Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by D. H. Lawrence
Title Page
Introduction
I: Sisters
II: Shortlands
III: Class-Room
IV: Diver
V: In the Train
VI: Crème de Menthe
VII: Totem
VIII: Breadalby
IX: Coal-Dust
X: Sketch-Book
XI: An Island
XII: Carpeting
XIII: Mino
XIV: Water-Party
XV: Sunday Evening
XVI: Man to Man
XVII: The Industrial Magnate
XVIII: Rabbit
XIX: Moony
XX: Gladiatorial
XXI: Threshold
XXII: Woman to Woman
XXIII: Excurse
XXIV: Death and Love
XXV: Marriage or Not
XXVI: A Chair
XXVII: Flitting
XXVIII: Gudrun in the Pompadour
XXIX: Continental
XXX: Snowed Up
XXXI: Exeunt
Copyright
The White Peacock
The Trespasser
Sons and Lovers
The Rainbow
The Lost Girl
Aaron’s Rod
Kangaroo
The Boy in the Bush
The Plumed Serpent
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The Escaped Cock
The Virgin and the Gypsy
THE TWO GREATEST novels written in English in the twentