were all witches, helping the pot to bubble. There
was an elation and a satisfaction in it all, but it was cruelly exhausting for
the newcomers, this ruthless mental pressure, this powerful, consuming,
destructive mentality that emanated from Joshua and Hermione and Birkin and
dominated the rest.

But a sickness, a fearful nausea gathered possession of Hermione. There was
a lull in the talk, as it was arrested by her unconscious but all-powerful will.

“Salsie, won’t you play something?” said Hermione,
breaking off completely. “Won’t somebody dance? Gudrun, you will
dance, won’t you? I wish you would. Anche tu, Palestra,
ballerai?—sì, per piacere. You too, Ursula.”

Hermione rose and slowly pulled the gold-embroidered band that hung by the
mantel, clinging to it for a moment, then releasing it suddenly. Like a
priestess she looked, unconscious, sunk in a heavy half-trance.

A servant came, and soon reappeared with armfuls of silk robes and shawls
and scarves, mostly oriental, things that Hermione, with her love for beautiful
extravagant dress, had collected gradually.

“The three women will dance together,” she said.

“What shall it be?” asked Alexander, rising briskly.

“Vergini Delle Rocchette,” said the Contessa at once.

“They are so languid,” said Ursula.

“The three witches from Macbeth,” suggested Fräulein usefully.
It was finally decided to do Naomi and Ruth and Orpah. Ursula was Naomi, Gudrun
was Ruth, the Contessa was Orpah. The idea was to make a little ballet, in the
style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky.

The Contessa was ready first, Alexander went to the piano, a space was
cleared. Orpah, in beautiful oriental clothes, began slowly to dance the death
of her husband. Then Ruth came, and they wept together, and lamented, then Naomi
came to comfort them. It was all done in dumb show, the women danced their
emotion in gesture and motion. The little drama went on for a quarter of an
hour.

Ursula was beautiful as Naomi. All her men were dead, it remained to her
only to stand alone in indomitable assertion, demanding nothing. Ruth,
woman-loving, loved her. Orpah, a vivid, sensational, subtle widow, would go
back to the former life, a repetition. The interplay between the women was real
and rather frightening. It was strange to see how Gudrun clung with heavy,
desperate passion to Ursula, yet smiled with subtle malevolence against her, how
Ursula accepted silently, unable to provide any more either for herself or for
the other, but dangerous and indomitable, refuting her grief.

Hermione loved to watch. She could see the Contessa’s rapid,
stoat-like sensationalism, Gudrun’s ultimate but treacherous cleaving to
the woman in her sister, Ursula’s dangerous helplessness, as if she were
helplessly weighted, and unreleased.

“That was very beautiful,” everybody cried with one accord. But
Hermione writhed in her soul, knowing what she could not know. She cried out for
more dancing, and it was her will that set the Contessa and Birkin moving
mockingly in Malbrouk.

Gerald was excited by the desperate cleaving of Gudrun to Naomi. The essence
of that female, subterranean recklessness and mockery penetrated his blood. He
could not forget Gudrun’s lifted, offered, cleaving, reckless, yet withal
mocking weight. And Birkin, watching like a hermit crab from its hole, had seen
the brilliant frustration and helplessness of Ursula. She was rich, full of
dangerous power. She was like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood.
He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was his future.

Alexander played some Hungarian music, and they all danced, seized by the
spirit. Gerald was marvellously exhilarated at finding himself in motion, moving
towards Gudrun, dancing with feet that could not yet escape from the waltz and
the two-step, but feeling his force stir along his limbs and his body, out of
captivity. He did not know yet how to dance their convulsive, rag-time sort of
dancing, but he knew how to begin. Birkin, when he could get free from the
weight of the people present, whom he disliked, danced rapidly and with a real
gaiety. And how Hermione hated him for this irresponsible gaiety.

“Now I see,” cried the Contessa excitedly, watching his purely
gay motion, which he had all to himself. “Mr Birkin, he is a
changer.”

Hermione looked at her slowly, and shuddered, knowing that only a foreigner
could have seen and have said this.

“Cosa vuol’dire, Palestra?” she asked, sing-song.

“Look,” said the Contessa, in Italian. “He is not a man,
he is a chameleon, a creature of change.”

“He is not a man, he is treacherous, not one of us,” said itself
over in Hermione’s consciousness. And her soul writhed in the black
subjugation to him, because of his power to escape, to exist, other than she
did, because he was not consistent, not a man, less than a man. She hated him in
a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer
dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible
sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul.

The house being full, Gerald was given the smaller room, really the
dressing-room, communicating with Birkin’s bedroom. When they all took
their candles and mounted the stairs, where the lamps were burning subduedly,
Hermione captured Ursula and brought her into her own bedroom, to talk to her. A
sort of constraint came over Ursula in the big, strange bedroom. Hermione seemed
to be bearing down on her, awful and inchoate, making some appeal. They were
looking at some Indian silk shirts, gorgeous and sensual in themselves, their
shape, their almost corrupt gorgeousness. And Hermione came near, and her bosom
writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment
Hermione’s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other, there was
again a sort of crash, a crashing down. And Ursula picked up a shirt of rich red
and blue silk, made for a young princess of fourteen, and was crying
mechanically:

“Isn’t it wonderful—who would dare to put those two strong
colours together—”

Then Hermione’s maid entered silently and Ursula, overcome with dread,
escaped, carried away by powerful impulse.

Birkin went straight to bed. He was feeling happy, and sleepy. Since he had
danced he was happy. But Gerald would talk to him. Gerald, in evening dress, sat
on Birkin’s bed when the other lay down, and must talk.

“Who are those two Brangwens?” Gerald asked.

“They live in Beldover.”

“In Beldover! Who are they then?”

“Teachers in the Grammar School.”

There was a pause.

“They are!” exclaimed Gerald at length. “I thought I had
seen them before.”

“It disappoints you?” said Birkin.

“Disappoints me! No—but how is it Hermione has them here?”

“She knew Gudrun in London—that’s the younger one, the one
with the darker hair—she’s an artist—does sculpture and
modelling.”

“She’s not a teacher in the Grammar School, then—only the
other?”

“Both—Gudrun art mistress, Ursula a class mistress.”

“And what’s the father?”

“Handicraft instructor in the schools.”

“Really!”

“Class-barriers are breaking down!”

Gerald was always uneasy under the slightly jeering tone of the other.

“That their father is handicraft instructor in a school! What does it
matter to me?”

Birkin laughed. Gerald looked at his face, as it lay there laughing and
bitter and indifferent on the pillow, and he could not go away.

“I don’t suppose you will see very much more of Gudrun, at
least. She is a restless bird, she’ll be gone in a week or two,”
said Birkin.

“Where will she go?”

“London, Paris, Rome—heaven knows. I always expect her to sheer
off to Damascus or San Francisco; she’s a bird of paradise. God knows what
she’s got to do with Beldover. It goes by contraries, like dreams.”

Gerald pondered for a few moments.

“How do you know her so well?” he asked.

“I knew her in London,” he replied, “in the Algernon
Strange set. She’ll know about Pussum and Libidnikov and the
rest—even if she doesn’t know them personally. She was never quite
that set—more conventional, in a way. I’ve known her for two years,
I suppose.”

“And she makes money, apart from her teaching?” asked Gerald.

“Some—irregularly. She can sell her models. She has a certain
réclame.”

“How much for?”

“A guinea, ten guineas.”

“And are they good? What are they?”

“I think sometimes they are marvellously good. That is hers, those two
wagtails in Hermione’s boudoir—you’ve seen them—they are
carved in wood and painted.”

“I thought it was savage carving again.”

“No, hers. That’s what they are—animals and birds,
sometimes odd small people in everyday dress, really rather wonderful when they
come off. They have a sort of funniness that is quite unconscious and
subtle.”

“She might be a well-known artist one day?” mused Gerald.

“She might. But I think she won’t. She drops her art if anything
else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously—she
must never be too serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she
won’t give herself away—she’s always on the defensive.
That’s what I can’t stand about her type. By the way, how did things
go off with Pussum after I left you? I haven’t heard anything.”

“Oh, rather disgusting. Halliday turned objectionable, and I only just
saved myself from jumping in his stomach, in a real old-fashioned row.”

Birkin was silent.

“Of course,” he said, “Julius is somewhat insane. On the
one hand he’s had religious mania, and on the other, he is fascinated by
obscenity. Either he is a pure servant, washing the feet of Christ, or else he
is making obscene drawings of Jesus—action and reaction—and between
the two, nothing. He is really insane. He wants a pure lily, another girl, with
a baby face, on the one hand, and on the other, he must have the Pussum,
just to defile himself with her.”

“That’s what I can’t make out,” said Gerald.
“Does he love her, the Pussum, or doesn’t he?”

“He neither does nor doesn’t. She is the harlot, the actual
harlot of adultery to him. And he’s got a craving to throw himself into
the filth of her. Then he gets up and calls on the name of the lily of purity,
the baby-faced girl, and so enjoys himself all round. It’s the old
story—action and reaction, and nothing between.”

“I don’t know,” said Gerald, after a pause, “that he
does insult the Pussum so very much. She strikes me as being rather foul.”

“But I thought you liked her,” exclaimed Birkin. “I always
felt fond of her. I never had anything to do with her, personally, that’s
true.”

“I liked her all right, for a couple of days,” said Gerald.
“But a week of her would have turned me over. There’s a certain
smell about the skin of those women, that in the end is sickening beyond
words—even if you like it at first.”

“I know,” said Birkin. Then he added, rather fretfully,
“But go to bed, Gerald. God knows what time it is.”

Gerald looked at his watch, and at length rose off the bed, and went to his
room. But he returned in a few minutes, in his shirt.

“One thing,” he said, seating himself on the bed again.
“We finished up rather stormily, and I never had time to give her
anything.”

“Money?” said Birkin. “She’ll get what she wants
from Halliday or from one of her acquaintances.”

“But then,” said Gerald, “I’d rather give her her
dues and settle the account.”

“She doesn’t care.”

“No, perhaps not. But one feels the account is left open, and one
would rather it were closed.”

“Would you?” said Birkin. He was looking at the white legs of
Gerald, as the latter sat on the side of the bed in his shirt. They were
white-skinned, full, muscular legs, handsome and decided. Yet they moved Birkin
with a sort of pathos, tenderness, as if they were childish.

“I think I’d rather close the account,” said Gerald,
repeating himself vaguely.

“It doesn’t matter one way or another,” said Birkin.

“You always say it doesn’t matter,” said Gerald, a little
puzzled, looking down at the face of the other man affectionately.

“Neither does it,” said Birkin.

“But she was a decent sort, really—”

“Render unto Cæsarina the things that are Cæsarina’s,”
said Birkin, turning aside. It seemed to him Gerald was talking for the sake of
talking. “Go away, it wearies me—it’s too late at
night,” he said.

“I wish you’d tell me something that did matter,” said
Gerald, looking down all the time at the face of the other man, waiting for
something. But Birkin turned his face aside.

“All right then, go to sleep,” said Gerald, and he laid his hand
affectionately on the other man’s shoulder, and went away.

In the morning when Gerald awoke and heard Birkin move, he called out:
“I still think I ought to give the Pussum ten pounds.”

“Oh God!” said Birkin, “don’t be so matter-of-fact.
Close the account in your own soul, if you like. It is there you can’t
close it.”

“How do you know I can’t?”

“Knowing you.”

Gerald meditated for some moments.

“It seems to me the right thing to do, you know, with the Pussums, is
to pay them.”

“And the right thing for mistresses: keep them. And the right thing
for wives: live under the same roof with them. Integer vitae scelerisque
purus—” said Birkin.

“There’s no need to be nasty about it,” said Gerald.

“It bores me. I’m not interested in your peccadilloes.”

“And I don’t care whether you are or not—I am.”

The morning was again sunny. The maid had been in and brought the water, and
had drawn the curtains. Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly
out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the
past. He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things
of the past were—the lovely accomplished past—this house, so still
and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace. And then, what a snare
and a delusion, this beauty of static things—what a horrible, dead prison
Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was
better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present. If only one might
create the future after one’s own heart—for a little pure truth, a
little unflinching application of simple truth to life, the heart cried out
ceaselessly.

“I can’t see what you will leave me at all, to be interested
in,” came Gerald’s voice from the lower room. “Neither the
Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.”

“You be interested in what you can, Gerald. Only I’m not
interested myself,” said Birkin.

“What am I to do at all, then?” came Gerald’s voice.

“What you like. What am I to do myself?”

In the silence Birkin could feel Gerald musing this fact.

“I’m blest if I know,” came the good-humoured answer.

“You see,” said Birkin, “part of you wants the Pussum, and
nothing but the Pussum, part of you wants the mines, the business, and nothing
but the business—and there you are—all in bits—”

“And part of me wants something else,” said Gerald, in a queer,
quiet, real voice.

“What?” said Birkin, rather surprised.

“That’s what I hoped you could tell me,” said Gerald.

There was a silence for some time.

“I can’t tell you—I can’t find my own way, let alone
yours. You might marry,” Birkin replied.

“Who—the Pussum?” asked Gerald.

“Perhaps,” said Birkin. And he rose and went to the window.

“That is your panacea,” said Gerald. “But you
haven’t even tried it on yourself yet, and you are sick enough.”

“I am,” said Birkin. “Still, I shall come right.”

“Through marriage?”

“Yes,” Birkin answered obstinately.

“And no,” added Gerald. “No, no, no, my boy.”

There was a silence between them, and a strange tension of hostility. They
always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free each
of the other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other.

“Salvator femininus,” said Gerald, satirically.

“Why not?” said Birkin.

“No reason at all,” said Gerald, “if it really works. But
whom will you marry?”

“A woman,” said Birkin.

“Good,” said Gerald.

Birkin and Gerald were the last to come down to breakfast. Hermione liked
everybody to be early. She suffered when she felt her day was diminished, she
felt she had missed her life. She seemed to grip the hours by the throat, to
force her life from them. She was rather pale and ghastly, as if left behind, in
the morning. Yet she had her power, her will was strangely pervasive. With the
entrance of the two young men a sudden tension was felt.

She lifted her face, and said, in her amused sing-song:

“Good morning! Did you sleep well? I’m so glad.”

And she turned away, ignoring them. Birkin, who knew her well, saw that she
intended to discount his existence.

“Will you take what you want from the sideboard?” said
Alexander, in a voice slightly suggesting disapprobation. “I hope the
things aren’t cold. Oh no! Do you mind putting out the flame under the
chafing-dish, Rupert? Thank you.”

Even Alexander was rather authoritative where Hermione was cool. He took his
tone from her, inevitably. Birkin sat down and looked at the table. He was so
used to this house, to this room, to this atmosphere, through years of intimacy,
and now he felt in complete opposition to it all, it had nothing to do with him.
How well he knew Hermione, as she sat there, erect and silent and somewhat
bemused, and yet so potent, so powerful! He knew her statically, so finally,
that it was almost like a madness. It was difficult to believe one was not mad,
that one was not a figure in the hall of kings in some Egyptian tomb, where the
dead all sat immemorial and tremendous. How utterly he knew Joshua Mattheson,
who was talking in his harsh, yet rather mincing voice, endlessly, endlessly,
always with a strong mentality working, always interesting, and yet always
known, everything he said known beforehand, however novel it was, and clever.
Alexander the up-to-date host, so bloodlessly free-and-easy, Fräulein so
prettily chiming in just as she should, the little Italian Countess taking
notice of everybody, only playing her little game, objective and cold, like a
weasel watching everything, and extracting her own amusement, never giving
herself in the slightest; then Miss Bradley, heavy and rather subservient,
treated with cool, almost amused contempt by Hermione, and therefore slighted by
everybody—how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the
same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they
were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the
innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known, its going
on is like a madness, it is so exhausted.

There was Gerald, an amused look on his face; the game pleased him. There
was Gudrun, watching with steady, large, hostile eyes; the game fascinated her,
and she loathed it. There was Ursula, with a slightly startled look on her face,
as if she were hurt, and the pain were just outside her consciousness.

Suddenly Birkin got up and went out.

“That’s enough,” he said to himself involuntarily.

Hermione knew his motion, though not in her consciousness. She lifted her
heavy eyes and saw him lapse suddenly away, on a sudden, unknown tide, and the
waves broke over her. Only her indomitable will remained static and mechanical,
she sat at the table making her musing, stray remarks. But the darkness had
covered her, she was like a ship that has gone down. It was finished for her
too, she was wrecked in the darkness. Yet the unfailing mechanism of her will
worked on, she had that activity.

“Shall we bathe this morning?” she said, suddenly looking at
them all.

“Splendid,” said Joshua. “It is a perfect morning.”

“Oh, it is beautiful,” said Fräulein.

“Yes, let us bathe,” said the Italian woman.

“We have no bathing suits,” said Gerald.

“Have mine,” said Alexander. “I must go to church and read
the lessons. They expect me.”

“Are you a Christian?” asked the Italian Countess, with sudden
interest.

“No,” said Alexander. “I’m not. But I believe in
keeping up the old institutions.”

“They are so beautiful,” said Fräulein daintily.

“Oh, they are,” cried Miss Bradley.

They all trailed out on to the lawn. It was a sunny, soft morning in early
summer, when life ran in the world subtly, like a reminiscence. The church bells
were ringing a little way off, not a cloud was in the sky, the swans were like
lilies on the water below, the peacocks walked with long, prancing steps across
the shadow and into the sunshine of the grass. One wanted to swoon into the
by-gone perfection of it all.

“Good-bye,” called Alexander, waving his gloves cheerily, and he
disappeared behind the bushes, on his way to church.

“Now,” said Hermione, “shall we all bathe?”

“I won’t,” said Ursula.

“You don’t want to?” said Hermione, looking at her slowly.

“No. I don’t want to,” said Ursula.

“Nor I,” said Gudrun.

“What about my suit?” asked Gerald.

“I don’t know,” laughed Hermione, with an odd, amused
intonation. “Will a handkerchief do—a large handkerchief?”

“That will do,” said Gerald.

“Come along then,” sang Hermione.

The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian, small and like a
cat, her white legs twinkling as she went, ducking slightly her head, that was
tied in a gold silk kerchief. She tripped through the gate and down the grass,
and stood, like a tiny figure of ivory and bronze, at the water’s edge,
having dropped off her towelling, watching the swans, which came up in surprise.
Then out ran Miss Bradley, like a large, soft plum in her dark-blue suit. Then
Gerald came, a scarlet silk kerchief round his loins, his towels over his arms.
He seemed to flaunt himself a little in the sun, lingering and laughing,
strolling easily, looking white but natural in his nakedness. Then came Sir
Joshua, in an overcoat, and lastly Hermione, striding with stiff grace from out
of a great mantle of purple silk, her head tied up in purple and gold. Handsome
was her stiff, long body, her straight-stepping white legs, there was a static
magnificence about her as she let the cloak float loosely away from her
striding. She crossed the lawn like some strange memory, and passed slowly and
statelily towards the water.

There were three ponds, in terraces descending the valley, large and smooth
and beautiful, lying in the sun. The water ran over a little stone wall, over
small rocks, splashing down from one pond to the level below. The swans had gone
out on to the opposite bank, the reeds smelled sweet, a faint breeze touched the
skin.

Gerald had dived in, after Sir Joshua, and had swum to the end of the pond.
There he climbed out and sat on the wall. There was a dive, and the little
Countess was swimming like a rat, to join him. They both sat in the sun,
laughing and crossing their arms on their breasts. Sir Joshua swam up to them,
and stood near them, up to his arm-pits in the water. Then Hermione and Miss
Bradley swam over, and they sat in a row on the embankment.

“Aren’t they terrifying? Aren’t they really
terrifying?” said Gudrun. “Don’t they look saurian? They are
just like great lizards. Did you ever see anything like Sir Joshua? But really,
Ursula, he belongs to the primeval world, when great lizards crawled
about.”

Gudrun looked in dismay on Sir Joshua, who stood up to the breast in the
water, his long, greyish hair washed down into his eyes, his neck set into
thick, crude shoulders. He was talking to Miss Bradley, who, seated on the bank
above, plump and big and wet, looked as if she might roll and slither in the
water almost like one of the slithering sealions in the Zoo.

Ursula watched in silence. Gerald was laughing happily, between Hermione and
the Italian. He reminded her of Dionysos, because his hair was really yellow,
his figure so full and laughing. Hermione, in her large, stiff, sinister grace,
leaned near him, frightening, as if she were not responsible for what she might
do. He knew a certain danger in her, a convulsive madness. But he only laughed
the more, turning often to the little Countess, who was flashing up her face at
him.

They all dropped into the water, and were swimming together like a shoal of
seals. Hermione was powerful and unconscious in the water, large and slow and
powerful. Palestra was quick and silent as a water rat, Gerald wavered and
flickered, a white natural shadow. Then, one after the other, they waded out,
and went up to the house.

But Gerald lingered a moment to speak to Gudrun.

“You don’t like the water?” he said.

She looked at him with a long, slow inscrutable look, as he stood before her
negligently, the water standing in beads all over his skin.

“I like it very much,” she replied.

He paused, expecting some sort of explanation.

“And you swim?”

“Yes, I swim.”

Still he would not ask her why she would not go in then. He could feel
something ironic in her. He walked away, piqued for the first time.

“Why wouldn’t you bathe?” he asked her again, later, when
he was once more the properly-dressed young Englishman.

She hesitated a moment before answering, opposing his persistence.

“Because I didn’t like the crowd,” she replied.

He laughed, her phrase seemed to re-echo in his consciousness. The flavour
of her slang was piquant to him. Whether he would or not, she signified the real
world to him. He wanted to come up to her standards, fulfil her expectations. He
knew that her criterion was the only one that mattered. The others were all
outsiders, instinctively, whatever they might be socially. And Gerald could not
help it, he was bound to strive to come up to her criterion, fulfil her idea of
a man and a human-being.

After lunch, when all the others had withdrawn, Hermione and Gerald and
Birkin lingered, finishing their talk. There had been some discussion, on the
whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man.
Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of
the chaos, what then?

The great social idea, said Sir Joshua, was the social equality of man. No,
said Gerald, the idea was, that every man was fit for his own little bit of a
task—let him do that, and then please himself. The unifying principle was
the work in hand. Only work, the business of production, held men together. It
was mechanical, but then society was a mechanism. Apart from work they were
isolated, free to do as they liked.

“Oh!” cried Gudrun. “Then we shan’t have names any
more—we shall be like the Germans, nothing but Herr Obermeister and Herr
Untermeister. I can imagine it—‘I am Mrs Colliery-Manager Crich—I am
Mrs Member-of-Parliament Roddice. I am Miss Art-Teacher Brangwen.’ Very pretty
that.”

“Things would work very much better, Miss Art-Teacher Brangwen,”
said Gerald.

“What things, Mr Colliery-Manager Crich? The relation between you and
me, par exemple?”

“Yes, for example,” cried the Italian. “That which is
between men and women—!”

“That is non-social,” said Birkin, sarcastically.

“Exactly,” said Gerald. “Between me and a woman, the
social question does not enter. It is my own affair.”

“A ten-pound note on it,” said Birkin.

“You don’t admit that a woman is a social being?” asked
Ursula of Gerald.

“She is both,” said Gerald. “She is a social being, as far
as society is concerned. But for her own private self, she is a free agent, it
is her own affair, what she does.”

“But won’t it be rather difficult to arrange the two
halves?” asked Ursula.

“Oh no,” replied Gerald. “They arrange themselves
naturally—we see it now, everywhere.”

“Don’t you laugh so pleasantly till you’re out of the
wood,” said Birkin.

Gerald knitted his brows in momentary irritation.

“Was I laughing?” he said.

“If,” said Hermione at last, “we could only realise, that
in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers
there—the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be no more of this
carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only
destroys.”

This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose
from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter
declamation, saying:

“It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all
different and unequal in spirit—it is only the social differences
that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or
mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes,
one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But
spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts.
It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy
is an absolute lie—your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply
it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat
bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars—therein lies the beginning
and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

“But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with
any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from
another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that.
One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but
because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.
The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another,
all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have
his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so
that I can tell him: ‘Now you’ve got what you want—you’ve got
your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind
yourself and don’t obstruct me.’”

Hermione was looking at him with leering eyes, along her cheeks. He could
feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It
was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the
unconsciousness. She heard his words in her unconscious self, consciously
she was as if deafened, she paid no heed to them.

“It sounds like megalomania, Rupert,” said Gerald, genially.

Hermione gave a queer, grunting sound. Birkin stood back.

“Yes, let it,” he said suddenly, the whole tone gone out of his
voice, that had been so insistent, bearing everybody down. And he went away.

But he felt, later, a little compunction. He had been violent, cruel with
poor Hermione. He wanted to recompense her, to make it up. He had hurt her, he
had been vindictive. He wanted to be on good terms with her again.

He went into her boudoir, a remote and very cushiony place. She was sitting
at her table writing letters. She lifted her face abstractedly when he entered,
watched him go to the sofa, and sit down. Then she looked down at her paper
again.

He took up a large volume which he had been reading before, and became
minutely attentive to his author. His back was towards Hermione. She could not
go on with her writing. Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness breaking in upon
it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles
with the swirling water. But in spite of her efforts she was borne down,
darkness seemed to break over her, she felt as if her heart was bursting. The
terrible tension grew stronger and stronger, it was most fearful agony, like
being walled up.

And then she realised that his presence was the wall, his presence was
destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled
up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall—she must
break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life
to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly.

Terrible shocks ran over her body, like shocks of electricity, as if many
volts of electricity suddenly struck her down. She was aware of him sitting
silently there, an unthinkable evil obstruction. Only this blotted out her mind,
pressed out her very breathing, his silent, stooping back, the back of his head.

A terrible voluptuous thrill ran down her arms—she was going to know
her voluptuous consummation. Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and
irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of
pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last.
It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in
extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli
that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it round in her hand as
she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely
unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment
in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious.

Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning
and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she
brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head. But
her fingers were in the way and deadened the blow. Nevertheless, down went his
head on the table on which his book lay, the stone slid aside and over his ear,
it was one convulsion of pure bliss for her, lit up by the crushed pain of her
fingers. But it was not somehow complete. She lifted her arm high to aim once
more, straight down on the head that lay dazed on the table. She must smash it,
it must be smashed before her ecstasy was consummated, fulfilled for ever. A
thousand lives, a thousand deaths mattered nothing now, only the fulfilment of
this perfect ecstasy.

She was not swift, she could only move slowly. A strong spirit in him woke
him and made him lift his face and twist to look at her. Her arm was raised, the
hand clasping the ball of lapis lazuli. It was her left hand, he realised again
with horror that she was left-handed. Hurriedly, with a burrowing motion, he
covered his head under the thick volume of Thucydides, and the blow came down,
almost breaking his neck, and shattering his heart.

He was shattered, but he was not afraid. Twisting round to face her he
pushed the table over and got away from her. He was like a flask that is smashed
to atoms, he seemed to himself that he was all fragments, smashed to bits. Yet
his movements were perfectly coherent and clear, his soul was entire and
unsurprised.

“No you don’t, Hermione,” he said in a low voice. “I
don’t let you.”

He saw her standing tall and livid and attentive, the stone clenched tense
in her hand.

“Stand away and let me go,” he said, drawing near to her.

As if pressed back by some hand, she stood away, watching him all the time
without changing, like a neutralised angel confronting him.

“It is not good,” he said, when he had gone past her. “It
isn’t I who will die. You hear?”

He kept his face to her as he went out, lest she should strike again. While
he was on his guard, she dared not move. And he was on his guard, she was
powerless. So he had gone, and left her standing.

She remained perfectly rigid, standing as she was for a long time. Then she
staggered to the couch and lay down, and went heavily to sleep. When she awoke,
she remembered what she had done, but it seemed to her, she had only hit him, as
any woman might do, because he tortured her. She was perfectly right. She knew
that, spiritually, she was right. In her own infallible purity, she had done
what must be done. She was right, she was pure. A drugged, almost sinister
religious expression became permanent on her face.

Birkin, barely conscious, and yet perfectly direct in his motion, went out
of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills.
The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He wandered
on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of
heather, and little clumps of young fir-trees, budding with soft paws. It was
rather wet everywhere, there was a stream running down at the bottom of the
valley, which was gloomy, or seemed gloomy. He was aware that he could not
regain his consciousness, that he was moving in a sort of darkness.

Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside, that was
overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to
saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat
down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his
legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them
touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over
him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.

But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young
fir-trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft sharp boughs beat upon him,
as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on
his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There
was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his
movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky,
cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back
with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and
more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one’s thigh
against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light
whip of the hazel on one’s shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the
silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness,
its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very
satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this
coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How
fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation,
waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!

As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he thought about
Hermione and the blow. He could feel a pain on the side of his head. But after
all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people matter
altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so lovely and fresh and
unexplored. Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people,
thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman—not in the least. The
leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and
desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was
enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.

It was quite right of Hermione to want to kill him. What had he to do with
her? Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here
was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive
vegetation, and himself, his own living self.

It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not
matter, so one knew where one belonged. He knew now where he belonged. This was
his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he
preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own
madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was
become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was
so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was
only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to humanity.
But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved
now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool and perfect. He would
overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his
new state.

He was aware of the pain in his head becoming more and more difficult every
minute. He was walking now along the road to the nearest station. It was raining
and he had no hat. But then plenty of cranks went out nowadays without hats, in
the rain.

He wondered again how much of his heaviness of heart, a certain depression,
was due to fear, fear lest anybody should have seen him naked lying against the
vegetation. What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost
to horror, to a sort of dream terror—his horror of being observed by some
other people. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the
creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this
heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegetation and be quite happy and
unquestioned, by himself.

He had better send a note to Hermione: she might trouble about him, and he
did not want the onus of this. So at the station, he wrote saying:

I will go on to town—I don’t want to come back to Breadalby for
the present. But it is quite all right—I don’t want you to mind
having biffed me, in the least. Tell the others it is just one of my moods. You
were quite right, to biff me—because I know you wanted to. So
there’s the end of it.

In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was insufferable pain, and
he was sick. He dragged himself from the station into a cab, feeling his way
step by step, like a blind man, and held up only by a dim will.

For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she
thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them. She
became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive righteousness. She lived
in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of her own rightness of spirit.

CHAPTER IX.
COAL-DUST

Going home from school in the afternoon, the Brangwen girls descended the
hill between the picturesque cottages of Willey Green till they came to the
railway crossing. There they found the gate shut, because the colliery train was
rumbling nearer. They could hear the small locomotive panting hoarsely as it
advanced with caution between the embankments. The one-legged man in the little
signal-hut by the road stared out from his security, like a crab from a
snail-shell.

Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on a red Arab mare. He
rode well and softly, pleased with the delicate quivering of the creature
between his knees. And he was very picturesque, at least in Gudrun’s eyes,
sitting soft and close on the slender red mare, whose long tail flowed on the
air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at the crossing to wait for the gate,
looking down the railway for the approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile
at his picturesqueness, Gudrun liked to look at him. He was well-set and easy,
his face with its warm tan showed up his whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue
eyes were full of sharp light as he watched the distance.

The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did not
like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise. But Gerald
pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp blasts of the chuffing
engine broke with more and more force on her. The repeated sharp blows of
unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror.
She recoiled like a spring let go. But a glistening, half-smiling look came into
Gerald’s face. He brought her back again, inevitably.

The noise was released, the little locomotive with her clanking steel
connecting-rod emerged on the highroad, clanking sharply. The mare rebounded
like a drop of water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed back into the
hedge, in fear. But Gerald was heavy on the mare, and forced her back. It seemed
as if he sank into her magnetically, and could thrust her back against herself.

“The fool!” cried Ursula loudly. “Why doesn’t he
ride away till it’s gone by?”

Gudrun was looking at him with black-dilated, spellbound eyes. But he sat
glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like
a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the
mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly,
heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails
of the crossing.

The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be done, put on the brakes,
and back came the trucks rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible
cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident concussions. The mare
opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror. Then
suddenly her fore feet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from
the horror. Back she went, and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she
must fall backwards on top of him. But he leaned forward, his face shining with
fixed amusement, and at last he brought her down, sank her down, and was bearing
her back to the mark. But as strong as the pressure of his compulsion was the
repulsion of her utter terror, throwing her back away from the railway, so that
she spun round and round, on two legs, as if she were in the centre of some
whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which seemed to
penetrate to her heart.

“No—! No—! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you
fool—!” cried Ursula at the top of her voice, completely outside
herself. And Gudrun hated her bitterly for being outside herself. It was
unendurable that Ursula’s voice was so powerful and naked.

A sharpened look came on Gerald’s face. He bit himself down on the
mare like a keen edge biting home, and forced her round. She roared as she
breathed, her nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart, her eyes
frenzied. It was a repulsive sight. But he held on her unrelaxed, with an almost
mechanical relentlessness, keen as a sword pressing in to her. Both man and
horse were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a ray of cold sunshine.

Meanwhile the eternal trucks were rumbling on, very slowly, treading one
after the other, one after the other, like a disgusting dream that has no end.
The connecting chains were grinding and squeaking as the tension varied, the
mare pawed and struck away mechanically now, her terror fulfilled in her, for
now the man encompassed her; her paws were blind and pathetic as she beat the
air, the man closed round her, and brought her down, almost as if she were part
of his own physique.

“And she’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!” cried Ursula,
frantic with opposition and hatred of Gerald. She alone understood him
perfectly, in pure opposition.

Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare, and
she turned white. And then on the very wound the bright spurs came down,
pressing relentlessly. The world reeled and passed into nothingness for Gudrun,
she could not know any more.

When she recovered, her soul was calm and cold, without feeling. The trucks
were still rumbling by, and the man and the mare were still fighting. But she
herself was cold and separate, she had no more feeling for them. She was quite
hard and cold and indifferent.

They could see the top of the hooded guard’s-van approaching, the
sound of the trucks was diminishing, there was hope of relief from the
intolerable noise. The heavy panting of the half-stunned mare sounded
automatically, the man seemed to be relaxing confidently, his will bright and
unstained. The guard’s-van came up, and passed slowly, the guard staring
out in his transition on the spectacle in the road. And, through the man in the
closed wagon, Gudrun could see the whole scene spectacularly, isolated and
momentary, like a vision isolated in eternity.

Lovely, grateful silence seemed to trail behind the receding train. How
sweet the silence is! Ursula looked with hatred on the buffers of the
diminishing wagon. The gatekeeper stood ready at the door of his hut, to proceed
to open the gate. But Gudrun sprang suddenly forward, in front of the struggling
horse, threw off the latch and flung the gates asunder, throwing one-half to the
keeper, and running with the other half, forwards. Gerald suddenly let go the
horse and leaped forwards, almost on to Gudrun. She was not afraid. As he jerked
aside the mare’s head, Gudrun cried, in a strange, high voice, like a
gull, or like a witch screaming out from the side of the road:

“I should think you’re proud.”

The words were distinct and formed. The man, twisting aside on his dancing
horse, looked at her in some surprise, some wondering interest. Then the
mare’s hoofs had danced three times on the drum-like sleepers of the
crossing, and man and horse were bounding springily, unequally up the road.

The two girls watched them go. The gate-keeper hobbled thudding over the
logs of the crossing, with his wooden leg. He had fastened the gate. Then he
also turned, and called to the girls:

“A masterful young jockey, that; ’ll have his own road, if ever
anybody would.”

“Yes,” cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. “Why
couldn’t he take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He’s a
fool, and a bully. Does he think it’s manly, to torture a horse?
It’s a living thing, why should he bully it and torture it?”

There was a pause, then the gate-keeper shook his head, and replied:

“Yes, it’s as nice a little mare as you could set eyes
on—beautiful little thing, beautiful. Now you couldn’t see his
father treat any animal like that—not you. They’re as different as
they welly can be, Gerald Crich and his father—two different men,
different made.”

Then there was a pause.

“But why does he do it?” cried Ursula, “why does he? Does
he think he’s grand, when he’s bullied a sensitive creature, ten
times as sensitive as himself?”

Again there was a cautious pause. Then again the man shook his head, as if
he would say nothing, but would think the more.

“I expect he’s got to train the mare to stand to
anything,” he replied. “A pure-bred Harab—not the sort of
breed as is used to round here—different sort from our sort altogether.
They say as he got her from Constantinople.”

“He would!” said Ursula. “He’d better have left her
to the Turks, I’m sure they would have had more decency towards
her.”

The man went in to drink his can of tea, the girls went on down the lane,
that was deep in soft black dust. Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the
sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the living body
of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of the blond man clenching the
palpitating body of the mare into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic
domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the
mare heavily into unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.

On the left, as the girls walked silently, the coal-mine lifted its great
mounds and its patterned head-stocks, the black railway with the trucks at rest
looked like a harbour just below, a large bay of railroad with anchored wagons.

Near the second level-crossing, that went over many bright rails, was a farm
belonging to the collieries, and a great round globe of iron, a disused boiler,
huge and rusty and perfectly round, stood silently in a paddock by the road. The
hens were pecking round it, some chickens were balanced on the drinking trough,
wagtails flew away in among trucks, from the water.

On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road-side, was a heap of
pale-grey stones for mending the roads, and a cart standing, and a middle-aged
man with whiskers round his face was leaning on his shovel, talking to a young
man in gaiters, who stood by the horse’s head. Both men were facing the
crossing.

They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near
distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light, gay summer
dresses, Ursula had an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow,
Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose, the figures of the two
women seemed to glitter in progress over the wide bay of the railway crossing,
white and orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a hot world
silted with coal-dust.

The two men stood quite still in the heat, watching. The elder was a short,
hard-faced energetic man of middle age, the younger a labourer of twenty-three
or so. They stood in silence watching the advance of the sisters. They watched
whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they passed, and whilst they receded down
the dusty road, that had dwellings on one side, and dusty young corn on the
other.

Then the elder man, with the whiskers round his face, said in a prurient
manner to the young man:

“What price that, eh? She’ll do, won’t she?”

“Which?” asked the young man, eagerly, with a laugh.

“Her with the red stockings. What d’you say? I’d give my
week’s wages for five minutes; what!—just for five minutes.”

Again the young man laughed.

“Your missis ’ud have summat to say to you,” he replied.

Gudrun had turned round and looked at the two men. They were to her sinister
creatures, standing watching after her, by the heap of pale grey slag. She
loathed the man with whiskers round his face.

“You’re first class, you are,” the man said to her, and to
the distance.

“Do you think it would be worth a week’s wages?” said the
younger man, musing.

“Do I? I’d put ’em bloody-well down this
second—”

The younger man looked after Gudrun and Ursula objectively, as if he wished
to calculate what there might be, that was worth his week’s wages. He
shook his head with fatal misgiving.

“No,” he said. “It’s not worth that to me.”

“Isn’t?” said the old man. “By God, if it
isn’t to me!”

And he went on shovelling his stones.

The girls descended between the houses with slate roofs and blackish brick
walls. The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery
district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the
senses. On the roads silted with black dust, the rich light fell more warmly,
more heavily, over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast, from the
glowing close of day.

“It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,” said Gudrun,
evidently suffering from fascination. “Can’t you feel in some way, a
thick, hot attraction in it? I can. And it quite stupifies me.”

They were passing between blocks of miners’ dwellings. In the back
yards of several dwellings, a miner could be seen washing himself in the open on
this hot evening, naked down to the loins, his great trousers of moleskin
slipping almost away. Miners already cleaned were sitting on their heels, with
their backs near the walls, talking and silent in pure physical well-being,
tired, and taking physical rest. Their voices sounded out with strong
intonation, and the broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood. It
seemed to envelop Gudrun in a labourer’s caress, there was in the whole
atmosphere a resonance of physical men, a glamorous thickness of labour and
maleness, surcharged in the air. But it was universal in the district, and
therefore unnoticed by the inhabitants.

To Gudrun, however, it was potent and half-repulsive. She could never tell
why Beldover was so utterly different from London and the south, why one’s
whole feelings were different, why one seemed to live in another sphere. Now she
realised that this was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of
their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous
resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They
sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like
that of machinery, cold and iron.

It was the same every evening when she came home, she seemed to move through
a wave of disruptive force, that was given off from the presence of thousands of
vigorous, underworld, half-automatised colliers, and which went to the brain and
the heart, awaking a fatal desire, and a fatal callousness.

There came over her a nostalgia for the place. She hated it, she knew how
utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless. Sometimes she
beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a machine. And
yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She struggled to get more and more into
accord with the atmosphere of the place, she craved to get her satisfaction of
it.

She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main street of the town, that
was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent atmosphere of
intense, dark callousness. There were always miners about. They moved with their
strange, distorted dignity, a certain beauty, and unnatural stillness in their
bearing, a look of abstraction and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt
faces. They belonged to another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices
were full of an intolerable deep resonance, like a machine’s burring, a
music more maddening than the siren’s long ago.

She found herself, with the rest of the common women, drawn out on Friday
evenings to the little market. Friday was pay-day for the colliers, and Friday
night was market night. Every woman was abroad, every man was out, shopping with
his wife, or gathering with his pals. The pavements were dark for miles around
with people coming in, the little market-place on the crown of the hill, and the
main street of Beldover were black with thickly-crowded men and women.

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a
ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract
faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking,
thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the
market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men,
mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

The carts that came could not pass through. They had to wait, the driver
calling and shouting, till the dense crowd would make way. Everywhere, young
fellows from the outlying districts were making conversation with the girls,
standing in the road and at the corners. The doors of the public-houses were
open and full of light, men passed in and out in a continual stream, everywhere
men were calling out to one another, or crossing to meet one another, or
standing in little gangs and circles, discussing, endlessly discussing. The
sense of talk, buzzing, jarring, half-secret, the endless mining and political
wrangling, vibrated in the air like discordant machinery. And it was their
voices which affected Gudrun almost to swooning. They aroused a strange,
nostalgic ache of desire, something almost demoniacal, never to be fulfilled.

Like any other common girl of the district, Gudrun strolled up and down, up
and down the length of the brilliant two-hundred paces of the pavement nearest
the market-place. She knew it was a vulgar thing to do; her father and mother
could not bear it; but the nostalgia came over her, she must be among the
people. Sometimes she sat among the louts in the cinema: rakish-looking,
unattractive louts they were. Yet she must be among them.

And, like any other common lass, she found her ‘boy.’ It was an
electrician, one of the electricians introduced according to Gerald’s new
scheme. He was an earnest, clever man, a scientist with a passion for sociology.
He lived alone in a cottage, in lodgings, in Willey Green. He was a gentleman,
and sufficiently well-to-do. His landlady spread the reports about him; he would
have a large wooden tub in his bedroom, and every time he came in from work, he
would have pails and pails of water brought up, to bathe in, then he put on
clean shirt and under-clothing every day, and clean silk socks; fastidious and
exacting he was in these respects, but in every other way, most ordinary and
unassuming.

Gudrun knew all these things. The Brangwen’s house was one to which
the gossip came naturally and inevitably. Palmer was in the first place a friend
of Ursula’s. But in his pale, elegant, serious face there showed the same
nostalgia that Gudrun felt. He too must walk up and down the street on Friday
evening. So he walked with Gudrun, and a friendship was struck up between them.
But he was not in love with Gudrun; he really wanted Ursula, but for some
strange reason, nothing could happen between her and him. He liked to have
Gudrun about, as a fellow-mind—but that was all. And she had no real
feeling for him. He was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back him. But he
was really impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery. He
was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an egoist. He
was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and despised them. In the
mass they fascinated him, as machinery fascinated him. They were a new sort of
machinery to him—but incalculable, incalculable.

So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to the cinema with him.
And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his sarcastic
remarks. There they were, the two of them: two elegants in one sense: in the
other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the people, teeming with the
distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all
alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All
had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal
half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will.

Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how she was sinking in.
And then she was filled with a fury of contempt and anger. She felt she was
sinking into one mass with the rest—all so close and intermingled and
breathless. It was horrible. She stifled. She prepared for flight, feverishly
she flew to her work. But soon she let go. She started off into the
country—the darkish, glamorous country. The spell was beginning to work
again.

CHAPTER X.
SKETCH-BOOK

One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at the
remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated
like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from
the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud,
and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy,
very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having
dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But she
could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she knew how
they rose out of the mud, she knew how they thrust out from themselves, how they
stood stiff and succulent against the air.

Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near the
water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life,
a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing with his soft
wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal sunshine; two white ones
wrestling in the low air; there was a halo round them; ah, when they came
tumbling nearer they were orangetips, and it was the orange that had made the
halo. Ursula rose and drifted away, unconscious like the butterflies.

Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants, sat
crouched on the shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and then staring
unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent stems. Her feet were
bare, her hat lay on the bank opposite.

She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of oars. She looked
round. There was a boat with a gaudy Japanese parasol, and a man in white,
rowing. The woman was Hermione, and the man was Gerald. She knew it instantly.
And instantly she perished in the keen frisson of anticipation, an electric
vibration in her veins, intense, much more intense than that which was always
humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover.

Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld,
automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw his back,
the movement of his white loins. But not that—it was the whiteness he
seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He seemed to stoop to something.
His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the electricity of the sky.

“There’s Gudrun,” came Hermione’s voice floating
distinct over the water. “We will go and speak to her. Do you mind?”

Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the water’s edge,
looking at him. He pulled the boat towards her, magnetically, without thinking
of her. In his world, his conscious world, she was still nobody. He knew that
Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down all the social differences, at
least apparently, and he left it to her.

“How do you do, Gudrun?” sang Hermione, using the Christian name
in the fashionable manner. “What are you doing?”

“How do you do, Hermione? I was sketching.”

“Were you?” The boat drifted nearer, till the keel ground on the
bank. “May we see? I should like to so much.”

It was no use resisting Hermione’s deliberate intention.

“Well—” said Gudrun reluctantly, for she always hated to
have her unfinished work exposed—“there’s nothing in the least
interesting.”

“Isn’t there? But let me see, will you?”

Gudrun reached out the sketch-book, Gerald stretched from the boat to take
it. And as he did so, he remembered Gudrun’s last words to him, and her
face lifted up to him as he sat on the swerving horse. An intensification of
pride went over his nerves, because he felt, in some way she was compelled by
him. The exchange of feeling between them was strong and apart from their
consciousness.

And as if in a spell, Gudrun was aware of his body, stretching and surging
like the marsh-fire, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward
like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in
her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious. And he rocked on the water
perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence. He looked round at the boat. It
was drifting off a little. He lifted the oar to bring it back. And the exquisite
pleasure of slowly arresting the boat, in the heavy-soft water, was complete as
a swoon.

“That’s what you have done,” said Hermione, looking
searchingly at the plants on the shore, and comparing with Gudrun’s
drawing. Gudrun looked round in the direction of Hermione’s long, pointing
finger. “That is it, isn’t it?” repeated Hermione, needing
confirmation.

“Yes,” said Gudrun automatically, taking no real heed.

“Let me look,” said Gerald, reaching forward for the book. But
Hermione ignored him, he must not presume, before she had finished. But he, his
will as unthwarted and as unflinching as hers, stretched forward till he touched
the book. A little shock, a storm of revulsion against him, shook Hermione
unconsciously. She released the book when he had not properly got it, and it
tumbled against the side of the boat and bounced into the water.

“There!” sang Hermione, with a strange ring of malevolent
victory. “I’m so sorry, so awfully sorry. Can’t you get it,
Gerald?”

This last was said in a note of anxious sneering that made Gerald’s
veins tingle with fine hate for her. He leaned far out of the boat, reaching
down into the water. He could feel his position was ridiculous, his loins
exposed behind him.

“It is of no importance,” came the strong, clanging voice of
Gudrun. She seemed to touch him. But he reached further, the boat swayed
violently. Hermione, however, remained unperturbed. He grasped the book, under
the water, and brought it up, dripping.

“I’m so dreadfully sorry—dreadfully sorry,” repeated
Hermione. “I’m afraid it was all my fault.”

“It’s of no importance—really, I assure you—it
doesn’t matter in the least,” said Gudrun loudly, with emphasis, her
face flushed scarlet. And she held out her hand impatiently for the wet book, to
have done with the scene. Gerald gave it to her. He was not quite himself.

“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” repeated Hermione, till both
Gerald and Gudrun were exasperated. “Is there nothing that can be
done?”

“In what way?” asked Gudrun, with cool irony.

“Can’t we save the drawings?”

There was a moment’s pause, wherein Gudrun made evident all her
refutation of Hermione’s persistence.

“I assure you,” said Gudrun, with cutting distinctness,
“the drawings are quite as good as ever they were, for my purpose. I want
them only for reference.”

“But can’t I give you a new book? I wish you’d let me do
that. I feel so truly sorry. I feel it was all my fault.”

“As far as I saw,” said Gudrun, “it wasn’t your
fault at all. If there was any fault, it was Mr Crich’s. But the
whole thing is entirely trivial, and it really is ridiculous to take
any notice of it.”

Gerald watched Gudrun closely, whilst she repulsed Hermione. There was a
body of cold power in her. He watched her with an insight that amounted to
clairvoyance. He saw her a dangerous, hostile spirit, that could stand
undiminished and unabated. It was so finished, and of such perfect gesture,
moreover.

“I’m awfully glad if it doesn’t matter,” he said;
“if there’s no real harm done.”

She looked back at him, with her fine blue eyes, and signalled full into his
spirit, as she said, her voice ringing with intimacy almost caressive now it was
addressed to him:

“Of course, it doesn’t matter in the least.”

The bond was established between them, in that look, in her tone. In her
tone, she made the understanding clear—they were of the same kind, he and
she, a sort of diabolic freemasonry subsisted between them. Henceforward, she
knew, she had her power over him. Wherever they met, they would be secretly
associated. And he would be helpless in the association with her. Her soul
exulted.

“Good-bye! I’m so glad you forgive me. Gooood-bye!”

Hermione sang her farewell, and waved her hand. Gerald automatically took
the oar and pushed off. But he was looking all the time, with a glimmering,
subtly-smiling admiration in his eyes, at Gudrun, who stood on the shoal shaking
the wet book in her hand. She turned away and ignored the receding boat. But
Gerald looked back as he rowed, beholding her, forgetting what he was doing.

“Aren’t we going too much to the left?” sang Hermione, as
she sat ignored under her coloured parasol.

Gerald looked round without replying, the oars balanced and glancing in the
sun.

“I think it’s all right,” he said good-humouredly,
beginning to row again without thinking of what he was doing. And Hermione
disliked him extremely for his good-humoured obliviousness, she was nullified,
she could not regain ascendancy.

CHAPTER XI.
AN ISLAND

Meanwhile Ursula had wandered on from Willey Water along the course of the
bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks’ singing. On the
bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots flowered
by the water. There was a rousedness and a glancing everywhere.

She strayed absorbedly on, over the brooks. She wanted to go to the
mill-pond above. The big mill-house was deserted, save for a labourer and his
wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and
through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by the sluice. When she
got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the pond before her, she
noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing and
hammering away.

She stood at the head of the sluice, looking at him. He was unaware of
anybody’s presence. He looked very busy, like a wild animal, active and
intent. She felt she ought to go away, he would not want her. He seemed to be so
much occupied. But she did not want to go away. Therefore she moved along the
bank till he would look up.

Which he soon did. The moment he saw her, he dropped his tools and came
forward, saying:

“How do you do? I’m making the punt water-tight. Tell me if you
think it is right.”

She went along with him.

“You are your father’s daughter, so you can tell me if it will
do,” he said.

She bent to look at the patched punt.

“I am sure I am my father’s daughter,” she said, fearful
of having to judge. “But I don’t know anything about carpentry. It
looks right, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I think. I hope it won’t let me to the bottom,
that’s all. Though even so, it isn’t a great matter, I should come
up again. Help me to get it into the water, will you?”

With combined efforts they turned over the heavy punt and set it afloat.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll try it and you can watch what
happens. Then if it carries, I’ll take you over to the island.”

“Do,” she cried, watching anxiously.

The pond was large, and had that perfect stillness and the dark lustre of
very deep water. There were two small islands overgrown with bushes and a few
trees, towards the middle. Birkin pushed himself off, and veered clumsily in the
pond. Luckily the punt drifted so that he could catch hold of a willow bough,
and pull it to the island.

“Rather overgrown,” he said, looking into the interior,
“but very nice. I’ll come and fetch you. The boat leaks a
little.”

In a moment he was with her again, and she stepped into the wet punt.

“It’ll float us all right,” he said, and manœuvred again
to the island.

They landed under a willow tree. She shrank from the little jungle of rank
plants before her, evil-smelling figwort and hemlock. But he explored into it.

“I shall mow this down,” he said, “and then it will be
romantic—like Paul et Virginie.”

“Yes, one could have lovely Watteau picnics here,” cried Ursula
with enthusiasm.

His face darkened.

“I don’t want Watteau picnics here,” he said.

“Only your Virginie,” she laughed.

“Virginie enough,” he smiled wryly. “No, I don’t
want her either.”

Ursula looked at him closely. She had not seen him since Breadalby. He was
very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face.

“You have been ill; haven’t you?” she asked, rather
repulsed.

“Yes,” he replied coldly.

They had sat down under the willow tree, and were looking at the pond, from
their retreat on the island.

“Has it made you frightened?” she asked.

“What of?” he asked, turning his eyes to look at her. Something
in him, inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed her, and shook her out of her
ordinary self.

“It is frightening to be very ill, isn’t it?” she said.

“It isn’t pleasant,” he said. “Whether one is really
afraid of death, or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a bit, in
another, very much.”

“But doesn’t it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes one so
ashamed, to be ill—illness is so terribly humiliating, don’t you
think?”

He considered for some minutes.

“Maybe,” he said. “Though one knows all the time
one’s life isn’t really right, at the source. That’s the
humiliation. I don’t see that the illness counts so much, after that. One
is ill because one doesn’t live properly—can’t. It’s the
failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one.”

“But do you fail to live?” she asked, almost jeering.

“Why yes—I don’t make much of a success of my days. One
seems always to be bumping one’s nose against the blank wall ahead.”

Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was frightened she always
laughed and pretended to be jaunty.

“Your poor nose!” she said, looking at that feature of his face.

“No wonder it’s ugly,” he replied.

She was silent for some minutes, struggling with her own self-deception. It
was an instinct in her, to deceive herself.

“But I’m happy—I think life is awfully
jolly,” she said.

“Good,” he answered, with a certain cold indifference.

She reached for a bit of paper which had wrapped a small piece of chocolate
she had found in her pocket, and began making a boat. He watched her without
heeding her. There was something strangely pathetic and tender in her moving,
unconscious finger-tips, that were agitated and hurt, really.

“I do enjoy things—don’t you?” she asked.

“Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can’t get right, at the
really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I
can’t get straight anyhow. I don’t know what really to
do. One must do something somewhere.”

“Why should you always be doing?” she retorted. “It is so
plebeian. I think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing
but just be oneself, like a walking flower.”

“I quite agree,” he said, “if one has burst into blossom.
But I can’t get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the
bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn’t nourished. Curse it, it
isn’t even a bud. It is a contravened knot.”

Again she laughed. He was so very fretful and exasperated. But she was
anxious and puzzled. How was one to get out, anyhow. There must be a way out
somewhere.

There was a silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another bit
of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat.

“And why is it,” she asked at length, “that there is no
flowering, no dignity of human life now?”

“The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There
are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush—and they look very nice
and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a
matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn’t true that they have
any significance—their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.”

“But there are good people,” protested Ursula.

“Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a dead tree,
covered with fine brilliant galls of people.”

Ursula could not help stiffening herself against this, it was too
picturesque and final. But neither could she help making him go on.

“And if it is so, why is it?” she asked, hostile. They were
rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition.

“Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they
won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old
positions when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little
worms and dry-rot.”

There was a long pause. His voice had become hot and very sarcastic. Ursula
was troubled and bewildered, they were both oblivious of everything but their
own immersion.

“But even if everybody is wrong—where are you right?”
she cried, “where are you any better?”

“I?—I’m not right,” he cried back. “At least
my only rightness lies in the fact that I know it. I detest what I am,
outwardly. I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie,
and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the
individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and
humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they
persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do!
Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the
greatest, and charity is the greatest—and see what they are doing all the
time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who
daren’t stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.”

“But,” said Ursula sadly, “that doesn’t alter the
fact that love is the greatest, does it? What they do doesn’t
alter the truth of what they say, does it?”

“Completely, because if what they say were true, then they
couldn’t help fulfilling it. But they maintain a lie, and so they run amok
at last. It’s a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well
say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything balances. What
people want is hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of
righteousness and love, they get it. They distil themselves with nitroglycerine,
all the lot of them, out of very love. It’s the lie that kills. If we want
hate, let us have it—death, murder, torture, violent destruction—let
us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was
swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human
being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be
better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop
of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an
infinite weight of mortal lies.”

“So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?” said
Ursula.

“I should indeed.”

“And the world empty of people?”

“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean
thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting
up?”

The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own
proposition. And really it was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world.
It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted. But still,
she was dissatisfied with him.

“But,” she objected, “you’d be dead yourself, so
what good would it do you?”

“I would die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be
cleaned of all the people. It is the most beautiful and freeing thought. Then
there would never be another foul humanity created, for a universal
defilement.”

“No,” said Ursula, “there would be nothing.”

“What! Nothing? Just because humanity was wiped out? You flatter
yourself. There’d be everything.”

“But how, if there were no people?”

“Do you think that creation depends on man! It merely doesn’t.
There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark
rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go.
There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels
that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn’t interrupt
them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.”

It pleased Ursula, what he said, pleased her very much, as a phantasy. Of
course it was only a pleasant fancy. She herself knew too well the actuality of
humanity, its hideous actuality. She knew it could not disappear so cleanly and
conveniently. It had a long way to go yet, a long and hideous way. Her subtle,
feminine, demoniacal soul knew it well.

“If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on
so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of
creation—like the ichthyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what
lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—things straight out of
the fire.”

“But man will never be gone,” she said, with insidious,
diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. “The world will go
with him.”

“Ah no,” he answered, “not so. I believe in the proud
angels and the demons that are our fore-runners. They will destroy us, because
we are not proud enough. The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and
floundered as we do. And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells—they
are a sign that pure creation takes place—even the butterfly. But humanity
never gets beyond the caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis, it never
will have wings. It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.”

Ursula watched him as he talked. There seemed a certain impatient fury in
him, all the while, and at the same time a great amusement in everything, and a
final tolerance. And it was this tolerance she mistrusted, not the fury. She saw
that, all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the
world. And this knowledge, whilst it comforted her heart somewhere with a little
self-satisfaction, stability, yet filled her with a certain sharp contempt and
hate of him. She wanted him to herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch. It
was something diffuse and generalised about him, which she could not stand. He
would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself as completely to
anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was
despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.

“But,” she said, “you believe in individual love, even if
you don’t believe in loving humanity—?”

“I don’t believe in love at all—that is, any more than I
believe in hate, or in grief. Love is one of the emotions like all the
others—and so it is all right whilst you feel it. But I can’t see how
it becomes an absolute. It is just part of human relationships, no more. And it
is only part of any human relationship. And why one should be required
always to feel it, any more than one always feels sorrow or distant joy,
I cannot conceive. Love isn’t a desideratum—it is an emotion you feel
or you don’t feel, according to circumstance.”

“Then why do you care about people at all?” she asked, “if
you don’t believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?”

“Why do I? Because I can’t get away from it.”

“Because you love it,” she persisted.

It irritated him.

“If I do love it,” he said, “it is my disease.”

“But it is a disease you don’t want to be cured of,” she
said, with some cold sneering.

He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.

“And if you don’t believe in love, what do you believe
in?” she asked mocking. “Simply in the end of the world, and
grass?”

He was beginning to feel a fool.

“I believe in the unseen hosts,” he said.

“And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and
birds? Your world is a poor show.”

“Perhaps it is,” he said, cool and superior now he was offended,
assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his
distance.

Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She looked at
him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday-school
stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same time, the
moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of
freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so
alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.

And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine
hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful, desirable
life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at
the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator Mundi and a
Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type.

He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused
from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was
enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect
attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost
supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.

“The point about love,” he said, his consciousness quickly
adjusting itself, “is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it.
It ought to be prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a
new, better idea.”

There was a beam of understanding between them.

“But it always means the same thing,” she said.

“Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,” he cried.
“Let the old meanings go.”

“But still it is love,” she persisted. A strange, wicked yellow
light shone at him in her eyes.

He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.

“No,” he said, “it isn’t. Spoken like that, never in
the world. You’ve no business to utter the word.”

“I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at
the right moment,” she mocked.

Again they looked at each other. She suddenly sprang up, turned her back to
him, and walked away. He too rose slowly and went to the water’s edge,
where, crouching, he began to amuse himself unconsciously. Picking a daisy he
dropped it on the pond, so that the stem was a keel, the flower floated like a
little water lily, staring with its open face up to the sky. It turned slowly
round, in a slow, slow Dervish dance, as it veered away.

He watched it, then dropped another daisy into the water, and after that
another, and sat watching them with bright, absolved eyes, crouching near on the
bank. Ursula turned to look. A strange feeling possessed her, as if something
were taking place. But it was all intangible. And some sort of control was being
put on her. She could not know. She could only watch the brilliant little discs
of the daisies veering slowly in travel on the dark, lustrous water. The little
flotilla was drifting into the light, a company of white specks in the distance.

“Do let us go to the shore, to follow them,” she said, afraid of
being any longer imprisoned on the island. And they pushed off in the punt.

She was glad to be on the free land again. She went along the bank towards
the sluice. The daisies were scattered broadcast on the pond, tiny radiant
things, like an exaltation, points of exaltation here and there. Why did they
move her so strongly and mystically?

“Look,” he said, “your boat of purple paper is escorting
them, and they are a convoy of rafts.”

Some of the daisies came slowly towards her, hesitating, making a shy bright
little cotillion on the dark clear water. Their gay bright candour moved her so
much as they came near, that she was almost in tears.

“Why are they so lovely,” she cried. “Why do I think them
so lovely?”

“They are nice flowers,” he said, her emotional tones putting a
constraint on him.

“You know that a daisy is a company of florets, a concourse, become
individual. Don’t the botanists put it highest in the line of development?
I believe they do.”

“The compositæ, yes, I think so,” said Ursula, who was never
very sure of anything. Things she knew perfectly well, at one moment, seemed to
become doubtful the next.

“Explain it so, then,” he said. “The daisy is a perfect
little democracy, so it’s the highest of flowers, hence its charm.”

“No,” she cried, “no—never. It isn’t
democratic.”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s the golden mob of the
proletariat, surrounded by a showy white fence of the idle rich.”

“How hateful—your hateful social orders!” she cried.

“Quite! It’s a daisy—we’ll leave it alone.”

“Do. Let it be a dark horse for once,” she said: “if
anything can be a dark horse to you,” she added satirically.

They stood aside, forgetful. As if a little stunned, they both were
motionless, barely conscious. The little conflict into which they had fallen had
torn their consciousness and left them like two impersonal forces, there in
contact.

He became aware of the lapse. He wanted to say something, to get on to a new
more ordinary footing.

“You know,” he said, “that I am having rooms here at the
mill? Don’t you think we can have some good times?”

“Oh are you?” she said, ignoring all his implication of admitted
intimacy.

He adjusted himself at once, became normally distant.

“If I find I can live sufficiently by myself,” he continued,
“I shall give up my work altogether. It has become dead to me. I
don’t believe in the humanity I pretend to be part of, I don’t care
a straw for the social ideals I live by, I hate the dying organic form of social
mankind—so it can’t be anything but trumpery, to work at education.
I shall drop it as soon as I am clear enough—tomorrow perhaps—and be
by myself.”

“Have you enough to live on?” asked Ursula.

“Yes—I’ve about four hundred a year. That makes it easy
for me.”

There was a pause.

“And what about Hermione?” asked Ursula.

“That’s over, finally—a pure failure, and never could have
been anything else.”

“But you still know each other?”

“We could hardly pretend to be strangers, could we?”

There was a stubborn pause.

“But isn’t that a half-measure?” asked Ursula at length.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll be able
to tell me if it is.”

Again there was a pause of some minutes’ duration. He was thinking.

“One must throw everything away, everything—let everything go,
to get the one last thing one wants,” he said.

“What thing?” she asked in challenge.

“I don’t know—freedom together,” he said.

She had wanted him to say ‘love.’

There was heard a loud barking of the dogs below. He seemed disturbed by it.
She did not notice. Only she thought he seemed uneasy.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, in rather a small voice,
“I believe that is Hermione come now, with Gerald Crich. She wanted to see
the rooms before they are furnished.”

“I know,” said Ursula. “She will superintend the
furnishing for you.”

“Probably. Does it matter?”

“Oh no, I should think not,” said Ursula. “Though
personally, I can’t bear her. I think she is a lie, if you like, you who
are always talking about lies.” Then she ruminated for a moment, when she
broke out: “Yes, and I do mind if she furnishes your rooms—I do
mind. I mind that you keep her hanging on at all.”

He was silent now, frowning.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t want her to furnish the
rooms here—and I don’t keep her hanging on. Only, I needn’t be
churlish to her, need I? At any rate, I shall have to go down and see them now.
You’ll come, won’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said coldly and irresolutely.

“Won’t you? Yes do. Come and see the rooms as well. Do
come.”

CHAPTER XII.
CARPETING

He set off down the bank, and she went unwillingly with him. Yet she would
not have stayed away, either.

“We know each other well, you and I, already,” he said. She did
not answer.

In the large darkish kitchen of the mill, the labourer’s wife was
talking shrilly to Hermione and Gerald, who stood, he in white and she in a
glistening bluish foulard, strangely luminous in the dusk of the room; whilst
from the cages on the walls, a dozen or more canaries sang at the top of their
voices. The cages were all placed round a small square window at the back, where
the sunshine came in, a beautiful beam, filtering through green leaves of a
tree. The voice of Mrs Salmon shrilled against the noise of the birds, which
rose ever more wild and triumphant, and the woman’s voice went up and up
against them, and the birds replied with wild animation.

“Here’s Rupert!” shouted Gerald in the midst of the din.
He was suffering badly, being very sensitive in the ear.

“O-o-h them birds, they won’t let you speak—!”
shrilled the labourer’s wife in disgust. “I’ll cover them
up.”

And she darted here and there, throwing a duster, an apron, a towel, a
table-cloth over the cages of the birds.

“Now will you stop it, and let a body speak for your row,” she
said, still in a voice that was too high.

The party watched her. Soon the cages were covered, they had a strange
funereal look. But from under the towels odd defiant trills and bubblings still
shook out.

“Oh, they won’t go on,” said Mrs Salmon reassuringly.
“They’ll go to sleep now.”

“Really,” said Hermione, politely.

“They will,” said Gerald. “They will go to sleep
automatically, now the impression of evening is produced.”

“Are they so easily deceived?” cried Ursula.

“Oh, yes,” replied Gerald. “Don’t you know the story
of Fabre, who, when he was a boy, put a hen’s head under her wing, and she
straight away went to sleep? It’s quite true.”

“And did that make him a naturalist?” asked Birkin.

“Probably,” said Gerald.

Meanwhile Ursula was peeping under one of the cloths. There sat the canary
in a corner, bunched and fluffed up for sleep.

“How ridiculous!” she cried. “It really thinks the night
has come! How absurd! Really, how can one have any respect for a creature that
is so easily taken in!”

“Yes,” sang Hermione, coming also to look. She put her hand on
Ursula’s arm and chuckled a low laugh. “Yes, doesn’t he look
comical?” she chuckled. “Like a stupid husband.”

Then, with her hand still on Ursula’s arm, she drew her away, saying,
in her mild sing-song:

“How did you come here? We saw Gudrun too.”

“I came to look at the pond,” said Ursula, “and I found Mr
Birkin there.”

“Did you? This is quite a Brangwen land, isn’t it!”

“I’m afraid I hoped so,” said Ursula. “I ran here
for refuge, when I saw you down the lake, just putting off.”

“Did you! And now we’ve run you to earth.”

Hermione’s eyelids lifted with an uncanny movement, amused but
overwrought. She had always her strange, rapt look, unnatural and irresponsible.

“I was going on,” said Ursula. “Mr Birkin wanted me to see
the rooms. Isn’t it delightful to live here? It is perfect.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, abstractedly. Then she turned right away
from Ursula, ceased to know her existence.

“How do you feel, Rupert?” she sang in a new, affectionate tone,
to Birkin.

“Very well,” he replied.

“Were you quite comfortable?” The curious, sinister, rapt look
was on Hermione’s face, she shrugged her bosom in a convulsed movement,
and seemed like one half in a trance.

“Quite comfortable,” he replied.

There was a long pause, whilst Hermione looked at him for a long time, from
under her heavy, drugged eyelids.

“And you think you’ll be happy here?” she said at last.

“I’m sure I shall.”

“I’m sure I shall do anything for him as I can,” said the
labourer’s wife. “And I’m sure our master will; so I hope
he’ll find himself comfortable.”

Hermione turned and looked at her slowly.

“Thank you so much,” she said, and then she turned completely
away again. She recovered her position, and lifting her face towards him, and
addressing him exclusively, she said:

“Have you measured the rooms?”

“No,” he said, “I’ve been mending the punt.”

“Shall we do it now?” she said slowly, balanced and
dispassionate.

“Have you got a tape measure, Mrs Salmon?” he said, turning to
the woman.

“Yes sir, I think I can find one,” replied the woman, bustling
immediately to a basket. “This is the only one I’ve got, if it will
do.”

Hermione took it, though it was offered to him.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “It will do very nicely.
Thank you so much.” Then she turned to Birkin, saying with a little gay
movement: “Shall we do it now, Rupert?”

“What about the others, they’ll be bored,” he said
reluctantly.

“Do you mind?” said Hermione, turning to Ursula and Gerald
vaguely.

“Not in the least,” they replied.

“Which room shall we do first?” she said, turning again to
Birkin, with the same gaiety, now she was going to do something with him.

“We’ll take them as they come,” he said.

“Should I be getting your teas ready, while you do that?” said
the labourer’s wife, also gay because she had something to do.

“Would you?” said Hermione, turning to her with the curious
motion of intimacy that seemed to envelop the woman, draw her almost to
Hermione’s breast, and which left the others standing apart. “I
should be so glad. Where shall we have it?”

“Where would you like it? Shall it be in here, or out on the
grass?”

“Where shall we have tea?” sang Hermione to the company at
large.

“On the bank by the pond. And we’ll carry the things up,
if you’ll just get them ready, Mrs Salmon,” said Birkin.

“All right,” said the pleased woman.

The party moved down the passage into the front room. It was empty, but
clean and sunny. There was a window looking on to the tangled front garden.

“This is the dining-room,” said Hermione. “We’ll
measure it this way, Rupert—you go down there—”

“Can’t I do it for you,” said Gerald, coming to take the
end of the tape.

“No, thank you,” cried Hermione, stooping to the ground in her
bluish, brilliant foulard. It was a great joy to her to do things, and
to have the ordering of the job, with Birkin. He obeyed her subduedly. Ursula
and Gerald looked on. It was a peculiarity of Hermione’s, that at every
moment, she had one intimate, and turned all the rest of those present into
onlookers. This raised her into a state of triumph.

They measured and discussed in the dining-room, and Hermione decided what
the floor coverings must be. It sent her into a strange, convulsed anger, to be
thwarted. Birkin always let her have her way, for the moment.

Then they moved across, through the hall, to the other front room, that was
a little smaller than the first.

“This is the study,” said Hermione. “Rupert, I have a rug
that I want you to have for here. Will you let me give it to you? Do—I
want to give it you.”

“What is it like?” he asked ungraciously.

“You haven’t seen it. It is chiefly rose red, then blue, a
metallic, mid-blue, and a very soft dark blue. I think you would like it. Do you
think you would?”

“It sounds very nice,” he replied. “What is it? Oriental?
With a pile?”

“Yes. Persian! It is made of camel’s hair, silky. I think it is
called Bergamos—twelve feet by seven—. Do you think it will
do?”

“It would do,” he said. “But why should you give me an
expensive rug? I can manage perfectly well with my old Oxford Turkish.”

“But may I give it to you? Do let me.”

“How much did it cost?”

She looked at him, and said:

“I don’t remember. It was quite cheap.”

He looked at her, his face set.

“I don’t want to take it, Hermione,” he said.

“Do let me give it to the rooms,” she said, going up to him and
putting her hand on his arm lightly, pleadingly. “I shall be so
disappointed.”

“You know I don’t want you to give me things,” he repeated
helplessly.

“I don’t want to give you things,” she said teasingly.
“But will you have this?”

“All right,” he said, defeated, and she triumphed.

They went upstairs. There were two bedrooms to correspond with the rooms
downstairs. One of them was half furnished, and Birkin had evidently slept
there. Hermione went round the room carefully, taking in every detail, as if
absorbing the evidence of his presence, in all the inanimate things. She felt
the bed and examined the coverings.

“Are you sure you were quite comfortable?” she said, pressing
the pillow.

“Perfectly,” he replied coldly.

“And were you warm? There is no down quilt. I am sure you need one.
You mustn’t have a great pressure of clothes.”

“I’ve got one,” he said. “It is coming down.”

They measured the rooms, and lingered over every consideration. Ursula stood
at the window and watched the woman carrying the tea up the bank to the pond.
She hated the palaver Hermione made, she wanted to drink tea, she wanted
anything but this fuss and business.

At last they all mounted the grassy bank, to the picnic. Hermione poured out
tea. She ignored now Ursula’s presence. And Ursula, recovering from her
ill-humour, turned to Gerald saying:

“Oh, I hated you so much the other day, Mr Crich,”

“What for?” said Gerald, wincing slightly away.

“For treating your horse so badly. Oh, I hated you so much!”

“What did he do?” sang Hermione.

“He made his lovely sensitive Arab horse stand with him at the
railway-crossing whilst a horrible lot of trucks went by; and the poor thing,
she was in a perfect frenzy, a perfect agony. It was the most horrible sight you
can imagine.”

“Why did you do it, Gerald?” asked Hermione, calm and
interrogative.

“She must learn to stand—what use is she to me in this country,
if she shies and goes off every time an engine whistles.”

“But why inflict unnecessary torture?” said Ursula. “Why
make her stand all that time at the crossing? You might just as well have ridden
back up the road, and saved all that horror. Her sides were bleeding where you
had spurred her. It was too horrible—!”

Gerald stiffened.

“I have to use her,” he replied. “And if I’m going
to be sure of her at all, she’ll have to learn to stand noises.”

“Why should she?” cried Ursula in a passion. “She is a
living creature, why should she stand anything, just because you choose to make
her? She has as much right to her own being, as you have to yours.”

“There I disagree,” said Gerald. “I consider that mare is
there for my use. Not because I bought her, but because that is the natural
order. It is more natural for a man to take a horse and use it as he likes, than
for him to go down on his knees to it, begging it to do as it wishes, and to
fulfil its own marvellous nature.”

Ursula was just breaking out, when Hermione lifted her face and began, in
her musing sing-song:

“I do think—I do really think we must have the courage to use
the lower animal life for our needs. I do think there is something wrong, when
we look on every living creature as if it were ourselves. I do feel, that it is
false to project our own feelings on every animate creature. It is a lack of
discrimination, a lack of criticism.”

“Quite,” said Birkin sharply. “Nothing is so detestable as
the maudlin attributing of human feelings and consciousness to animals.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, wearily, “we must really take a
position. Either we are going to use the animals, or they will use us.”

“That’s a fact,” said Gerald. “A horse has got a
will like a man, though it has no mind strictly. And if your will isn’t
master, then the horse is master of you. And this is a thing I can’t help.
I can’t help being master of the horse.”

“If only we could learn how to use our will,” said Hermione,
“we could do anything. The will can cure anything, and put anything right.
That I am convinced of—if only we use the will properly,
intelligibly.”

“What do you mean by using the will properly?” said Birkin.

“A very great doctor taught me,” she said, addressing Ursula and
Gerald vaguely. “He told me for instance, that to cure oneself of a bad
habit, one should force oneself to do it, when one would not do it—make
oneself do it—and then the habit would disappear.”

“How do you mean?” said Gerald.

“If you bite your nails, for example. Then, when you don’t want
to bite your nails, bite them, make yourself bite them. And you would find the
habit was broken.”

“Is that so?” said Gerald.

“Yes. And in so many things, I have made myself well. I was a very
queer and nervous girl. And by learning to use my will, simply by using my will,
I made myself right.”

Ursula looked all the while at Hermione, as she spoke in her slow,
dispassionate, and yet strangely tense voice. A curious thrill went over the
younger woman. Some strange, dark, convulsive power was in Hermione, fascinating
and repelling.

“It is fatal to use the will like that,” cried Birkin harshly,
“disgusting. Such a will is an obscenity.”

Hermione looked at him for a long time, with her shadowed, heavy eyes. Her
face was soft and pale and thin, almost phosphorescent, her jaw was lean.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” she said at length. There
always seemed an interval, a strange split between what she seemed to feel and
experience, and what she actually said and thought. She seemed to catch her
thoughts at length from off the surface of a maelstrom of chaotic black emotions
and reactions, and Birkin was always filled with repulsion, she caught so
infallibly, her will never failed her. Her voice was always dispassionate and
tense, and perfectly confident. Yet she shuddered with a sense of nausea, a sort
of seasickness that always threatened to overwhelm her mind. But her mind
remained unbroken, her will was still perfect. It almost sent Birkin mad. But he
would never, never dare to break her will, and let loose the maelstrom of her
subconsciousness, and see her in her ultimate madness. Yet he was always
striking at her.

“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t
got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse,
strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human
power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two
wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse
bolt, while you’ve been driving it.”

“I have felt a horse bolt while I was driving it,” said Gerald,
“but it didn’t make me know it had two wills. I only knew it was
frightened.”

Hermione had ceased to listen. She simply became oblivious when these
subjects were started.

“Why should a horse want to put itself in the human power?”
asked Ursula. “That is quite incomprehensible to me. I don’t believe
it ever wanted it.”

“Yes it did. It’s the last, perhaps highest, love-impulse:
resign your will to the higher being,” said Birkin.

“What curious notions you have of love,” jeered Ursula.

“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside
her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she
wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

“Then I’m a bolter,” said Ursula, with a burst of
laughter.

“It’s a dangerous thing to domesticate even horses, let alone
women,” said Birkin. “The dominant principle has some rare
antagonists.”

“Good thing too,” said Ursula.

“Quite,” said Gerald, with a faint smile. “There’s
more fun.”

Hermione could bear no more. She rose, saying in her easy sing-song:

“Isn’t the evening beautiful! I get filled sometimes with such a
great sense of beauty, that I feel I can hardly bear it.”

Ursula, to whom she had appealed, rose with her, moved to the last
impersonal depths. And Birkin seemed to her almost a monster of hateful
arrogance. She went with Hermione along the bank of the pond, talking of
beautiful, soothing things, picking the gentle cowslips.

“Wouldn’t you like a dress,” said Ursula to Hermione,
“of this yellow spotted with orange—a cotton dress?”

“Yes,” said Hermione, stopping and looking at the flower,
letting the thought come home to her and soothe her. “Wouldn’t it be
pretty? I should love it.”

And she turned smiling to Ursula, in a feeling of real affection.

But Gerald remained with Birkin, wanting to probe him to the bottom, to know
what he meant by the dual will in horses. A flicker of excitement danced on
Gerald’s face.

Hermione and Ursula strayed on together, united in a sudden bond of deep
affection and closeness.

“I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and
analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their
beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness. Don’t
you feel it, don’t you feel you can’t be tortured into any more
knowledge?” said Hermione, stopping in front of Ursula, and turning to her
with clenched fists thrust downwards.

“Yes,” said Ursula. “I do. I am sick of all this poking
and prying.”

“I’m so glad you are. Sometimes,” said Hermione, again
stopping arrested in her progress and turning to Ursula, “sometimes I
wonder if I ought to submit to all this realisation, if I am not being weak
in rejecting it. But I feel I can’t—I can’t. It
seems to destroy everything. All the beauty and the—and the true
holiness is destroyed—and I feel I can’t live without them.”

“And it would be simply wrong to live without them,” cried
Ursula. “No, it is so irreverent to think that everything must be realised
in the head. Really, something must be left to the Lord, there always is and
always will be.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, reassured like a child, “it should,
shouldn’t it? And Rupert—” she lifted her face to the sky, in
a muse—“he can only tear things to pieces. He really is
like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made. And I
can’t think it is right—it does seem so irreverent, as you say.”

“Like tearing open a bud to see what the flower will be like,”
said Ursula.

“Yes. And that kills everything, doesn’t it? It doesn’t
allow any possibility of flowering.”

“Of course not,” said Ursula. “It is purely
destructive.”

“It is, isn’t it!”

Hermione looked long and slow at Ursula, seeming to accept confirmation from
her. Then the two women were silent. As soon as they were in accord, they began
mutually to mistrust each other. In spite of herself, Ursula felt herself
recoiling from Hermione. It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion.

They returned to the men, like two conspirators who have withdrawn to come
to an agreement. Birkin looked up at them. Ursula hated him for his cold
watchfulness. But he said nothing.

“Shall we be going?” said Hermione. “Rupert, you are
coming to Shortlands to dinner? Will you come at once, will you come now, with
us?”

“I’m not dressed,” replied Birkin. “And you know
Gerald stickles for convention.”

“I don’t stickle for it,” said Gerald. “But if
you’d got as sick as I have of rowdy go-as-you-please in the house,
you’d prefer it if people were peaceful and conventional, at least at
meals.”

“All right,” said Birkin.

“But can’t we wait for you while you dress?” persisted
Hermione.

“If you like.”

He rose to go indoors. Ursula said she would take her leave.

“Only,” she said, turning to Gerald, “I must say that,
however man is lord of the beast and the fowl, I still don’t think he has
any right to violate the feelings of the inferior creation. I still think it
would have been much more sensible and nice of you if you’d trotted back
up the road while the train went by, and been considerate.”

“I see,” said Gerald, smiling, but somewhat annoyed. “I
must remember another time.”

“They all think I’m an interfering female,” thought Ursula
to herself, as she went away. But she was in arms against them.

She ran home plunged in thought. She had been very much moved by Hermione,
she had really come into contact with her, so that there was a sort of league
between the two women. And yet she could not bear her. But she put the thought
away. “She’s really good,” she said to herself. “She
really wants what is right.” And she tried to feel at one with Hermione,
and to shut off from Birkin. She was strictly hostile to him. But she was held
to him by some bond, some deep principle. This at once irritated her and saved
her.

Only now and again, violent little shudders would come over her, out of her
subconsciousness, and she knew it was the fact that she had stated her challenge
to Birkin, and he had, consciously or unconsciously, accepted. It was a fight to
the death between them—or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no
one could say.

CHAPTER XIII.
MINO

The days went by, and she received no sign. Was he going to ignore her, was
he going to take no further notice of her secret? A dreary weight of anxiety and
acrid bitterness settled on her. And yet Ursula knew she was only deceiving
herself, and that he would proceed. She said no word to anybody.

Then, sure enough, there came a note from him, asking if she would come to
tea with Gudrun, to his rooms in town.

“Why does he ask Gudrun as well?” she asked herself at once.
“Does he want to protect himself, or does he think I would not go
alone?” She was tormented by the thought that he wanted to protect
himself. But at the end of all, she only said to herself:

“I don’t want Gudrun to be there, because I want him to say
something more to me. So I shan’t tell Gudrun anything about it, and I
shall go alone. Then I shall know.”

She found herself sitting on the tram-car, mounting up the hill going out of
the town, to the place where he had his lodging. She seemed to have passed into
a kind of dream world, absolved from the conditions of actuality. She watched
the sordid streets of the town go by beneath her, as if she were a spirit
disconnected from the material universe. What had it all to do with her? She was
palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not
consider any more, what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had
passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out
of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has
ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown.

Birkin was standing in the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the
landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a
frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came
out from him and shook her almost into a swoon.

“You are alone?” he said.

“Yes—Gudrun could not come.”

He instantly guessed why.

And they were both seated in silence, in the terrible tension of the room.
She was aware that it was a pleasant room, full of light and very restful in its
form—aware also of a fuchsia tree, with dangling scarlet and purple
flowers.

“How nice the fuchsias are!” she said, to break the silence.

“Aren’t they! Did you think I had forgotten what I said?”

A swoon went over Ursula’s mind.

“I don’t want you to remember it—if you don’t want
to,” she struggled to say, through the dark mist that covered her.

There was silence for some moments.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t that. Only—if we are
going to know each other, we must pledge ourselves for ever. If we are going to
make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and
infallible about it.”

There was a clang of mistrust and almost anger in his voice. She did not
answer. Her heart was too much contracted. She could not have spoken.

Seeing she was not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving
himself away:

“I can’t say it is love I have to offer—and it isn’t
love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder—and
rarer.”

There was a silence, out of which she said:

“You mean you don’t love me?”

She suffered furiously, saying that.

“Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t
true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love
for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last
issues.”

“Love gives out in the last issues?” she asked, feeling numb to
the lips.

“Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of
love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional
relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is
the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a
naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle,
and never can.”

She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its
abstract earnestness.

“And you mean you can’t love?” she asked, in trepidation.

“Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is
not love.”

She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could
not submit.

“But how do you know—if you have never really loved?”
she asked.

“It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is
further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision,
some of them.”

“Then there is no love,” cried Ursula.

“Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there is
no love.”

Ursula was given over to this statement for some moments. Then she half rose
from her chair, saying, in a final, repellent voice:

“Then let me go home—what am I doing here?”

“There is the door,” he said. “You are a free
agent.”

He was suspended finely and perfectly in this extremity. She hung motionless
for some seconds, then she sat down again.

“If there is no love, what is there?” she cried, almost jeering.

“Something,” he said, looking at her, battling with his soul,
with all his might.

“What?”

He was silent for a long time, unable to be in communication with her while
she was in this state of opposition.

“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; “a
final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a
final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional,
loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of
agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange
creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no
obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no
understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman,—so
there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is
outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can
only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for
nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the
primal desire.”

Ursula listened to this speech, her mind dumb and almost senseless, what he
said was so unexpected and so untoward.

“It is just purely selfish,” she said.

“If it is pure, yes. But it isn’t selfish at all. Because I
don’t know what I want of you. I deliver myself over to the
unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely,
into the unknown. Only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast
off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is
perfectly ourselves can take place in us.”

She pondered along her own line of thought.

“But it is because you love me, that you want me?” she
persisted.

“No it isn’t. It is because I believe in you—if I
do believe in you.”

“Aren’t you sure?” she laughed, suddenly hurt.

He was looking at her steadfastly, scarcely heeding what she said.

“Yes, I must believe in you, or else I shouldn’t be here saying
this,” he replied. “But that is all the proof I have. I don’t
feel any very strong belief at this particular moment.”

She disliked him for this sudden relapse into weariness and faithlessness.

“But don’t you think me good-looking?” she persisted, in a
mocking voice.

He looked at her, to see if he felt that she was good-looking.

“I don’t feel that you’re good-looking,” he said.

“Not even attractive?” she mocked, bitingly.

He knitted his brows in sudden exasperation.

“Don’t you see that it’s not a question of visual
appreciation in the least,” he cried. “I don’t want to
see you. I’ve seen plenty of women, I’m sick and weary of seeing
them. I want a woman I don’t see.”

“I’m sorry I can’t oblige you by being invisible,”
she laughed.

“Yes,” he said, “you are invisible to me, if you
don’t force me to be visually aware of you. But I don’t want to see
you or hear you.”

“What did you ask me to tea for, then?” she mocked.

But he would take no notice of her. He was talking to himself.

“I want to find you, where you don’t know your own existence,
the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don’t want your good
looks, and I don’t want your womanly feelings, and I don’t want your
thoughts nor opinions nor your ideas—they are all bagatelles to me.”

“You are very conceited, Monsieur,” she mocked. “How do
you know what my womanly feelings are, or my thoughts or my ideas? You
don’t even know what I think of you now.”

“Nor do I care in the slightest.”

“I think you are very silly. I think you want to tell me you love me,
and you go all this way round to do it.”

“All right,” he said, looking up with sudden exasperation.
“Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your
meretricious persiflage.”

“Is it really persiflage?” she mocked, her face really relaxing
into laughter. She interpreted it, that he had made a deep confession of love to
her. But he was so absurd in his words, also.

They were silent for many minutes, she was pleased and elated like a child.
His concentration broke, he began to look at her simply and naturally.

“What I want is a strange conjunction with you—” he said
quietly; “not meeting and mingling—you are quite right—but an
equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings—as the stars balance each
other.”

She looked at him. He was very earnest, and earnestness was always rather
ridiculous, commonplace, to her. It made her feel unfree and uncomfortable. Yet
she liked him so much. But why drag in the stars.

“Isn’t this rather sudden?” she mocked.

He began to laugh.

“Best to read the terms of the contract, before we sign,” he
said.

A young grey cat that had been sleeping on the sofa jumped down and
stretched, rising on its long legs, and arching its slim back. Then it sat
considering for a moment, erect and kingly. And then, like a dart, it had shot
out of the room, through the open window-doors, and into the garden.

“What’s he after?” said Birkin, rising.

The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an
ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy,
brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked
statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed
herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with
wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on
her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door,
crouching in a wonderful, soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a
shadow.

He, going statelily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for
pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of her face. She
ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched
unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no
notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she
drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces
forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a
dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome
cuff. She subsided at once, submissively.

“She is a wild cat,” said Birkin. “She has come in from
the woods.”

The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires
staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the
garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure
superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque
young perfection. The wild cat’s round, green, wondering eyes were staring
all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards
the kitchen.

In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had
boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid
back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice,
leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws.

“Now why does he do that?” cried Ursula in indignation.

“They are on intimate terms,” said Birkin.

“And is that why he hits her?”

“Yes,” laughed Birkin, “I think he wants to make it quite
obvious to her.”

“Isn’t it horrid of him!” she cried; and going out into
the garden she called to the Mino:

“Stop it, don’t bully. Stop hitting her.”

The stray cat vanished like a swift, invisible shadow. The Mino glanced at
Ursula, then looked from her disdainfully to his master.

“Are you a bully, Mino?” Birkin asked.

The young slim cat looked at him, and slowly narrowed its eyes. Then it
glanced away at the landscape, looking into the distance as if completely
oblivious of the two human beings.

“Mino,” said Ursula, “I don’t like you. You are a
bully like all males.”

“No,” said Birkin, “he is justified. He is not a bully. He
is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of
fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the
wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability.”

“Yes, I know!” cried Ursula. “He wants his own way—I
know what your fine words work down to—bossiness, I call it,
bossiness.”

The young cat again glanced at Birkin in disdain of the noisy woman.

“I quite agree with you, Miciotto,” said Birkin to the cat.
“Keep your male dignity, and your higher understanding.”

Again the Mino narrowed his eyes as if he were looking at the sun. Then,
suddenly affecting to have no connection at all with the two people, he went
trotting off, with assumed spontaneity and gaiety, his tail erect, his white
feet blithe.

“Now he will find the belle sauvage once more, and entertain her with
his superior wisdom,” laughed Birkin.

Ursula looked at the man who stood in the garden with his hair blowing and
his eyes smiling ironically, and she cried:

“Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it
is such a lie! One wouldn’t mind if there were any justification for
it.”

“The wild cat,” said Birkin, “doesn’t mind. She
perceives that it is justified.”

“Does she!” cried Ursula. “And tell it to the Horse
Marines.”

“To them also.”

“It is just like Gerald Crich with his horse—a lust for
bullying—a real Wille zur Macht—so base, so petty.”

“I agree that the Wille zur Macht is a base and petty thing. But
with the Mino, it is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable
equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male.
Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of
chaos. It is a volonté de pouvoir, if you like, a will to ability,
taking pouvoir as a verb.”

“Ah—! Sophistries! It’s the old Adam.”

“Oh yes. Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise, when he kept
her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.”

“Yes—yes—” cried Ursula, pointing her finger at him.
“There you are—a star in its orbit! A satellite—a satellite of
Mars—that’s what she is to be! There—there—you’ve
given yourself away! You want a satellite, Mars and his satellite! You’ve
said it—you’ve said it—you’ve dished yourself!”

He stood smiling in frustration and amusement and irritation and admiration
and love. She was so quick, and so lambent, like discernible fire, and so
vindictive, and so rich in her dangerous flamy sensitiveness.

“I’ve not said it at all,” he replied, “if you will
give me a chance to speak.”

“No, no!” she cried. “I won’t let you speak.
You’ve said it, a satellite, you’re not going to wriggle out of it.
You’ve said it.”

“You’ll never believe now that I haven’t said it,”
he answered. “I neither implied nor indicated nor mentioned a satellite,
nor intended a satellite, never.”

“You prevaricator!” she cried, in real indignation.

“Tea is ready, sir,” said the landlady from the doorway.

They both looked at her, very much as the cats had looked at them, a little
while before.

“Thank you, Mrs Daykin.”

An interrupted silence fell over the two of them, a moment of breach.

“Come and have tea,” he said.

“Yes, I should love it,” she replied, gathering herself
together.

They sat facing each other across the tea table.

“I did not say, nor imply, a satellite. I meant two single equal stars
balanced in conjunction—”

“You gave yourself away, you gave away your little game
completely,” she cried, beginning at once to eat. He saw that she would
take no further heed of his expostulation, so he began to pour the tea.

“What good things to eat!” she cried.

“Take your own sugar,” he said.

He handed her her cup. He had everything so nice, such pretty cups and
plates, painted with mauve-lustre and green, also shapely bowls and glass
plates, and old spoons, on a woven cloth of pale grey and black and purple. It
was very rich and fine. But Ursula could see Hermione’s influence.

“Your things are so lovely!” she said, almost angrily.

“I like them. It gives me real pleasure to use things that are
attractive in themselves—pleasant things. And Mrs Daykin is good. She
thinks everything is wonderful, for my sake.”

“Really,” said Ursula, “landladies are better than wives,
nowadays. They certainly care a great deal more. It is much more beautiful
and complete here now, than if you were married.”

“But think of the emptiness within,” he laughed.

“No,” she said. “I am jealous that men have such perfect
landladies and such beautiful lodgings. There is nothing left them to
desire.”

“In the house-keeping way, we’ll hope not. It is disgusting,
people marrying for a home.”

“Still,” said Ursula, “a man has very little need for a
woman now, has he?”

“In outer things, maybe—except to share his bed and bear his
children. But essentially, there is just the same need as there ever was. Only
nobody takes the trouble to be essential.”

“How essential?” she said.

“I do think,” he said, “that the world is only held
together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people—a
bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.”

“But it’s such old hat,” said Ursula. “Why should
love be a bond? No, I’m not having any.”

“If you are walking westward,” he said, “you forfeit the
northern and eastward and southern direction. If you admit a unison, you forfeit
all the possibilities of chaos.”

“But love is freedom,” she declared.

“Don’t cant to me,” he replied. “Love is a direction
which excludes all other directions. It’s a freedom together, if you
like.”

“No,” she said, “love includes everything.”

“Sentimental cant,” he replied. “You want the state of
chaos, that’s all. It is ultimate nihilism, this freedom-in-love business,
this freedom which is love and love which is freedom. As a matter of fact, if
you enter into a pure unison, it is irrevocable, and it is never pure till it is
irrevocable. And when it is irrevocable, it is one way, like the path of a
star.”

“Ha!” she cried bitterly. “It is the old dead
morality.”

“No,” he said, “it is the law of creation. One is
committed. One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for
ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic
balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.”

“I don’t trust you when you drag in the stars,” she said.
“If you were quite true, it wouldn’t be necessary to be so
far-fetched.”

“Don’t trust me then,” he said, angry. “It is enough
that I trust myself.”

“And that is where you make another mistake,” she replied.
“You don’t trust yourself. You don’t fully believe yourself
what you are saying. You don’t really want this conjunction, otherwise you
wouldn’t talk so much about it, you’d get it.”

He was suspended for a moment, arrested.

“How?” he said.

“By just loving,” she retorted in defiance.

He was still a moment, in anger. Then he said:

“I tell you, I don’t believe in love like that. I tell you, you
want love to administer to your egoism, to subserve you. Love is a process of
subservience with you—and with everybody. I hate it.”

“No,” she cried, pressing back her head like a cobra, her eyes
flashing. “It is a process of pride—I want to be proud—”

“Proud and subservient, proud and subservient, I know you,” he
retorted dryly. “Proud and subservient, then subservient to the
proud—I know you and your love. It is a tick-tack, tick-tack, a dance of
opposites.”

“Are you sure?” she mocked wickedly, “what my love
is?”

“Yes, I am,” he retorted.

“So cocksure!” she said. “How can anybody ever be right,
who is so cocksure? It shows you are wrong.”

He was silent in chagrin.

They had talked and struggled till they were both wearied out.

“Tell me about yourself and your people,” he said.

And she told him about the Brangwens, and about her mother, and about
Skrebensky, her first love, and about her later experiences. He sat very still,
watching her as she talked. And he seemed to listen with reverence. Her face was
beautiful and full of baffled light as she told him all the things that had hurt
her or perplexed her so deeply. He seemed to warm and comfort his soul at the
beautiful light of her nature.

“If she really could pledge herself,” he thought to himself,
with passionate insistence but hardly any hope. Yet a curious little
irresponsible laughter appeared in his heart.

“We have all suffered so much,” he mocked, ironically.

She looked up at him, and a flash of wild gaiety went over her face, a
strange flash of yellow light coming from her eyes.

“Haven’t we!” she cried, in a high, reckless cry.
“It is almost absurd, isn’t it?”

“Quite absurd,” he said. “Suffering bores me, any
more.”

“So it does me.”

He was almost afraid of the mocking recklessness of her splendid face. Here
was one who would go to the whole lengths of heaven or hell, whichever she had
to go. And he mistrusted her, he was afraid of a woman capable of such abandon,
such dangerous thoroughness of destructivity. Yet he chuckled within himself
also.

She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, looking down at him
with strange golden-lighted eyes, very tender, but with a curious devilish look
lurking underneath.

“Say you love me, say ‘my love’ to me,” she pleaded.

He looked back into her eyes, and saw. His face flickered with sardonic
comprehension.

“I love you right enough,” he said, grimly. “But I want it
to be something else.”

“But why? But why?” she insisted, bending her wonderful luminous
face to him. “Why isn’t it enough?”

“Because we can go one better,” he said, putting his arms round
her.

“No, we can’t,” she said, in a strong, voluptuous voice of
yielding. “We can only love each other. Say ‘my love’ to me,
say it, say it.”

She put her arms round his neck. He enfolded her, and kissed her subtly,
murmuring in a subtle voice of love, and irony, and submission:

“Yes,—my love, yes,—my love. Let love be enough then. I
love you then—I love you. I’m bored by the rest.”

“Yes,” she murmured, nestling very sweet and close to him.

CHAPTER XIV.
WATER-PARTY

Every year Mr Crich gave a more or less public water-party on the lake.
There was a little pleasure-launch on Willey Water and several rowing boats, and
guests could take tea either in the marquee that was set up in the grounds of
the house, or they could picnic in the shade of the great walnut tree at the
boat-house by the lake. This year the staff of the Grammar-School was invited,
along with the chief officials of the firm. Gerald and the younger Criches did
not care for this party, but it had become customary now, and it pleased the
father, as being the only occasion when he could gather some people of the
district together in festivity with him. For he loved to give pleasures to his
dependents and to those poorer than himself. But his children preferred the
company of their own equals in wealth. They hated their inferiors’
humility or gratitude or awkwardness.

Nevertheless they were willing to attend at this festival, as they had done
almost since they were children, the more so, as they all felt a little guilty
now, and unwilling to thwart their father any more, since he was so ill in
health. Therefore, quite cheerfully Laura prepared to take her mother’s
place as hostess, and Gerald assumed responsibility for the amusements on the
water.

Birkin had written to Ursula saying he expected to see her at the party, and
Gudrun, although she scorned the patronage of the Criches, would nevertheless
accompany her mother and father if the weather were fine.

The day came blue and full of sunshine, with little wafts of wind. The
sisters both wore dresses of white crêpe, and hats of soft grass. But Gudrun had
a sash of brilliant black and pink and yellow colour wound broadly round her
waist, and she had pink silk stockings, and black and pink and yellow decoration
on the brim of her hat, weighing it down a little. She carried also a yellow
silk coat over her arm, so that she looked remarkable, like a painting from the
Salon. Her appearance was a sore trial to her father, who said angrily:

“Don’t you think you might as well get yourself up for a
Christmas cracker, an’ ha’ done with it?”

But Gudrun looked handsome and brilliant, and she wore her clothes in pure
defiance. When people stared at her, and giggled after her, she made a point of
saying loudly, to Ursula:

“Regarde, regarde ces gens-là! Ne sont-ils pas des hiboux
incroyables?” And with the words of French in her mouth, she would look
over her shoulder at the giggling party.

“No, really, it’s impossible!” Ursula would reply
distinctly. And so the two girls took it out of their universal enemy. But their
father became more and more enraged.

Ursula was all snowy white, save that her hat was pink, and entirely without
trimming, and her shoes were dark red, and she carried an orange-coloured coat.
And in this guise they were walking all the way to Shortlands, their father and
mother going in front.

They were laughing at their mother, who, dressed in a summer material of
black and purple stripes, and wearing a hat of purple straw, was setting forth
with much more of the shyness and trepidation of a young girl than her daughters
ever felt, walking demurely beside her husband, who, as usual, looked rather
crumpled in his best suit, as if he were the father of a young family and had
been holding the baby whilst his wife got dressed.

“Look at the young couple in front,” said Gudrun calmly. Ursula
looked at her mother and father, and was suddenly seized with uncontrollable
laughter. The two girls stood in the road and laughed till the tears ran down
their faces, as they caught sight again of the shy, unworldly couple of their
parents going on ahead.

“We are roaring at you, mother,” called Ursula, helplessly
following after her parents.

Mrs Brangwen turned round with a slightly puzzled, exasperated look.
“Oh indeed!” she said. “What is there so very funny about
me, I should like to know?”

She could not understand that there could be anything amiss with her
appearance. She had a perfect calm sufficiency, an easy indifference to any
criticism whatsoever, as if she were beyond it. Her clothes were always rather
odd, and as a rule slip-shod, yet she wore them with a perfect ease and
satisfaction. Whatever she had on, so long as she was barely tidy, she was
right, beyond remark; such an aristocrat she was by instinct.

“You look so stately, like a country Baroness,” said Ursula,
laughing with a little tenderness at her mother’s naive puzzled air.

“Just like a country Baroness!” chimed in Gudrun. Now the
mother’s natural hauteur became self-conscious, and the girls shrieked
again.

“Go home, you pair of idiots, great giggling idiots!” cried the
father inflamed with irritation.

“Mm-m-er!” booed Ursula, pulling a face at his crossness.

The yellow lights danced in his eyes, he leaned forward in real rage.

“Don’t be so silly as to take any notice of the great
gabies,” said Mrs Brangwen, turning on her way.

“I’ll see if I’m going to be followed by a pair of
giggling yelling jackanapes—” he cried vengefully.

The girls stood still, laughing helplessly at his fury, upon the path beside
the hedge.

“Why you’re as silly as they are, to take any notice,”
said Mrs Brangwen also becoming angry now he was really enraged.

“There are some people coming, father,” cried Ursula, with
mocking warning. He glanced round quickly, and went on to join his wife, walking
stiff with rage. And the girls followed, weak with laughter.

When the people had passed by, Brangwen cried in a loud, stupid voice:

“I’m going back home if there’s any more of this.
I’m damned if I’m going to be made a fool of in this fashion, in the
public road.”

He was really out of temper. At the sound of his blind, vindictive voice,
the laughter suddenly left the girls, and their hearts contracted with contempt.
They hated his words “in the public road.” What did they care for
the public road? But Gudrun was conciliatory.

“But we weren’t laughing to hurt you,” she cried, with an
uncouth gentleness which made her parents uncomfortable. “We were laughing
because we’re fond of you.”

“We’ll walk on in front, if they are so touchy,” said
Ursula, angry. And in this wise they arrived at Willey Water. The lake was blue
and fair, the meadows sloped down in sunshine on one side, the thick dark woods
dropped steeply on the other. The little pleasure-launch was fussing out from
the shore, twanging its music, crowded with people, flapping its paddles. Near
the boat-house was a throng of gaily-dressed persons, small in the distance. And
on the high-road, some of the common people were standing along the hedge,
looking at the festivity beyond, enviously, like souls not admitted to paradise.

“My eye!” said Gudrun, sotto voce, looking at the motley of
guests, “there’s a pretty crowd if you like! Imagine yourself in the
midst of that, my dear.”

Gudrun’s apprehensive horror of people in the mass unnerved Ursula.
“It looks rather awful,” she said anxiously.

“And imagine what they’ll be like—imagine!” said
Gudrun, still in that unnerving, subdued voice. Yet she advanced determinedly.

“I suppose we can get away from them,” said Ursula anxiously.

“We’re in a pretty fix if we can’t,” said Gudrun.
Her extreme ironic loathing and apprehension was very trying to Ursula.

“We needn’t stay,” she said.

“I certainly shan’t stay five minutes among that little
lot,” said Gudrun. They advanced nearer, till they saw policemen at the
gates.

“Policemen to keep you in, too!” said Gudrun. “My word,
this is a beautiful affair.”

“We’d better look after father and mother,” said Ursula
anxiously.

“Mother’s perfectly capable of getting through this little
celebration,” said Gudrun with some contempt.

But Ursula knew that her father felt uncouth and angry and unhappy, so she
was far from her ease. They waited outside the gate till their parents came up.
The tall, thin man in his crumpled clothes was unnerved and irritable as a boy,
finding himself on the brink of this social function. He did not feel a
gentleman, he did not feel anything except pure exasperation.

Ursula took her place at his side, they gave their tickets to the policeman,
and passed in on to the grass, four abreast; the tall, hot, ruddy-dark man with
his narrow boyish brow drawn with irritation, the fresh-faced, easy woman,
perfectly collected though her hair was slipping on one side, then Gudrun, her
eyes round and dark and staring, her full soft face impassive, almost sulky, so
that she seemed to be backing away in antagonism even whilst she was advancing;
and then Ursula, with the odd, brilliant, dazzled look on her face, that always
came when she was in some false situation.

Birkin was the good angel. He came smiling to them with his affected social
grace, that somehow was never quite right. But he took off his hat and smiled
at them with a real smile in his eyes, so that Brangwen cried out heartily in
relief:

“How do you do? You’re better, are you?”

“Yes, I’m better. How do you do, Mrs Brangwen? I know Gudrun and
Ursula very well.”

His eyes smiled full of natural warmth. He had a soft, flattering manner
with women, particularly with women who were not young.

“Yes,” said Mrs Brangwen, cool but yet gratified. “I have
heard them speak of you often enough.”

He laughed. Gudrun looked aside, feeling she was being belittled. People
were standing about in groups, some women were sitting in the shade of the
walnut tree, with cups of tea in their hands, a waiter in evening dress was
hurrying round, some girls were simpering with parasols, some young men, who had
just come in from rowing, were sitting cross-legged on the grass, coatless,
their shirt-sleeves rolled up in manly fashion, their hands resting on their
white flannel trousers, their gaudy ties floating about, as they laughed and
tried to be witty with the young damsels.

“Why,” thought Gudrun churlishly, “don’t they have
the manners to put their coats on, and not to assume such intimacy in their
appearance.”

She abhorred the ordinary young man, with his hair plastered back, and his
easy-going chumminess.

Hermione Roddice came up, in a handsome gown of white lace, trailing an
enormous silk shawl blotched with great embroidered flowers, and balancing an
enormous plain hat on her head. She looked striking, astonishing, almost
macabre, so tall, with the fringe of her great cream-coloured vividly-blotched
shawl trailing on the ground after her, her thick hair coming low over her eyes,
her face strange and long and pale, and the blotches of brilliant colour drawn
round her.

“Doesn’t she look weird!” Gudrun heard some girls titter
behind her. And she could have killed them.

“How do you do!” sang Hermione, coming up very kindly, and
glancing slowly over Gudrun’s father and mother. It was a trying moment,
exasperating for Gudrun. Hermione was really so strongly entrenched in her class
superiority, she could come up and know people out of simple curiosity, as if
they were creatures on exhibition. Gudrun would do the same herself. But she
resented being in the position when somebody might do it to her.

Hermione, very remarkable, and distinguishing the Brangwens very much, led
them along to where Laura Crich stood receiving the guests.

“This is Mrs Brangwen,” sang Hermione, and Laura, who wore a
stiff embroidered linen dress, shook hands and said she was glad to see her.
Then Gerald came up, dressed in white, with a black and brown blazer, and
looking handsome. He too was introduced to the Brangwen parents, and immediately
he spoke to Mrs Brangwen as if she were a lady, and to Brangwen as if he were
not a gentleman. Gerald was so obvious in his demeanour. He had to shake hands
with his left hand, because he had hurt his right, and carried it, bandaged up,
in the pocket of his jacket. Gudrun was very thankful that none of her party
asked him what was the matter with the hand.

The steam launch was fussing in, all its music jingling, people calling
excitedly from on board. Gerald went to see to the debarkation, Birkin was
getting tea for Mrs Brangwen, Brangwen had joined a Grammar-School group,
Hermione was sitting down by their mother, the girls went to the landing-stage
to watch the launch come in.

She hooted and tooted gaily, then her paddles were silent, the ropes were
thrown ashore, she drifted in with a little bump. Immediately the passengers
crowded excitedly to come ashore.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” shouted Gerald in sharp command.

They must wait till the boat was tight on the ropes, till the small gangway
was put out. Then they streamed ashore, clamouring as if they had come from
America.

“Oh it’s so nice!” the young girls were crying.
“It’s quite lovely.”

The waiters from on board ran out to the boat-house with baskets, the
captain lounged on the little bridge. Seeing all safe, Gerald came to Gudrun and
Ursula.

“You wouldn’t care to go on board for the next trip, and have
tea there?” he asked.

“No thanks,” said Gudrun coldly.

“You don’t care for the water?”

“For the water? Yes, I like it very much.”

He looked at her, his eyes searching.

“You don’t care for going on a launch, then?”

She was slow in answering, and then she spoke slowly.

“No,” she said. “I can’t say that I do.” Her
colour was high, she seemed angry about something.

“Un peu trop de monde,” said Ursula, explaining.

“Eh? Trop de monde!” He laughed shortly. “Yes
there’s a fair number of ’em.”

Gudrun turned on him brilliantly.

“Have you ever been from Westminster Bridge to Richmond on one of the
Thames steamers?” she cried.

“No,” he said, “I can’t say I have.”

“Well, it’s one of the most vile experiences I’ve ever
had.” She spoke rapidly and excitedly, the colour high in her cheeks.
“There was absolutely nowhere to sit down, nowhere, a man just above sang
‘Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep’ the whole way; he was blind and
he had a small organ, one of those portable organs, and he expected money; so you can
imagine what that was like; there came a constant smell of luncheon from below,
and puffs of hot oily machinery; the journey took hours and hours and hours; and
for miles, literally for miles, dreadful boys ran with us on the shore, in that
awful Thames mud, going in up to the waist—they had their trousers
turned back, and they went up to their hips in that indescribable Thames mud, their
faces always turned to us, and screaming, exactly like carrion creatures,
screaming ‘’Ere y’are sir, ’ere y’are sir, ’ere
y’are sir,’ exactly like some foul carrion objects, perfectly obscene; and
paterfamilias on board, laughing when the boys went right down in that awful
mud, occasionally throwing them a ha’penny. And if you’d seen the
intent look on the faces of these boys, and the way they darted in the filth
when a coin was flung—really, no vulture or jackal could dream of
approaching them, for foulness. I never would go on a pleasure boat
again—never.”

Gerald watched her all the time she spoke, his eyes glittering with faint
rousedness. It was not so much what she said; it was she herself who roused him,
roused him with a small, vivid pricking.

“Of course,” he said, “every civilised body is bound to
have its vermin.”

“Why?” cried Ursula. “I don’t have vermin.”

“And it’s not that—it’s the quality of the whole
thing—paterfamilias laughing and thinking it sport, and throwing the
ha’pennies, and materfamilias spreading her fat little knees and eating,
continually eating—” replied Gudrun.

“Yes,” said Ursula. “It isn’t the boys so much who
are vermin; it’s the people themselves, the whole body politic, as you
call it.”

Gerald laughed.

“Never mind,” he said. “You shan’t go on the
launch.”

Gudrun flushed quickly at his rebuke.

There were a few moments of silence. Gerald, like a sentinel, was watching
the people who were going on to the boat. He was very good-looking and
self-contained, but his air of soldierly alertness was rather irritating.

“Will you have tea here then, or go across to the house, where
there’s a tent on the lawn?” he asked.

“Can’t we have a rowing boat, and get out?” asked Ursula,
who was always rushing in too fast.

“To get out?” smiled Gerald.

“You see,” cried Gudrun, flushing at Ursula’s outspoken
rudeness, “we don’t know the people, we are almost complete
strangers here.”

“Oh, I can soon set you up with a few acquaintances,” he said
easily.

Gudrun looked at him, to see if it were ill-meant. Then she smiled at him.

“Ah,” she said, “you know what we mean. Can’t we go
up there, and explore that coast?” She pointed to a grove on the hillock
of the meadow-side, near the shore half way down the lake. “That looks
perfectly lovely. We might even bathe. Isn’t it beautiful in this light.
Really, it’s like one of the reaches of the Nile—as one imagines the
Nile.”

Gerald smiled at her factitious enthusiasm for the distant spot.

“You’re sure it’s far enough off?” he asked
ironically, adding at once: “Yes, you might go there, if we could get a
boat. They seem to be all out.”

He looked round the lake and counted the rowing boats on its surface.

“How lovely it would be!” cried Ursula wistfully.

“And don’t you want tea?” he said.

“Oh,” said Gudrun, “we could just drink a cup, and be
off.”

He looked from one to the other, smiling. He was somewhat offended—yet
sporting.

“Can you manage a boat pretty well?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Gudrun, coldly, “pretty well.”

“Oh yes,” cried Ursula. “We can both of us row like
water-spiders.”

“You can? There’s a light little canoe of mine, that I
didn’t take out for fear somebody should drown themselves. Do you think
you’d be safe in that?”

“Oh perfectly,” said Gudrun.

“What an angel!” cried Ursula.

“Don’t, for my sake, have an accident—because I’m
responsible for the water.”

“Sure,” pledged Gudrun.

“Besides, we can both swim quite well,” said Ursula.

“Well—then I’ll get them to put you up a tea-basket, and
you can picnic all to yourselves,—that’s the idea, isn’t
it?”

“How fearfully good! How frightfully nice if you could!” cried
Gudrun warmly, her colour flushing up again. It made the blood stir in his
veins, the subtle way she turned to him and infused her gratitude into his body.

“Where’s Birkin?” he said, his eyes twinkling. “He
might help me to get it down.”

“But what about your hand? Isn’t it hurt?” asked Gudrun,
rather muted, as if avoiding the intimacy. This was the first time the hurt had
been mentioned. The curious way she skirted round the subject sent a new, subtle
caress through his veins. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was bandaged.
He looked at it, then put it in his pocket again. Gudrun quivered at the sight
of the wrapped up paw.

“Oh I can manage with one hand. The canoe is as light as a
feather,” he said. “There’s Rupert!—Rupert!”

Birkin turned from his social duties and came towards them.

“What have you done to it?” asked Ursula, who had been aching to
put the question for the last half hour.

“To my hand?” said Gerald. “I trapped it in some
machinery.”

“Ugh!” said Ursula. “And did it hurt much?”

“Yes,” he said. “It did at the time. It’s getting
better now. It crushed the fingers.”

“Oh,” cried Ursula, as if in pain, “I hate people who hurt
themselves. I can feel it.” And she shook her hand.

“What do you want?” said Birkin.

The two men carried down the slim brown boat, and set it on the water.

“You’re quite sure you’ll be safe in it?” Gerald
asked.

“Quite sure,” said Gudrun. “I wouldn’t be so mean as
to take it, if there was the slightest doubt. But I’ve had a canoe at
Arundel, and I assure you I’m perfectly safe.”

So saying, having given her word like a man, she and Ursula entered the
frail craft, and pushed gently off. The two men stood watching them. Gudrun was
paddling. She knew the men were watching her, and it made her slow and rather
clumsy. The colour flew in her face like a flag.

“Thanks awfully,” she called back to him, from the water, as the
boat slid away. “It’s lovely—like sitting in a leaf.”

He laughed at the fancy. Her voice was shrill and strange, calling from the
distance. He watched her as she paddled away. There was something childlike
about her, trustful and deferential, like a child. He watched her all the while,
as she rowed. And to Gudrun it was a real delight, in make-belief, to be the
childlike, clinging woman to the man who stood there on the quay, so
good-looking and efficient in his white clothes, and moreover the most important
man she knew at the moment. She did not take any notice of the wavering,
indistinct, lambent Birkin, who stood at his side. One figure at a time occupied
the field of her attention.

The boat rustled lightly along the water. They passed the bathers whose
striped tents stood between the willows of the meadow’s edge, and drew
along the open shore, past the meadows that sloped golden in the light of the
already late afternoon. Other boats were stealing under the wooded shore
opposite, they could hear people’s laughter and voices. But Gudrun rowed
on towards the clump of trees that balanced perfect in the distance, in the
golden light.

The sisters found a little place where a tiny stream flowed into the lake,
with reeds and flowery marsh of pink willow herb, and a gravelly bank to the
side. Here they ran delicately ashore, with their frail boat, the two girls took
off their shoes and stockings and went through the water’s edge to the
grass. The tiny ripples of the lake were warm and clear, they lifted their boat
on to the bank, and looked round with joy. They were quite alone in a forsaken
little stream-mouth, and on the knoll just behind was the clump of trees.

“We will bathe just for a moment,” said Ursula, “and then
we’ll have tea.”

They looked round. Nobody could notice them, or could come up in time to see
them. In less than a minute Ursula had thrown off her clothes and had slipped
naked into the water, and was swimming out. Quickly, Gudrun joined her. They
swam silently and blissfully for a few minutes, circling round their little
stream-mouth. Then they slipped ashore and ran into the grove again, like
nymphs.

“How lovely it is to be free,” said Ursula, running swiftly here
and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose. The
grove was of beech-trees, big and splendid, a steel-grey scaffolding of trunks
and boughs, with level sprays of strong green here and there, whilst through the
northern side the distance glimmered open as through a window.

When they had run and danced themselves dry, the girls quickly dressed and
sat down to the fragrant tea. They sat on the northern side of the grove, in the
yellow sunshine facing the slope of the grassy hill, alone in a little wild
world of their own. The tea was hot and aromatic, there were delicious little
sandwiches of cucumber and of caviare, and winy cakes.

“Are you happy, Prune?” cried Ursula in delight, looking at her
sister.

“Ursula, I’m perfectly happy,” replied Gudrun gravely,
looking at the westering sun.

“So am I.”

When they were together, doing the things they enjoyed, the two sisters were
quite complete in a perfect world of their own. And this was one of the perfect
moments of freedom and delight, such as children alone know, when all seems a
perfect and blissful adventure.

When they had finished tea, the two girls sat on, silent and serene. Then
Ursula, who had a beautiful strong voice, began to sing to herself, softly:
“Ännchen von Tharau.” Gudrun listened, as she sat beneath the trees,
and the yearning came into her heart. Ursula seemed so peaceful and sufficient
unto herself, sitting there unconsciously crooning her song, strong and
unquestioned at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside.
Always this desolating, agonised feeling, that she was outside of life, an
onlooker, whilst Ursula was a partaker, caused Gudrun to suffer from a sense of
her own negation, and made her, that she must always demand the other to be
aware of her, to be in connection with her.

“Do you mind if I do Dalcroze to that tune, Hurtler?” she asked
in a curious muted tone, scarce moving her lips.

“What did you say?” asked Ursula, looking up in peaceful
surprise.

“Will you sing while I do Dalcroze?” said Gudrun, suffering at
having to repeat herself.

Ursula thought a moment, gathering her straying wits together.

“While you do—?” she asked vaguely.

“Dalcroze movements,” said Gudrun, suffering tortures of
self-consciousness, even because of her sister.

“Oh Dalcroze! I couldn’t catch the name. Do—I should love
to see you,” cried Ursula, with childish surprised brightness. “What
shall I sing?”

“Sing anything you like, and I’ll take the rhythm from
it.”

But Ursula could not for her life think of anything to sing. However, she
suddenly began, in a laughing, teasing voice:

“My love—is a high-born lady—”

Gudrun, looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet,
began slowly to dance in the eurythmic manner, pulsing and fluttering
rhythmically with her feet, making slower, regular gestures with her hands and
arms, now spreading her arms wide, now raising them above her head, now flinging
them softly apart, and lifting her face, her feet all the time beating and
running to the measure of the song, as if it were some strange incantation, her
white, rapt form drifting here and there in a strange impulsive rhapsody,
seeming to be lifted on a breeze of incantation, shuddering with strange little
runs. Ursula sat on the grass, her mouth open in her singing, her eyes laughing
as if she thought it was a great joke, but a yellow light flashing up in them,
as she caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex
shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister’s white form, that was
clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of
hypnotic influence.

“My love is a high-born lady—She is-s-s—rather dark than
shady—” rang out Ursula’s laughing, satiric song, and quicker,
fiercer went Gudrun in the dance, stamping as if she were trying to throw off
some bond, flinging her hands suddenly and stamping again, then rushing with
face uplifted and throat full and beautiful, and eyes half closed, sightless.
The sun was low and yellow, sinking down, and in the sky floated a thin,
ineffectual moon.

Ursula was quite absorbed in her song, when suddenly Gudrun stopped and said
mildly, ironically:

“Ursula!”

“Yes?” said Ursula, opening her eyes out of the trance.

Gudrun was standing still and pointing, a mocking smile on her face, towards
the side.

“Ugh!” cried Ursula in sudden panic, starting to her feet.

“They’re quite all right,” rang out Gudrun’s
sardonic voice.

On the left stood a little cluster of Highland cattle, vividly coloured and
fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward
their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about. Their eyes glittered
through their tangle of hair, their naked nostrils were full of shadow.

“Won’t they do anything?” cried Ursula in fear.

Gudrun, who was usually frightened of cattle, now shook her head in a queer,
half-doubtful, half-sardonic motion, a faint smile round her mouth.

“Don’t they look charming, Ursula?” cried Gudrun, in a
high, strident voice, something like the scream of a seagull.

“Charming,” cried Ursula in trepidation. “But won’t
they do anything to us?”

Again Gudrun looked back at her sister with an enigmatic smile, and shook
her head.

“I’m sure they won’t,” she said, as if she had to
convince herself also, and yet, as if she were confident of some secret power in
herself, and had to put it to the test. “Sit down and sing again,”
she called in her high, strident voice.

“I’m frightened,” cried Ursula, in a pathetic voice,
watching the group of sturdy short cattle, that stood with their knees planted,
and watched with their dark, wicked eyes, through the matted fringe of their
hair. Nevertheless, she sank down again, in her former posture.

“They are quite safe,” came Gudrun’s high call.
“Sing something, you’ve only to sing something.”

It was evident she had a strange passion to dance before the sturdy,
handsome cattle.

Ursula began to sing, in a false quavering voice:

“Way down in Tennessee—”

She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread
and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle,
lifting her body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some
little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms, her wrists, her hands
stretching and heaving and falling and reaching and reaching and falling, her
breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in some
voluptuous ecstasy towards them, whilst she drifted imperceptibly nearer, an
uncanny white figure, towards them, carried away in its own rapt trance, ebbing
in strange fluctuations upon the cattle, that waited, and ducked their heads a
little in sudden contraction from her, watching all the time as if hypnotised,
their bare horns branching in the clear light, as the white figure of the woman
ebbed upon them, in the slow, hypnotising convulsion of the dance. She could
feel them just in front of her, it was as if she had the electric pulse from
their breasts running into her hands. Soon she would touch them, actually touch
them. A terrible shiver of fear and pleasure went through her. And all the
while, Ursula, spell-bound, kept up her high-pitched thin, irrelevant song,
which pierced the fading evening like an incantation.

Gudrun could hear the cattle breathing heavily with helpless fear and
fascination. Oh, they were brave little beasts, these wild Scotch bullocks, wild
and fleecy. Suddenly one of them snorted, ducked its head, and backed.

“Hue! Hi-eee!” came a sudden loud shout from the edge of the
grove. The cattle broke and fell back quite spontaneously, went running up the
hill, their fleece waving like fire to their motion. Gudrun stood suspended out
on the grass, Ursula rose to her feet.

It was Gerald and Birkin come to find them, and Gerald had cried out to
frighten off the cattle.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he now called, in a
high, wondering vexed tone.

“Why have you come?” came back Gudrun’s strident cry of
anger.

“What do you think you were doing?” Gerald repeated,
automatically.

“We were doing eurythmics,” laughed Ursula, in a shaken voice.

Gudrun stood aloof looking at them with large dark eyes of resentment,
suspended for a few moments. Then she walked away up the hill, after the cattle,
which had gathered in a little, spell-bound cluster higher up.

“Where are you going?” Gerald called after her. And he followed
her up the hill-side. The sun had gone behind the hill, and shadows were
clinging to the earth, the sky above was full of travelling light.

“A poor song for a dance,” said Birkin to Ursula, standing
before her with a sardonic, flickering laugh on his face. And in another second,
he was singing softly to himself, and dancing a grotesque step-dance in front of
her, his limbs and body shaking loose, his face flickering palely, a constant
thing, whilst his feet beat a rapid mocking tattoo, and his body seemed to hang
all loose and quaking in between, like a shadow.

“I think we’ve all gone mad,” she said, laughing rather
frightened.

“Pity we aren’t madder,” he answered, as he kept up the
incessant shaking dance. Then suddenly he leaned up to her and kissed her
fingers lightly, putting his face to hers and looking into her eyes with a pale
grin. She stepped back, affronted.

“Offended—?” he asked ironically, suddenly going quite
still and reserved again. “I thought you liked the light fantastic.”

“Not like that,” she said, confused and bewildered, almost
affronted. Yet somewhere inside her she was fascinated by the sight of his
loose, vibrating body, perfectly abandoned to its own dropping and swinging, and
by the pallid, sardonic-smiling face above. Yet automatically she stiffened
herself away, and disapproved. It seemed almost an obscenity, in a man who
talked as a rule so very seriously.

“Why not like that?” he mocked. And immediately he dropped again
into the incredibly rapid, slack-waggling dance, watching her malevolently. And
moving in the rapid, stationary dance, he came a little nearer, and reached
forward with an incredibly mocking, satiric gleam on his face, and would have
kissed her again, had she not started back.

“No, don’t!” she cried, really afraid.

“Cordelia after all,” he said satirically. She was stung, as if
this were an insult. She knew he intended it as such, and it bewildered her.

“And you,” she cried in retort, “why do you always take
your soul in your mouth, so frightfully full?”

“So that I can spit it out the more readily,” he said, pleased
by his own retort.

Gerald Crich, his face narrowing to an intent gleam, followed up the hill
with quick strides, straight after Gudrun. The cattle stood with their noses
together on the brow of a slope, watching the scene below, the men in white
hovering about the white forms of the women, watching above all Gudrun, who was
advancing slowly towards them. She stood a moment, glancing back at Gerald, and
then at the cattle.

Then in a sudden motion, she lifted her arms and rushed sheer upon the
long-horned bullocks, in shuddering irregular runs, pausing for a second and
looking at them, then lifting her hands and running forward with a flash, till
they ceased pawing the ground, and gave way, snorting with terror, lifting their
heads from the ground and flinging themselves away, galloping off into the
evening, becoming tiny in the distance, and still not stopping.

Gudrun remained staring after them, with a mask-like defiant face.

“Why do you want to drive them mad?” asked Gerald, coming up
with her.

She took no notice of him, only averted her face from him. “It’s
not safe, you know,” he persisted. “They’re nasty, when they
do turn.”

“Turn where? Turn away?” she mocked loudly.

“No,” he said, “turn against you.”

“Turn against me?” she mocked.

He could make nothing of this.

“Anyway, they gored one of the farmer’s cows to death, the other
day,” he said.

“What do I care?” she said.

“I cared though,” he replied, “seeing that they’re
my cattle.”

“How are they yours! You haven’t swallowed them. Give me one of
them now,” she said, holding out her hand.

“You know where they are,” he said, pointing over the hill.
“You can have one if you’d like it sent to you later on.”

She looked at him inscrutably.

“You think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t
you?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed dangerously. There was a faint domineering smile on his
face.

“Why should I think that?” he said.

She was watching him all the time with her dark, dilated, inchoate eyes. She
leaned forward and swung round her arm, catching him a light blow on the face
with the back of her hand.

“That’s why,” she said, mocking.

And she felt in her soul an unconquerable desire for deep violence against
him. She shut off the fear and dismay that filled her conscious mind. She wanted
to do as she did, she was not going to be afraid.

He recoiled from the slight blow on his face. He became deadly pale, and a
dangerous flame darkened his eyes. For some seconds he could not speak, his
lungs were so suffused with blood, his heart stretched almost to bursting with a
great gush of ungovernable emotion. It was as if some reservoir of black emotion
had burst within him, and swamped him.

“You have struck the first blow,” he said at last, forcing the
words from his lungs, in a voice so soft and low, it sounded like a dream within
her, not spoken in the outer air.

“And I shall strike the last,” she retorted involuntarily, with
confident assurance. He was silent, he did not contradict her.

She stood negligently, staring away from him, into the distance. On the edge
of her consciousness the question was asking itself, automatically:

“Why are you behaving in this impossible and ridiculous
fashion.” But she was sullen, she half shoved the question out of herself.
She could not get it clean away, so she felt self-conscious.

Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely. His eyes were lit up with
intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She turned suddenly on him.

“It’s you who make me behave like this, you know,” she
said, almost suggestive.

“I? How?” he said.

But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below, on the water,
lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor
of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer,
overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one
part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing
themselves in the dusk. The launch was being illuminated. All round, shadow was
gathering from the trees.

Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the
open grassy slope. Gudrun waited for him to come up. Then she softly put out her
hand and touched him, saying softly:

“Don’t be angry with me.”

A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he stammered:

“I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you.”

His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save
himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive.

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said.

The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of
all his control, was too much for him. He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if
his hand were iron.

“It’s all right, then, is it?” he said, holding her
arrested.

She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood
ran cold.

“Yes, it’s all right,” she said softly, as if drugged, her
voice crooning and witch-like.

He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body. But he recovered a
little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a boy, and
was set apart, like Cain.

They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and
laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula.

“Do you smell this little marsh?” he said, sniffing the air. He
was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.

“It’s rather nice,” she said.

“No,” he replied, “alarming.”

“Why alarming?” she laughed.

“It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,” he said,
“putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all
the time onward. That’s what we never take into count—that it rolls
onwards.”

“What does?”

“The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river
of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to
heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the
other is our real reality—”

“But what other? I don’t see any other,” said Ursula.

“It is your reality, nevertheless,” he said; “that dark
river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls—the
black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this—our sea-born
Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our
reality, nowadays.”

“You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?” asked Ursula.

“I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,”
he replied. “When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find
ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation.
Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the
snakes and swans and lotus—marsh-flowers—and Gudrun and
Gerald—born in the process of destructive creation.”

“And you and me—?” she asked.

“Probably,” he replied. “In part, certainly. Whether we
are that, in toto, I don’t yet know.”

“You mean we are flowers of dissolution—fleurs du mal? I
don’t feel as if I were,” she protested.

He was silent for a time.

“I don’t feel as if we were, altogether,” he replied.
“Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption—lilies. But there
ought to be some roses, warm and flamy. You know Herakleitos says ‘a dry soul is
best.’ I know so well what that means. Do you?”

“I’m not sure,” Ursula replied. “But what if people
are all flowers of dissolution—when they’re flowers at
all—what difference does it make?”

“No difference—and all the difference. Dissolution rolls on,
just as production does,” he said. “It is a progressive
process—and it ends in universal nothing—the end of the world, if
you like. But why isn’t the end of the world as good as the
beginning?”

“I suppose it isn’t,” said Ursula, rather angry.

“Oh yes, ultimately,” he said. “It means a new cycle of
creation after—but not for us. If it is the end, then we are of the
end—fleurs du mal if you like. If we are fleurs du mal,
we are not roses of happiness, and there you are.”

“But I think I am,” said Ursula. “I think I am a rose of
happiness.”

“Ready-made?” he asked ironically.

“No—real,” she said, hurt.

“If we are the end, we are not the beginning,” he said.

“Yes we are,” she said. “The beginning comes out of the
end.”

“After it, not out of it. After us, not out of us.”

“You are a devil, you know, really,” she said. “You want
to destroy our hope. You want us to be deathly.”

“No,” he said, “I only want us to know what we are.”

“Ha!” she cried in anger. “You only want us to know
death.”

“You’re quite right,” said the soft voice of Gerald, out
of the dusk behind.

Birkin rose. Gerald and Gudrun came up. They all began to smoke, in the
moments of silence. One after another, Birkin lighted their cigarettes. The
match flickered in the twilight, and they were all smoking peacefully by the
water-side. The lake was dim, the light dying from off it, in the midst of the
dark land. The air all round was intangible, neither here nor there, and there
was an unreal noise of banjoes, or suchlike music.

As the golden swim of light overhead died out, the moon gained brightness,
and seemed to begin to smile forth her ascendancy. The dark woods on the
opposite shore melted into universal shadow. And amid this universal
under-shadow, there was a scattered intrusion of lights. Far down the lake were
fantastic pale strings of colour, like beads of wan fire, green and red and
yellow. The music came out in a little puff, as the launch, all illuminated,
veered into the great shadow, stirring her outlines of half-living lights,
puffing out her music in little drifts.

All were lighting up. Here and there, close against the faint water, and at
the far end of the lake, where the water lay milky in the last whiteness of the
sky, and there was no shadow, solitary, frail flames of lanterns floated from
the unseen boats. There was a sound of oars, and a boat passed from the pallor
into the darkness under the wood, where her lanterns seemed to kindle into fire,
hanging in ruddy lovely globes. And again, in the lake, shadowy red gleams
hovered in reflection about the boat. Everywhere were these noiseless ruddy
creatures of fire drifting near the surface of the water, caught at by the
rarest, scarce visible reflections.

Birkin brought the lanterns from the bigger boat, and the four shadowy white
figures gathered round, to light them. Ursula held up the first, Birkin lowered
the light from the rosy, glowing cup of his hands, into the depths of the
lantern. It was kindled, and they all stood back to look at the great blue moon
of light that hung from Ursula’s hand, casting a strange gleam on her
face. It flickered, and Birkin went bending over the well of light. His face
shone out like an apparition, so unconscious, and again, something demoniacal.
Ursula was dim and veiled, looming over him.

“That is all right,” said his voice softly.

She held up the lantern. It had a flight of storks streaming through a
turquoise sky of light, over a dark earth.

“This is beautiful,” she said.

“Lovely,” echoed Gudrun, who wanted to hold one also, and lift
it up full of beauty.

“Light one for me,” she said. Gerald stood by her,
incapacitated. Birkin lit the lantern she held up. Her heart beat with anxiety,
to see how beautiful it would be. It was primrose yellow, with tall straight
flowers growing darkly from their dark leaves, lifting their heads into the
primrose day, while butterflies hovered about them, in the pure clear light.

Gudrun gave a little cry of excitement, as if pierced with delight.

“Isn’t it beautiful, oh, isn’t it beautiful!”

Her soul was really pierced with beauty, she was translated beyond herself.
Gerald leaned near to her, into her zone of light, as if to see. He came close
to her, and stood touching her, looking with her at the primrose-shining globe.
And she turned her face to his, that was faintly bright in the light of the
lantern, and they stood together in one luminous union, close together and
ringed round with light, all the rest excluded.

Birkin looked away, and went to light Ursula’s second lantern. It had
a pale ruddy sea-bottom, with black crabs and sea-weed moving sinuously under a
transparent sea, that passed into flamy ruddiness above.

“You’ve got the heavens above, and the waters under the
earth,” said Birkin to her.

“Anything but the earth itself,” she laughed, watching his live
hands that hovered to attend to the light.

“I’m dying to see what my second one is,” cried Gudrun, in
a vibrating rather strident voice, that seemed to repel the others from her.

Birkin went and kindled it. It was of a lovely deep blue colour, with a red
floor, and a great white cuttle-fish flowing in white soft streams all over it.
The cuttle-fish had a face that stared straight from the heart of the light,
very fixed and coldly intent.

“How truly terrifying!” exclaimed Gudrun, in a voice of horror.
Gerald, at her side, gave a low laugh.

“But isn’t it really fearful!” she cried in dismay.

Again he laughed, and said:

“Change it with Ursula, for the crabs.”

Gudrun was silent for a moment.

“Ursula,” she said, “could you bear to have this fearful
thing?”

“I think the colouring is lovely,” said Ursula.

“So do I,” said Gudrun. “But could you bear to have it
swinging to your boat? Don’t you want to destroy it at once?”

“Oh no,” said Ursula. “I don’t want to destroy
it.”

“Well do you mind having it instead of the crabs? Are you sure you
don’t mind?”

Gudrun came forward to exchange lanterns.

“No,” said Ursula, yielding up the crabs and receiving the
cuttle-fish.

Yet she could not help feeling rather resentful at the way in which Gudrun
and Gerald should assume a right over her, a precedence.

“Come then,” said Birkin. “I’ll put them on the
boats.”

He and Ursula were moving away to the big boat.

“I suppose you’ll row me back, Rupert,” said Gerald, out
of the pale shadow of the evening.

“Won’t you go with Gudrun in the canoe?” said Birkin.
“It’ll be more interesting.”

There was a moment’s pause. Birkin and Ursula stood dimly, with their
swinging lanterns, by the water’s edge. The world was all illusive.

“Is that all right?” said Gudrun to him.

“It’ll suit me very well,” he said. “But what about
you, and the rowing? I don’t see why you should pull me.”

“Why not?” she said. “I can pull you as well as I could
pull Ursula.”

By her tone he could tell she wanted to have him in the boat to herself, and
that she was subtly gratified that she should have power over them both. He gave
himself, in a strange, electric submission.

She handed him the lanterns, whilst she went to fix the cane at the end of
the canoe. He followed after her, and stood with the lanterns dangling against
his white-flannelled thighs, emphasising the shadow around.

“Kiss me before we go,” came his voice softly from out of the
shadow above.

She stopped her work in real, momentary astonishment.

“But why?” she exclaimed, in pure surprise.

“Why?” he echoed, ironically.

And she looked at him fixedly for some moments. Then she leaned forward and
kissed him, with a slow, luxurious kiss, lingering on the mouth. And then she
took the lanterns from him, while he stood swooning with the perfect fire that
burned in all his joints.

They lifted the canoe into the water, Gudrun took her place, and Gerald
pushed off.

“Are you sure you don’t hurt your hand, doing that?” she
asked, solicitous. “Because I could have done it perfectly.”

“I don’t hurt myself,” he said in a low, soft voice, that
caressed her with inexpressible beauty.

And she watched him as he sat near her, very near to her, in the stern of
the canoe, his legs coming towards hers, his feet touching hers. And she paddled
softly, lingeringly, longing for him to say something meaningful to her. But he
remained silent.

“You like this, do you?” she said, in a gentle, solicitous
voice.

He laughed shortly.

“There is a space between us,” he said, in the same low,
unconscious voice, as if something were speaking out of him. And she was as if
magically aware of their being balanced in separation, in the boat. She swooned
with acute comprehension and pleasure.

“But I’m very near,” she said caressively, gaily.

“Yet distant, distant,” he said.

Again she was silent with pleasure, before she answered, speaking with a
reedy, thrilled voice:

“Yet we cannot very well change, whilst we are on the water.”
She caressed him subtly and strangely, having him completely at her mercy.

A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon-like lanterns
low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer
twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly-splashing paddles, trailing her
strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly
with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other
simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats
creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and
the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of
oars and a waving of music.

Gudrun paddled almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the
rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula’s lanterns swaying softly cheek to
cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He
was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights casting their softness
behind him.

Gudrun rested her paddle and looked round. The canoe lifted with the
lightest ebbing of the water. Gerald’s white knees were very near to her.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” she said softly, as if reverently.

She looked at him, as he leaned back against the faint crystal of the
lantern-light. She could see his face, although it was a pure shadow. But it was
a piece of twilight. And her breast was keen with passion for him, he was so
beautiful in his male stillness and mystery. It was a certain pure effluence of
maleness, like an aroma from his softly, firmly moulded contours, a certain rich
perfection of his presence, that touched her with an ecstasy, a thrill of pure
intoxication. She loved to look at him. For the present she did not want to
touch him, to know the further, satisfying substance of his living body. He was
purely intangible, yet so near. Her hands lay on the paddle like slumber, she
only wanted to see him, like a crystal shadow, to feel his essential presence.

“Yes,” he said vaguely. “It is very beautiful.”

He was listening to the faint near sounds, the dropping of water-drops from
the oar-blades, the slight drumming of the lanterns behind him, as they rubbed
against one another, the occasional rustling of Gudrun’s full skirt, an
alien land noise. His mind was almost submerged, he was almost transfused,
lapsed out for the first time in his life, into the things about him. For he
always kept such a keen attentiveness, concentrated and unyielding in himself.
Now he had let go, imperceptibly he was melting into oneness with the whole. It
was like pure, perfect sleep, his first great sleep of life. He had been so
insistent, so guarded, all his life. But here was sleep, and peace, and perfect
lapsing out.

“Shall I row to the landing-stage?” asked Gudrun wistfully.

“Anywhere,” he answered. “Let it drift.”

“Tell me then, if we are running into anything,” she replied, in
that very quiet, toneless voice of sheer intimacy.

“The lights will show,” he said.

So they drifted almost motionless, in silence. He wanted silence, pure and
whole. But she was uneasy yet for some word, for some assurance.

“Nobody will miss you?” she asked, anxious for some
communication.

“Miss me?” he echoed. “No! Why?”

“I wondered if anybody would be looking for you.”

“Why should they look for me?” And then he remembered his
manners. “But perhaps you want to get back,” he said, in a changed
voice.

“No, I don’t want to get back,” she replied. “No, I
assure you.”

“You’re quite sure it’s all right for you?”

“Perfectly all right.”

And again they were still. The launch twanged and hooted, somebody was
singing. Then as if the night smashed, suddenly there was a great shout, a
confusion of shouting, warring on the water, then the horrid noise of paddles
reversed and churned violently.

Gerald sat up, and Gudrun looked at him in fear.

“Somebody in the water,” he said, angrily, and desperately,
looking keenly across the dusk. “Can you row up?”

“Where, to the launch?” asked Gudrun, in nervous panic.

“Yes.”

“You’ll tell me if I don’t steer straight,” she
said, in nervous apprehension.

“You keep pretty level,” he said, and the canoe hastened
forward.

The shouting and the noise continued, sounding horrid through the dusk, over
the surface of the water.

“Wasn’t this bound to happen?” said Gudrun, with heavy
hateful irony. But he hardly heard, and she glanced over her shoulder to see her
way. The half-dark waters were sprinkled with lovely bubbles of swaying lights,
the launch did not look far off. She was rocking her lights in the early night.
Gudrun rowed as hard as she could. But now that it was a serious matter, she
seemed uncertain and clumsy in her stroke, it was difficult to paddle swiftly.
She glanced at his face. He was looking fixedly into the darkness, very keen and
alert and single in himself, instrumental. Her heart sank, she seemed to die a
death. “Of course,” she said to herself, “nobody will be
drowned. Of course they won’t. It would be too extravagant and
sensational.” But her heart was cold, because of his sharp impersonal
face. It was as if he belonged naturally to dread and catastrophe, as if he were
himself again.

Then there came a child’s voice, a girl’s high, piercing shriek:

“Di—Di—Di—Di—Oh Di—Oh Di—Oh
Di!”

The blood ran cold in Gudrun’s veins.

“It’s Diana, is it,” muttered Gerald. “The young
monkey, she’d have to be up to some of her tricks.”

And he glanced again at the paddle, the boat was not going quickly enough
for him. It made Gudrun almost helpless at the rowing, this nervous stress. She
kept up with all her might. Still the voices were calling and answering.

“Where, where? There you are—that’s it. Which?
No—No-o-o. Damn it all, here, here—” Boats were hurrying
from all directions to the scene, coloured lanterns could be seen waving close
to the surface of the lake, reflections swaying after them in uneven haste.
The steamer hooted again, for some unknown reason. Gudrun’s boat was
travelling quickly, the lanterns were swinging behind Gerald.

And then again came the child’s high, screaming voice, with a note of
weeping and impatience in it now:

“Di—Oh Di—Oh Di—Di—!”

It was a terrible sound, coming through the obscure air of the evening.

“You’d be better if you were in bed, Winnie,” Gerald
muttered to himself.

He was stooping unlacing his shoes, pushing them off with the foot. Then he
threw his soft hat into the bottom of the boat.

“You can’t go into the water with your hurt hand,” said
Gudrun, panting, in a low voice of horror.

“What? It won’t hurt.”

He had struggled out of his jacket, and had dropped it between his feet. He
sat bare-headed, all in white now. He felt the belt at his waist. They were
nearing the launch, which stood still big above them, her myriad lamps making
lovely darts, and sinuous running tongues of ugly red and green and yellow light
on the lustrous dark water, under the shadow.

“Oh get her out! Oh Di, darling! Oh get her out! Oh Daddy, Oh
Daddy!” moaned the child’s voice, in distraction. Somebody was in
the water, with a life belt. Two boats paddled near, their lanterns swinging
ineffectually, the boats nosing round.

“Hi there—Rockley!—hi there!”

“Mr Gerald!” came the captain’s terrified voice.
“Miss Diana’s in the water.”

“Anybody gone in for her?” came Gerald’s sharp voice.

“Young Doctor Brindell, sir.”

“Where?”

“Can’t see no signs of them, sir. Everybody’s looking, but
there’s nothing so far.”

There was a moment’s ominous pause.

“Where did she go in?”

“I think—about where that boat is,” came the uncertain
answer, “that one with red and green lights.”

“Row there,” said Gerald quietly to Gudrun.

“Get her out, Gerald, oh get her out,” the child’s voice
was crying anxiously. He took no heed.

“Lean back that way,” said Gerald to Gudrun, as he stood up in
the frail boat. “She won’t upset.”

In another moment, he had dropped clean down, soft and plumb, into the
water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with
transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was
gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of
all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely
the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous.
Lanterns swayed here and there, people were talking in an undertone on the
launch and in the boats. She could hear Winifred moaning: “Oh do find her
Gerald, do find her,” and someone trying to comfort the child. Gudrun
paddled aimlessly here and there. The terrible, massive, cold, boundless surface
of the water terrified her beyond words. Would he never come back? She felt she
must jump into the water too, to know the horror also.

She started, hearing someone say: “There he is.” She saw the
movement of his swimming, like a water-rat. And she rowed involuntarily to him.
But he was near another boat, a bigger one. Still she rowed towards him. She
must be very near. She saw him—he looked like a seal. He looked like a
seal as he took hold of the side of the boat. His fair hair was washed down on
his round head, his face seemed to glisten suavely. She could hear him panting.

Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his
loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, made
her want to die, to die. The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed
into the boat, his back rounded and soft—ah, this was too much for her,
too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of
fate, and of beauty, such beauty!

He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life.
She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his
hand. And she knew it was all no good, and that she would never go beyond him,
he was the final approximation of life to her.

“Put the lights out, we shall see better,” came his voice,
sudden and mechanical and belonging to the world of man. She could scarcely
believe there was a world of man. She leaned round and blew out her lanterns.
They were difficult to blow out. Everywhere the lights were gone save the
coloured points on the sides of the launch. The bluey-grey, early night spread
level around, the moon was overhead, there were shadows of boats here and there.

Again there was a splash, and he was gone under. Gudrun sat, sick at heart,
frightened of the great, level surface of the water, so heavy and deadly. She
was so alone, with the level, unliving field of the water stretching beneath
her. It was not a good isolation, it was a terrible, cold separation of
suspense. She was suspended upon the surface of the insidious reality until such
time as she also should disappear beneath it.

Then she knew, by a stirring of voices, that he had climbed out again, into
a boat. She sat wanting connection with him. Strenuously she claimed her
connection with him, across the invisible space of the water. But round her
heart was an isolation unbearable, through which nothing would penetrate.

“Take the launch in. It’s no use keeping her there. Get lines
for the dragging,” came the decisive, instrumental voice, that was full of
the sound of the world.

The launch began gradually to beat the waters.

“Gerald! Gerald!” came the wild crying voice of Winifred. He did
not answer. Slowly the launch drifted round in a pathetic, clumsy circle, and
slunk away to the land, retreating into the dimness. The wash of her paddles
grew duller. Gudrun rocked in her light boat, and dipped the paddle
automatically to steady herself.

“Gudrun?” called Ursula’s voice.

“Ursula!”

The boats of the two sisters pulled together.

“Where is Gerald?” said Gudrun.

“He’s dived again,” said Ursula plaintively. “And I
know he ought not, with his hurt hand and everything.”

“I’ll take him in home this time,” said Birkin.

The boats swayed again from the wash of steamer. Gudrun and Ursula kept a
look-out for Gerald.

“There he is!” cried Ursula, who had the sharpest eyes. He had
not been long under. Birkin pulled towards him, Gudrun following. He swam
slowly, and caught hold of the boat with his wounded hand. It slipped, and he
sank back.

“Why don’t you help him?” cried Ursula sharply.

He came again, and Birkin leaned to help him in to the boat. Gudrun again
watched Gerald climb out of the water, but this time slowly, heavily, with the
blind clambering motions of an amphibious beast, clumsy. Again the moon shone
with faint luminosity on his white wet figure, on the stooping back and the
rounded loins. But it looked defeated now, his body, it clambered and fell with
slow clumsiness. He was breathing hoarsely too, like an animal that is
suffering. He sat slack and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind
like a seal’s, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing. Gudrun shuddered
as she mechanically followed his boat. Birkin rowed without speaking to the
landing-stage.

“Where are you going?” Gerald asked suddenly, as if just waking
up.

“Home,” said Birkin.

“Oh no!” said Gerald imperiously. “We can’t go home
while they’re in the water. Turn back again, I’m going to find
them.” The women were frightened, his voice was so imperative and
dangerous, almost mad, not to be opposed.

“No!” said Birkin. “You can’t.” There was a
strange fluid compulsion in his voice. Gerald was silent in a battle of wills.
It was as if he would kill the other man. But Birkin rowed evenly and
unswerving, with an inhuman inevitability.

“Why should you interfere?” said Gerald, in hate.

Birkin did not answer. He rowed towards the land. And Gerald sat mute, like
a dumb beast, panting, his teeth chattering, his arms inert, his head like a
seal’s head.

They came to the landing-stage. Wet and naked-looking, Gerald climbed up the
few steps. There stood his father, in the night.

“Father!” he said.

“Yes my boy? Go home and get those things off.”

“We shan’t save them, father,” said Gerald.

“There’s hope yet, my boy.”

“I’m afraid not. There’s no knowing where they are. You
can’t find them. And there’s a current, as cold as hell.”

“We’ll let the water out,” said the father. “Go home
you and look to yourself. See that he’s looked after, Rupert,” he
added in a neutral voice.

“Well father, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m afraid
it’s my fault. But it can’t be helped; I’ve done what I could
for the moment. I could go on diving, of course—not much, though—and
not much use—”

He moved away barefoot, on the planks of the platform. Then he trod on
something sharp.

“Of course, you’ve got no shoes on,” said Birkin.

“His shoes are here!” cried Gudrun from below. She was making
fast her boat.

Gerald waited for them to be brought to him. Gudrun came with them. He
pulled them on his feet.

“If you once die,” he said, “then when it’s over,
it’s finished. Why come to life again? There’s room under that water
there for thousands.”

“Two is enough,” she said murmuring.

He dragged on his second shoe. He was shivering violently, and his jaw shook
as he spoke.

“That’s true,” he said, “maybe. But it’s
curious how much room there seems, a whole universe under there; and as cold as
hell, you’re as helpless as if your head was cut off.” He could
scarcely speak, he shook so violently. “There’s one thing about our
family, you know,” he continued. “Once anything goes wrong, it can
never be put right again—not with us. I’ve noticed it all my
life—you can’t put a thing right, once it has gone wrong.”

They were walking across the high-road to the house.

“And do you know, when you are down there, it is so cold, actually,
and so endless, so different really from what it is on top, so endless—you
wonder how it is so many are alive, why we’re up here. Are you going? I
shall see you again, shan’t I? Good-night, and thank you. Thank you very
much!”

The two girls waited a while, to see if there were any hope. The moon shone
clearly overhead, with almost impertinent brightness, the small dark boats
clustered on the water, there were voices and subdued shouts. But it was all to
no purpose. Gudrun went home when Birkin returned.

He was commissioned to open the sluice that let out the water from the lake,
which was pierced at one end, near the high-road, thus serving as a reservoir to
supply with water the distant mines, in case of necessity. “Come with
me,” he said to Ursula, “and then I will walk home with you, when
I’ve done this.”

He called at the water-keeper’s cottage and took the key of the
sluice. They went through a little gate from the high-road, to the head of the
water, where was a great stone basin which received the overflow, and a flight
of stone steps descended into the depths of the water itself. At the head of the
steps was the lock of the sluice-gate.

The night was silver-grey and perfect, save for the scattered restless sound
of voices. The grey sheen of the moonlight caught the stretch of water, dark
boats plashed and moved. But Ursula’s mind ceased to be receptive,
everything was unimportant and unreal.

Birkin fixed the iron handle of the sluice, and turned it with a wrench. The
cogs began slowly to rise. He turned and turned, like a slave, his white figure
became distinct. Ursula looked away. She could not bear to see him winding
heavily and laboriously, bending and rising mechanically like a slave, turning
the handle.

Then, a real shock to her, there came a loud splashing of water from out of
the dark, tree-filled hollow beyond the road, a splashing that deepened rapidly
to a harsh roar, and then became a heavy, booming noise of a great body of water
falling solidly all the time. It occupied the whole of the night, this great
steady booming of water, everything was drowned within it, drowned and lost.
Ursula seemed to have to struggle for her life. She put her hands over her ears,
and looked at the high bland moon.

“Can’t we go now?” she cried to Birkin, who was watching
the water on the steps, to see if it would get any lower. It seemed to fascinate
him. He looked at her and nodded.

The little dark boats had moved nearer, people were crowding curiously along
the hedge by the high-road, to see what was to be seen. Birkin and Ursula went
to the cottage with the key, then turned their backs on the lake. She was in
great haste. She could not bear the terrible crushing boom of the escaping
water.

“Do you think they are dead?” she cried in a high voice, to make
herself heard.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Isn’t it horrible!”

He paid no heed. They walked up the hill, further and further away from the
noise.

“Do you mind very much?” she asked him.

“I don’t mind about the dead,” he said, “once they
are dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won’t let
go.”

She pondered for a time.

“Yes,” she said. “The fact of death doesn’t really
seem to matter much, does it?”

“No,” he said. “What does it matter if Diana Crich is
alive or dead?”

“Doesn’t it?” she said, shocked.

“No, why should it? Better she were dead—she’ll be much
more real. She’ll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting,
negated thing.”

“You are rather horrible,” murmured Ursula.

“No! I’d rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living somehow, was
all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil—he’ll find his way out
quickly instead of slowly. Death is all right—nothing better.”

“Yet you don’t want to die,” she challenged him.

He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to
her in its change:

“I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through
with the death process.”

“And aren’t you?” asked Ursula nervously.

They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said,
slowly, as if afraid:

“There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which
isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death—our kind
of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep,
like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the
world.”

Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to
catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear,
but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where
he wanted her, to yield as it were her very identity.

“Why should love be like sleep?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know. So that it is like death—I do want to die
from this life—and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over
like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone,
and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.”

She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew, that
words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a
dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his gesture through her blood,
and she drew back, even though her desire sent her forward.

“But,” she said gravely, “didn’t you say you wanted
something that was not love—something beyond love?”

He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be
spoken. Whichever way one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break a
way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the
walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the
womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old
body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out.

“I don’t want love,” he said. “I don’t want to
know you. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we
are found different. One shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched.
One Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit of
healthy pride and insouciance. I hate myself serious.”

“Why shouldn’t you be serious?” she said.

He thought for a minute, then he said, sulkily:

“I don’t know.” Then they walked on in silence, at outs.
He was vague and lost.

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly putting her hand on
his arm, with a loving impulse, “how we always talk like this! I suppose
we do love each other, in some way.”

“Oh yes,” he said; “too much.”

She laughed almost gaily.

“You’d have to have it your own way, wouldn’t you?”
she teased. “You could never take it on trust.”

He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the
middle of the road.

“Yes,” he said softly.

And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of delicate
happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she could not respond.
They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their stillness. Yet she held back from
them. It was like strange moths, very soft and silent, settling on her from the
darkness of her soul. She was uneasy. She drew away.

“Isn’t somebody coming?” she said.

So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards
Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she stopped and
held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with hard, fierce kisses
of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old blood beat up in him.

“Not this, not this,” he whimpered to himself, as the first
perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing
of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him. And soon
he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet in the small core
of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But this also was lost;
he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death,
beyond question.

Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away
from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of
burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the
darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter
save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had
blazed up anew like a new spell of life. “I was becoming quite dead-alive,
nothing but a word-bag,” he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet
somewhere far off and small, the other hovered.

The men were still dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the bank
and heard Gerald’s voice. The water was still booming in the night, the
moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was sinking. There came
the raw smell of the banks, in the night air.

Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had gone to
bed. On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the young man who
was lost. He stood quite silent, waiting. Birkin also stood and watched, Gerald
came up in a boat.

“You still here, Rupert?” he said. “We can’t get
them. The bottom slopes, you know, very steep. The water lies between two very
sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will
take you. It isn’t as if it was a level bottom. You never know where you
are, with the dragging.”

“Is there any need for you to be working?” said Birkin.
“Wouldn’t it be much better if you went to bed?”

“To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We’ll find
’em, before I go away from here.”

“But the men would find them just the same without you—why
should you insist?”

Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on
Birkin’s shoulder, saying:

“Don’t you bother about me, Rupert. If there’s
anybody’s health to think about, it’s yours, not mine. How do you
feel yourself?”

“Very well. But you, you spoil your own chance of life—you waste
your best self.”

Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said:

“Waste it? What else is there to do with it?”

“But leave this, won’t you? You force yourself into horrors, and
put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now.”

“A mill-stone of beastly memories!” Gerald repeated. Then he put
his hand again affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder. “God,
you’ve got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.”

Birkin’s heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling
way of putting things.

“Won’t you leave it? Come over to my place”—he urged
as one urges a drunken man.

“No,” said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other
man’s shoulder. “Thanks very much, Rupert—I shall be glad to
come tomorrow, if that’ll do. You understand, don’t you? I want to
see this job through. But I’ll come tomorrow, right enough. Oh, I’d
rather come and have a chat with you than—than do anything else, I verily
believe. Yes, I would. You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.”

“What do I mean, more than I know?” asked Birkin irritably. He
was acutely aware of Gerald’s hand on his shoulder. And he did not want
this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery.

“I’ll tell you another time,” said Gerald coaxingly.

“Come along with me now—I want you to come,” said Birkin.

There was a pause, intense and real. Birkin wondered why his own heart beat
so heavily. Then Gerald’s fingers gripped hard and communicative into
Birkin’s shoulder, as he said:

“No, I’ll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you—I know
what you mean. We’re all right, you know, you and me.”

“I may be all right, but I’m sure you’re not, mucking
about here,” said Birkin. And he went away.

The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had her
arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him.

“She killed him,” said Gerald.

The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last. The lake was sunk to quarter
size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw rottenish water.
Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill. The water still boomed through the
sluice.

As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the back
of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a straggling
procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a stretcher, Gerald going
beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers following in silence. Indoors the
family was all sitting up, waiting. Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her
room. The doctor in secret struggled to bring back his son, till he himself was
exhausted.

Over all the outlying district was a hush of dreadful excitement on that
Sunday morning. The colliery people felt as if this catastrophe had happened
directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and frightened than if
their own men had been killed. Such a tragedy in Shortlands, the high home of
the district! One of the young mistresses, persisting in dancing on the cabin
roof of the launch, wilful young madam, drowned in the midst of the festival,
with the young doctor! Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered
about, discussing the calamity. At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there
seemed a strange presence. It was as if the angel of death were very near, there
was a sense of the supernatural in the air. The men had excited, startled faces,
the women looked solemn, some of them had been crying. The children enjoyed the
excitement at first. There was an intensity in the air, almost magical. Did all
enjoy it? Did all enjoy the thrill?

Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald. She was thinking all the
time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him. She was shocked
and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how she should deport herself
with Gerald: act her part. That was the real thrill: how she should act her
part.

Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable
of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the accident, but
her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by herself, whenever she
could, and longed to see him again. She wanted him to come to the
house,—she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once. She was
waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day, waiting for him to knock at the
door. Every minute, she glanced automatically at the window. He would be there.

CHAPTER XV.
SUNDAY EVENING

As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and
within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to
death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity,
harder to bear than death.

“Unless something happens,” she said to herself, in the perfect
lucidity of final suffering, “I shall die. I am at the end of my line of
life.”

She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death.
She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this
brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into
the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug. Darkly,
without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death. She had travelled
all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew
all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was
fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the
tree into death. And one must fulfil one’s development to the end, must
carry the adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border
into death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge.

After all, when one was fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into death,
as a bitter fruit plunges in its ripeness downwards. Death is a great
consummation, a consummating experience. It is a development from life. That we
know, while we are yet living. What then need we think for further? One can
never see beyond the consummation. It is enough that death is a great and
conclusive experience. Why should we ask what comes after the experience, when
the experience is still unknown to us? Let us die, since the great experience is
the one that follows now upon all the rest, death, which is the next great
crisis in front of which we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we
do but hang about the gates in undignified uneasiness. There it is, in front of
us, as in front of Sappho, the illimitable space. Thereinto goes the journey.
Have we not the courage to go on with our journey, must we cry ‘I
daren’t’? On ahead we will go, into death, and whatever death may
mean. If a man can see the next step to be taken, why should he fear the next
but one? Why ask about the next but one? Of the next step we are certain. It is
the step into death.

“I shall die—I shall quickly die,” said Ursula to herself,
clear as if in a trance, clear, calm, and certain beyond human certainty. But
somewhere behind, in the twilight, there was a bitter weeping and a
hopelessness. That must not be attended to. One must go where the unfaltering
spirit goes, there must be no baulking the issue, because of fear. No baulking
the issue, no listening to the lesser voices. If the deepest desire be now, to
go on into the unknown of death, shall one forfeit the deepest truth for one
more shallow?

“Then let it end,” she said to herself. It was a decision. It
was not a question of taking one’s life—she would never kill
herself, that was repulsive and violent. It was a question of knowing
the nextcstep. And the next step led into the space of death. Did it?—or
was there—?

Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside the
fire. And then the thought came back. The space of death! Could she give
herself to it? Ah yes—it was a sleep. She had had enough. So long she had
held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to resist any more.

In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was dark.
She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of her body, the
unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that is too much, the
far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the body.

“Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?” she
asked herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the
body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation of the
integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as well. Unless I set
my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of life, fix myself and remain
static, cut off from living, absolved within my own will. But better die than
live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move
on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which
is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live
mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity
absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no
ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanised
life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a
shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week! Another
shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical activity. Was not the
adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not death infinitely more lovely
and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning,
without any real significance. How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame
to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One
could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity.
One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be
found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there
is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanised,
cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for from life—it was the
same in all countries and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look
out on to the great dark sky of death with elation, as one had looked out of the
classroom window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one
was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid
vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death.

But what a joy! What a gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it
could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they
turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the
dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up,
parcelled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it.
Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must
ignominiously creep between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life.

But the great, dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to
scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they
were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their
true vulgar silliness in face of it.

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to.
There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put
upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown,
unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of
perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward
to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman
transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To
know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of
this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our
humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of
this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.

Ursula sat quite still and quite forgotten, alone by the fire in the
drawing-room. The children were playing in the kitchen, all the others were gone
to church. And she was gone into the ultimate darkness of her own soul.

She was startled by hearing the bell ring, away in the kitchen, the children
came scudding along the passage in delicious alarm.

“Ursula, there’s somebody.”

“I know. Don’t be silly,” she replied. She too was
startled, almost frightened. She dared hardly go to the door.

Birkin stood on the threshold, his rain-coat turned up to his ears. He had
come now, now she was gone far away. She was aware of the rainy night behind
him.

“Oh is it you?” she said.

“I am glad you are at home,” he said in a low voice, entering
the house.

“They are all gone to church.”

He took off his coat and hung it up. The children were peeping at him round
the corner.

“Go and get undressed now, Billy and Dora,” said Ursula.
“Mother will be back soon, and she’ll be disappointed if
you’re not in bed.”

The children, in a sudden angelic mood, retired without a word. Birkin and
Ursula went into the drawing-room.

The fire burned low. He looked at her and wondered at the luminous delicacy
of her beauty, and the wide shining of her eyes. He watched from a distance,
with wonder in his heart, she seemed transfigured with light.

“What have you been doing all day?” he asked her.

“Only sitting about,” she said.

He looked at her. There was a change in her. But she was separate from him.
She remained apart, in a kind of brightness. They both sat silent in the soft
light of the lamp. He felt he ought to go away again, he ought not to have come.
Still he did not gather enough resolution to move. But he was de trop,
her mood was absent and separate.

Then there came the voices of the two children calling shyly outside the
door, softly, with self-excited timidity:

“Ursula! Ursula!”

She rose and opened the door. On the threshold stood the two children in
their long nightgowns, with wide-eyed, angelic faces. They were being very good
for the moment, playing the rôle perfectly of two obedient children.

“Shall you take us to bed!” said Billy, in a loud whisper.

“Why you are angels tonight,” she said softly.
“Won’t you come and say good-night to Mr Birkin?”

The children merged shyly into the room, on bare feet. Billy’s face
was wide and grinning, but there was a great solemnity of being good in his
round blue eyes. Dora, peeping from the floss of her fair hair, hung back like
some tiny Dryad, that has no soul.

“Will you say good-night to me?” asked Birkin, in a voice that
was strangely soft and smooth. Dora drifted away at once, like a leaf lifted on
a breath of wind. But Billy went softly forward, slow and willing, lifting his
pinched-up mouth implicitly to be kissed. Ursula watched the full, gathered lips
of the man gently touch those of the boy, so gently. Then Birkin lifted his
fingers and touched the boy’s round, confiding cheek, with a faint touch
of love. Neither spoke. Billy seemed angelic like a cherub boy, or like an
acolyte, Birkin was a tall, grave angel looking down to him.

“Are you going to be kissed?” Ursula broke in, speaking to the
little girl. But Dora edged away like a tiny Dryad that will not be touched.

“Won’t you say good-night to Mr Birkin? Go, he’s waiting
for you,” said Ursula. But the girl-child only made a little motion away
from him.

“Silly Dora, silly Dora!” said Ursula.

Birkin felt some mistrust and antagonism in the small child. He could not
understand it.

“Come then,” said Ursula. “Let us go before mother
comes.”

“Who’ll hear us say our prayers?” asked Billy anxiously.

“Whom you like.”

“Won’t you?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Ursula?”

“Well Billy?”

“Is it whom you like?”

“That’s it.”

“Well what is whom?”

“It’s the accusative of who.”

There was a moment’s contemplative silence, then the confiding:

“Is it?”

Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire. When Ursula came down he sat
motionless, with his arms on his knees. She saw him, how he was motionless and
ageless, like some crouching idol, some image of a deathly religion. He looked
round at her, and his face, very pale and unreal, seemed to gleam with a
whiteness almost phosphorescent.

“Don’t you feel well?” she asked, in indefinable
repulsion.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“But don’t you know without thinking about it?”

He looked at her, his eyes dark and swift, and he saw her revulsion. He did
not answer her question.

“Don’t you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking
about it?” she persisted.

“Not always,” he said coldly.

“But don’t you think that’s very wicked?”

“Wicked?”

“Yes. I think it’s criminal to have so little connection with
your own body that you don’t even know when you are ill.”

He looked at her darkly.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why don’t you stay in bed when you are seedy? You look
perfectly ghastly.”

“Offensively so?” he asked ironically.

“Yes, quite offensive. Quite repelling.”

“Ah!! Well that’s unfortunate.”

“And it’s raining, and it’s a horrible night. Really, you
shouldn’t be forgiven for treating your body like it—you ought
to suffer, a man who takes as little notice of his body as that.”

“—takes as little notice of his body as that,” he echoed
mechanically.

This cut her short, and there was silence.

The others came in from church, and the two had the girls to face, then the
mother and Gudrun, and then the father and the boy.

“Good-evening,” said Brangwen, faintly surprised. “Came to
see me, did you?”

“No,” said Birkin, “not about anything, in particular,
that is. The day was dismal, and I thought you wouldn’t mind if I called
in.”

“It has been a depressing day,” said Mrs Brangwen
sympathetically. At that moment the voices of the children were heard calling
from upstairs: “Mother! Mother!” She lifted her face and answered
mildly into the distance: “I shall come up to you in a minute,
Doysie.” Then to Birkin: “There is nothing fresh at Shortlands, I
suppose? Ah,” she sighed, “no, poor things, I should think
not.”

“You’ve been over there today, I suppose?” asked the
father.

“Gerald came round to tea with me, and I walked back with him. The
house is overexcited and unwholesome, I thought.”

“I should think they were people who hadn’t much
restraint,” said Gudrun.

“Or too much,” Birkin answered.

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” said Gudrun, almost vindictively,
“one or the other.”

“They all feel they ought to behave in some unnatural fashion,”
said Birkin. “When people are in grief, they would do better to cover
their faces and keep in retirement, as in the old days.”

“Certainly!” cried Gudrun, flushed and inflammable. “What
can be worse than this public grief—what is more horrible, more false! If
grief is not private, and hidden, what is?”

“Exactly,” he said. “I felt ashamed when I was there and
they were all going about in a lugubrious false way, feeling they must not be
natural or ordinary.”

“Well—” said Mrs Brangwen, offended at this criticism,
“it isn’t so easy to bear a trouble like that.”

And she went upstairs to the children.

He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave. When he was gone
Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into
a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and
intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It
merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear
and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond
herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several
days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It
surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the
world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was
quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational. She did not know why
she hated him, her hate was quite abstract. She had only realised with a shock
that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure transportation. He was the
enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and jewel-like, the quintessence of all
that was inimical.

She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that had
such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own forehead, to
feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white flame of essential hate.

It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for that;
she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection with him. Her
relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate was so pure and
gemlike. It was as if he were a beam of essential enmity, a beam of light that
did not only destroy her, but denied her altogether, revoked her whole world.
She saw him as a clear stroke of uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like
being whose existence defined her own non-existence. When she heard he was ill
again, her hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible.
It stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it. She could not
escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her.

CHAPTER XVI.
MAN TO MAN

He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near
to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how strong and
durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times take one’s
chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to
persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life.

He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested with
her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered. The old
way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in
him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life
lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction,
was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The
hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their
doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive
alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community
of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in
couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested
relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist,
meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse
than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from
the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.

On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned
a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And
he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. He wanted sex to
revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional
process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he
wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure
beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like
two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.

He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for
unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should
find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of
water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he
wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet
balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love
was become madly abhorrent to him.

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had
such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to
have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to
her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything
and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna
Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers because she had
borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed
him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna
Mater, she was detestable.

She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he not
know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what was she all the
while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience, claiming with horrible,
insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own again, claiming back the man she
had borne in suffering. By her very suffering and humility she bound her son
with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner.

And Ursula, Ursula was the same—or the inverse. She too was the awful,
arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest
depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable
overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it herself. She
was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man. But this was
only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman
worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must
be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still
aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had
any real place or wholeness.

And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken
fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of one
whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things
that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us of the mixed, the
unresolved. And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is
manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to
the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in
the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together
like two stars.

In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The
process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of
sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other. But the separation
was imperfect even them. And so our world-cycle passes. There is now to come the
new day, when we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure
man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. But there is no longer
any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love. There is only the
pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other.
In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised.
Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws. The man has his pure
freedom, the woman hers. Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised
sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other.

So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill. He liked sometimes to be ill enough
to take to his bed. For then he got better very quickly, and things came to him
clear and sure.

Whilst he was laid up, Gerald came to see him. The two men had a deep,
uneasy feeling for each other. Gerald’s eyes were quick and restless, his
whole manner tense and impatient, he seemed strung up to some activity.
According to conventionality, he wore black clothes, he looked formal, handsome
and comme il faut. His hair was fair almost to whiteness, sharp like splinters
of light, his face was keen and ruddy, his body seemed full of northern energy.
Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was
too unreal;—clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald
felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was
delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not
quite to be counted as a man among men.

“Why are you laid up again?” he asked kindly, taking the sick
man’s hand. It was always Gerald who was protective, offering the warm
shelter of his physical strength.

“For my sins, I suppose,” Birkin said, smiling a little
ironically.

“For your sins? Yes, probably that is so. You should sin less, and
keep better in health?”

“You’d better teach me.”

He looked at Gerald with ironic eyes.

“How are things with you?” asked Birkin.

“With me?” Gerald looked at Birkin, saw he was serious, and a
warm light came into his eyes.

“I don’t know that they’re any different. I don’t
see how they could be. There’s nothing to change.”

“I suppose you are conducting the business as successfully as ever,
and ignoring the demand of the soul.”

“That’s it,” said Gerald. “At least as far as the
business is concerned. I couldn’t say about the soul, I’am
sure.”

“No.”

“Surely you don’t expect me to?” laughed Gerald.

“No. How are the rest of your affairs progressing, apart from the
business?”

“The rest of my affairs? What are those? I couldn’t say; I
don’t know what you refer to.”

“Yes, you do,” said Birkin. “Are you gloomy or cheerful?
And what about Gudrun Brangwen?”

“What about her?” A confused look came over Gerald.
“Well,” he added, “I don’t know. I can only tell you she
gave me a hit over the face last time I saw her.”

“A hit over the face! What for?”

“That I couldn’t tell you, either.”

“Really! But when?”

“The night of the party—when Diana was drowned. She was driving
the cattle up the hill, and I went after her—you remember.”

“Yes, I remember. But what made her do that? You didn’t
definitely ask her for it, I suppose?”

“I? No, not that I know of. I merely said to her, that it was
dangerous to drive those Highland bullocks—as it is. She turned in
such a way, and said—‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and
your cattle, don’t you?’ So I asked her ‘why,’ and for
answer she flung me a back-hander across the face.”

Birkin laughed quickly, as if it pleased him. Gerald looked at him,
wondering, and began to laugh as well, saying:

“I didn’t laugh at the time, I assure you. I was never so taken
aback in my life.”

“And weren’t you furious?”

“Furious? I should think I was. I’d have murdered her for two
pins.”

“H’m!” ejaculated Birkin. “Poor Gudrun,
wouldn’t she suffer afterwards for having given herself away!” He
was hugely delighted.

“Would she suffer?” asked Gerald, also amused now.

Both men smiled in malice and amusement.

“Badly, I should think; seeing how self-conscious she is.”

“She is self-conscious, is she? Then what made her do it? For I
certainly think it was quite uncalled-for, and quite unjustified.”

“I suppose it was a sudden impulse.”

“Yes, but how do you account for her having such an impulse? I’d
done her no harm.”

Birkin shook his head.

“The Amazon suddenly came up in her, I suppose,” he said.

“Well,” replied Gerald, “I’d rather it had been the
Orinoco.”

They both laughed at the poor joke. Gerald was thinking how Gudrun had said
she would strike the last blow too. But some reserve made him keep this back
from Birkin.

“And you resent it?” Birkin asked.

“I don’t resent it. I don’t care a tinker’s curse
about it.” He was silent a moment, then he added, laughing. “No,
I’ll see it through, that’s all. She seemed sorry afterwards.”

“Did she? You’ve not met since that night?”

Gerald’s face clouded.

“No,” he said. “We’ve been—you can imagine how
it’s been, since the accident.”

“Yes. Is it calming down?”

“I don’t know. It’s a shock, of course. But I don’t
believe mother minds. I really don’t believe she takes any notice. And
what’s so funny, she used to be all for the children—nothing
mattered, nothing whatever mattered but the children. And now, she doesn’t
take any more notice than if it was one of the servants.”

“No? Did it upset you very much?”

“It’s a shock. But I don’t feel it very much, really. I
don’t feel any different. We’ve all got to die, and it doesn’t
seem to make any great difference, anyhow, whether you die or not. I can’t
feel any grief, you know. It leaves me cold. I can’t quite account
for it.”

“You don’t care if you die or not?” asked Birkin.

Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a weapon. He
felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a
great fear.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t want to die, why should I?
But I never trouble. The question doesn’t seem to be on the carpet for me
at all. It doesn’t interest me, you know.”

“Timor mortis conturbat me,” quoted Birkin,
adding—“No, death doesn’t really seem the point any more. It
curiously doesn’t concern one. It’s like an ordinary
tomorrow.”

Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and an
unspoken understanding was exchanged.

Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he looked at
Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in space, strangely
keen-eyed and yet blind.

“If death isn’t the point,” he said, in a strangely
abstract, cold, fine voice—“what is?” He sounded as if he had
been found out.

“What is?” re-echoed Birkin. And there was a mocking silence.

“There’s long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death,
before we disappear,” said Birkin.

“There is,” said Gerald. “But what sort of way?” He
seemed to press the other man for knowledge which he himself knew far better
than Birkin did.

“Right down the slopes of degeneration—mystic, universal
degeneration. There are many stages of pure degradation to go through: agelong.
We live on long after our death, and progressively, in progressive
devolution.”

Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as if,
somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as if his own
knowledge were direct and personal, whereas Birkin’s was a matter of
observation and inference, not quite hitting the nail on the head:—though
aiming near enough at it. But he was not going to give himself away. If Birkin
could get at the secrets, let him. Gerald would never help him. Gerald would be
a dark horse to the end.

“Of course,” he said, with a startling change of conversation,
“it is father who really feels it. It will finish him. For him the world
collapses. All his care now is for Winnie—he must save Winnie. He says she
ought to be sent away to school, but she won’t hear of it, and he’ll
never do it. Of course she is in rather a queer way. We’re all of us
curiously bad at living. We can do things—but we can’t get on with
life at all. It’s curious—a family failing.”

“She oughtn’t to be sent away to school,” said Birkin, who
was considering a new proposition.

“She oughtn’t. Why?”

“She’s a queer child—a special child, more special even
than you. And in my opinion special children should never be sent away to
school. Only moderately ordinary children should be sent to school—so it
seems to me.”

“I’m inclined to think just the opposite. I think it would
probably make her more normal if she went away and mixed with other
children.”

“She wouldn’t mix, you see. You never really mixed, did you?
And she wouldn’t be willing even to pretend to. She’s proud, and
solitary, and naturally apart. If she has a single nature, why do you want to
make her gregarious?”

“No, I don’t want to make her anything. But I think school would
be good for her.”

“Was it good for you?”

Gerald’s eyes narrowed uglily. School had been torture to him. Yet he
had not questioned whether one should go through this torture. He seemed to
believe in education through subjection and torment.

“I hated it at the time, but I can see it was necessary,” he
said. “It brought me into line a bit—and you can’t live unless
you do come into line somewhere.”

“Well,” said Birkin, “I begin to think that you
can’t live unless you keep entirely out of the line. It’s no good
trying to toe the line, when your one impulse is to smash up the line. Winnie is
a special nature, and for special natures you must give a special world.”

“Yes, but where’s your special world?” said Gerald.

“Make it. Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the
world down to fit yourself. As a matter of fact, two exceptional people make
another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You don’t
want a world same as your brothers-in-law. It’s just the special
quality you value. Do you want to be normal or ordinary! It’s a lie.
You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world of liberty.”

Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would never
openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one direction—much
more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other man, as if Birkin were in
some way young, innocent, child-like: so amazingly clever, but incurably
innocent.

“Yet you are so banal as to consider me chiefly a freak,” said
Birkin pointedly.

“A freak!” exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened
suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the
cunning bud. “No—I never consider you a freak.” And he watched
the other man with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. “I
feel,” Gerald continued, “that there is always an element of
uncertainty about you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But
I’m never sure of you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had
no soul.”

He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He thought he
had all the soul in the world. He stared in amazement. And Gerald, watching, saw
the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes, a young, spontaneous goodness
that attracted the other man infinitely, yet filled him with bitter chagrin,
because he mistrusted it so much. He knew Birkin could do without
him—could forget, and not suffer. This was always present in
Gerald’s consciousness, filling him with bitter unbelief: this
consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment. It seemed
almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh, often, on Birkin’s part,
to talk so deeply and importantly.

Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw
himself confronted with another problem—the problem of love and eternal
conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary—it had been a
necessity inside himself all his life—to love a man purely and fully. Of
course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.

He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in
brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.

“You know how the old German knights used to swear a
Blutbruderschaft,” he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity
in his eyes.

“Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood
into the cut?” said Gerald.

“Yes—and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their
lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to
swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without
any possibility of going back on it.”

He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked down
at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was
mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction.

“We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?” pleaded
Birkin. “We will swear to stand by each other—be true to each
other—ultimately—infallibly—given to each other,
organically—without possibility of taking back.”

Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His face
shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he kept his reserve.
He held himself back.

“Shall we swear to each other, one day?” said Birkin, putting
out his hand towards Gerald.

Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if withheld and
afraid.

“We’ll leave it till I understand it better,” he said, in
a voice of excuse.

Birkin watched him. A little sharp disappointment, perhaps a touch of
contempt came into his heart.

“Yes,” he said. “You must tell me what you think, later.
You know what I mean? Not sloppy emotionalism. An impersonal union that leaves
one free.”

They lapsed both into silence. Birkin was looking at Gerald all the time. He
seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he usually saw in Gerald,
and which usually he liked so much, but the man himself, complete, and as if
fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were
limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal
halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their
moments of passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or
boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin in
Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in real indifferent gaiety. He
had a clog, a sort of monomania.

There was silence for a time. Then Birkin said, in a lighter tone, letting
the stress of the contact pass:

“Can’t you get a good governess for Winifred?—somebody
exceptional?”

“Hermione Roddice suggested we should ask Gudrun to teach her to draw
and to model in clay. You know Winnie is astonishingly clever with that
plasticine stuff. Hermione declares she is an artist.” Gerald spoke in the
usual animated, chatty manner, as if nothing unusual had passed. But
Birkin’s manner was full of reminder.

“Really! I didn’t know that. Oh well then, if Gudrun would teach
her, it would be perfect—couldn’t be anything better—if
Winifred is an artist. Because Gudrun somewhere is one. And every true artist is
the salvation of every other.”

“I thought they got on so badly, as a rule.”

“Perhaps. But only artists produce for each other the world that is
fit to live in. If you can arrange that for Winifred, it is perfect.”

“But you think she wouldn’t come?”

“I don’t know. Gudrun is rather self-opinionated. She
won’t go cheap anywhere. Or if she does, she’ll pretty soon take
herself back. So whether she would condescend to do private teaching,
particularly here, in Beldover, I don’t know. But it would be just the
thing. Winifred has got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the
means of being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She’ll
never get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself, and
she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think what her life
will be like unless she does find a means of expression, some way of fulfilment.
You can see what mere leaving it to fate brings. You can see how much marriage
is to be trusted to—look at your own mother.”

“Do you think mother is abnormal?”

“No! I think she only wanted something more, or other than the common
run of life. And not getting it, she has gone wrong perhaps.”

“After producing a brood of wrong children,” said Gerald
gloomily.

“No more wrong than any of the rest of us,” Birkin replied.
“The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves, take them one
by one.”

“Sometimes I think it is a curse to be alive,” said Gerald with
sudden impotent anger.

“Well,” said Birkin, “why not! Let it be a curse sometimes
to be alive—at other times it is anything but a curse. You’ve got
plenty of zest in it really.”

“Less than you’d think,” said Gerald, revealing a strange
poverty in his look at the other man.

There was silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

“I don’t see what she has to distinguish between teaching at the
Grammar School, and coming to teach Win,” said Gerald.

“The difference between a public servant and a private one. The only
nobleman today, king and only aristocrat, is the public, the public. You are
quite willing to serve the public—but to be a private tutor—”

“I don’t want to serve either—”

“No! And Gudrun will probably feel the same.”

Gerald thought for a few minutes. Then he said:

“At all events, father won’t make her feel like a private
servant. He will be fussy and greatful enough.”

“So he ought. And so ought all of you. Do you think you can hire a
woman like Gudrun Brangwen with money? She is your equal like
anything—probably your superior.”

“Is she?” said Gerald.

“Yes, and if you haven’t the guts to know it, I hope
she’ll leave you to your own devices.”

“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, “if she is my equal, I wish
she weren’t a teacher, because I don’t think teachers as a rule are
my equal.”

“Nor do I, damn them. But am I a teacher because I teach, or a parson
because I preach?”

Gerald laughed. He was always uneasy on this score. He did not want to claim
social superiority, yet he would not claim intrinsic personal superiority,
because he would never base his standard of values on pure being. So he wobbled
upon a tacit assumption of social standing. No, Birkin wanted him to accept the
fact of intrinsic difference between human beings, which he did not intend to
accept. It was against his social honour, his principle. He rose to go.

“I’ve been neglecting my business all this while,” he said
smiling.

“I ought to have reminded you before,” Birkin replied, laughing
and mocking.

“I knew you’d say something like that,” laughed Gerald,
rather uneasily.

“Did you?”

“Yes, Rupert. It wouldn’t do for us all to be like you
are—we should soon be in the cart. When I am above the world, I shall
ignore all businesses.”

“Of course, we’re not in the cart now,” said Birkin,
satirically.

“Not as much as you make out. At any rate, we have enough to eat and
drink—”

“And be satisfied,” added Birkin.

Gerald came near the bed and stood looking down at Birkin whose throat was
exposed, whose tossed hair fell attractively on the warm brow, above the eyes
that were so unchallenged and still in the satirical face. Gerald, full-limbed
and turgid with energy, stood unwilling to go, he was held by the presence of
the other man. He had not the power to go away.

“So,” said Birkin. “Good-bye.” And he reached out
his hand from under the bed-clothes, smiling with a glimmering look.

“Good-bye,” said Gerald, taking the warm hand of his friend in a
firm grasp. “I shall come again. I miss you down at the mill.”

“I’ll be there in a few days,” said Birkin.

The eyes of the two men met again. Gerald’s, that were keen as a
hawk’s, were suffused now with warm light and with unadmitted love, Birkin
looked back as out of a darkness, unsounded and unknown, yet with a kind of
warmth, that seemed to flow over Gerald’s brain like a fertile sleep.

“Good-bye then. There’s nothing I can do for you?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

Birkin watched the black-clothed form of the other man move out of the door,
the bright head was gone, he turned over to sleep.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE INDUSTRIAL MAGNATE

In Beldover, there was both for Ursula and for Gudrun an interval. It seemed
to Ursula as if Birkin had gone out of her for the time, he had lost his
significance, he scarcely mattered in her world. She had her own friends, her
own activities, her own life. She turned back to the old ways with zest, away
from him.

And Gudrun, after feeling every moment in all her veins conscious of Gerald
Crich, connected even physically with him, was now almost indifferent to the
thought of him. She was nursing new schemes for going away and trying a new form
of life. All the time, there was something in her urging her to avoid the final
establishing of a relationship with Gerald. She felt it would be wiser and
better to have no more than a casual acquaintance with him.

She had a scheme for going to St Petersburg, where she had a friend who was
a sculptor like herself, and who lived with a wealthy Russian whose hobby was
jewel-making. The emotional, rather rootless life of the Russians appealed to
her. She did not want to go to Paris. Paris was dry, and essentially boring. She
would like to go to Rome, Munich, Vienna, or to St Petersburg or Moscow. She had
a friend in St Petersburg and a friend in Munich. To each of these she wrote,
asking about rooms.

She had a certain amount of money. She had come home partly to save, and now
she had sold several pieces of work, she had been praised in various shows. She
knew she could become quite the “go’ if she went to London. But she
knew London, she wanted something else. She had seventy pounds, of which nobody
knew anything. She would move soon, as soon as she heard from her friends. Her
nature, in spite of her apparent placidity and calm, was profoundly restless.

The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey. Mrs
Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and
cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her too cosy, too tidy kitchen. There was
a cat-like comfort and cleanliness everywhere.

“Yes, Miss Brangwen,” she said, in her slightly whining,
insinuating voice, “and how do you like being back in the old place,
then?”

Gudrun, whom she addressed, hated her at once.

“I don’t care for it,” she replied abruptly.

“You don’t? Ay, well, I suppose you found a difference from
London. You like life, and big, grand places. Some of us has to be content with
Willey Green and Beldover. And what do you think of our Grammar School, as
there’s so much talk about?”

“What do I think of it?” Gudrun looked round at her slowly.
“Do you mean, do I think it’s a good school?”

“Yes. What is your opinion of it?”

“I do think it’s a good school.”

Gudrun was very cold and repelling. She knew the common people hated the
school.

“Ay, you do, then! I’ve heard so much, one way and the other.
It’s nice to know what those that’s in it feel. But opinions vary,
don’t they? Mr Crich up at Highclose is all for it. Ay, poor man,
I’m afraid he’s not long for this world. He’s very
poorly.”

“Is he worse?” asked Ursula.

“Eh, yes—since they lost Miss Diana. He’s gone off to a
shadow. Poor man, he’s had a world of trouble.”

“Has he?” asked Gudrun, faintly ironic.

“He has, a world of trouble. And as nice and kind a gentleman as ever
you could wish to meet. His children don’t take after him.”

“I suppose they take after their mother?” said Ursula.

“In many ways.” Mrs Krik lowered her voice a little. “She
was a proud haughty lady when she came into these parts—my word, she was
that! She mustn’t be looked at, and it was worth your life to speak to
her.” The woman made a dry, sly face.

“Did you know her when she was first married?”

“Yes, I knew her. I nursed three of her children. And proper little
terrors they were, little fiends—that Gerald was a demon if ever there was
one, a proper demon, ay, at six months old.” A curious malicious, sly tone
came into the woman’s voice.

“Really,” said Gudrun.

“That wilful, masterful—he’d mastered one nurse at six
months. Kick, and scream, and struggle like a demon. Many’s the time
I’ve pinched his little bottom for him, when he was a child in arms. Ay,
and he’d have been better if he’d had it pinched oftener. But she
wouldn’t have them corrected—no-o, wouldn’t hear of it. I can
remember the rows she had with Mr Crich, my word. When he’d got worked up,
properly worked up till he could stand no more, he’d lock the study door
and whip them. But she paced up and down all the while like a tiger outside,
like a tiger, with very murder in her face. She had a face that could look
death. And when the door was opened, she’d go in with her hands
lifted—‘What have you been doing to my children, you coward.’
She was like one out of her mind. I believe he was frightened of her; he had to be
driven mad before he’d lift a finger. Didn’t the servants have a life
of it! And didn’t we used to be thankful when one of them caught it. They
were the torment of your life.”

“Really!” said Gudrun.

“In every possible way. If you wouldn’t let them smash their
pots on the table, if you wouldn’t let them drag the kitten about with a
string round its neck, if you wouldn’t give them whatever they asked for,
every mortal thing—then there was a shine on, and their mother coming in
asking—‘What’s the matter with him? What have you done to him? What
is it, Darling?’ And then she’d turn on you as if she’d trample you
under her feet. But she didn’t trample on me. I was the only one that
could do anything with her demons—for she wasn’t going to be
bothered with them herself. No, she took no trouble for them. But they must
just have their way, they mustn’t be spoken to. And Master Gerald was the
beauty. I left when he was a year and a half, I could stand no more. But I
pinched his little bottom for him when he was in arms, I did, when there was no
holding him, and I’m not sorry I did—”

Gudrun went away in fury and loathing. The phrase, “I pinched his
little bottom for him,” sent her into a white, stony fury. She could not
bear it, she wanted to have the woman taken out at once and strangled. And yet
there the phrase was lodged in her mind for ever, beyond escape. She felt, one
day, she would have to tell him, to see how he took it. And she loathed
herself for the thought.

But at Shortlands the life-long struggle was coming to a close. The father
was ill and was going to die. He had bad internal pains, which took away all his
attentive life, and left him with only a vestige of his consciousness. More and
more a silence came over him, he was less and less acutely aware of his
surroundings. The pain seemed to absorb his activity. He knew it was there, he
knew it would come again. It was like something lurking in the darkness within
him. And he had not the power, or the will, to seek it out and to know it. There
it remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then
being silent. And when it tore him he crouched in silent subjection under it,
and when it left him alone again, he refused to know of it. It was within the
darkness, let it remain unknown. So he never admitted it, except in a secret
corner of himself, where all his never-revealed fears and secrets were
accumulated. For the rest, he had a pain, it went away, it made no difference.
It even stimulated him, excited him.

But it gradually absorbed his life. Gradually it drew away all his
potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life and drew him away
into the darkness. And in this twilight of his life little remained visible to
him. The business, his work, that was gone entirely. His public interests had
disappeared as if they had never been. Even his family had become extraneous to
him, he could only remember, in some slight non-essential part of himself, that
such and such were his children. But it was historical fact, not vital to him.
He had to make an effort to know their relation to him. Even his wife barely
existed. She indeed was like the darkness, like the pain within him. By some
strange association, the darkness that contained the pain and the darkness that
contained his wife were identical. All his thoughts and understandings became
blurred and fused, and now his wife and the consuming pain were the same dark
secret power against him, that he never faced. He never drove the dread out of
its lair within him. He only knew that there was a dark place, and something
inhabiting this darkness which issued from time to time and rent him. But he
dared not penetrate and drive the beast into the open. He had rather ignore its
existence. Only, in his vague way, the dread was his wife, the destroyer, and it
was the pain, the destruction, a darkness which was one and both.

He very rarely saw his wife. She kept her room. Only occasionally she came
forth, with her head stretched forward, and in her low, possessed voice, she
asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of more than thirty
years: “Well, I don’t think I’m any the worse, dear.”
But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit, frightened
almost to the verge of death.

But all his life, he had been so constant to his lights, he had never broken
down. He would die even now without breaking down, without knowing what his
feelings were, towards her. All his life, he had said: “Poor Christiana,
she has such a strong temper.” With unbroken will, he had stood by this
position with regard to her, he had substituted pity for all his hostility, pity
had been his shield and his safeguard, and his infallible weapon. And still, in
his consciousness, he was sorry for her, her nature was so violent and so
impatient.

But now his pity, with his life, was wearing thin, and the dread almost
amounting to horror, was rising into being. But before the armour of his pity
really broke, he would die, as an insect when its shell is cracked. This was his
final resource. Others would live on, and know the living death, the ensuing
process of hopeless chaos. He would not. He denied death its victory.

He had been so constant to his lights, so constant to charity, and to his
love for his neighbour. Perhaps he had loved his neighbour even better than
himself—which is going one further than the commandment. Always, this
flame had burned in his heart, sustaining him through everything, the welfare of
the people. He was a large employer of labour, he was a great mine-owner. And he
had never lost this from his heart, that in Christ he was one with his workmen.
Nay, he had felt inferior to them, as if they through poverty and labour were
nearer to God than he. He had always the unacknowledged belief, that it was his
workmen, the miners, who held in their hands the means of salvation. To move
nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must gravitate towards
theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God made manifest. In them he
worshipped the highest, the great, sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity.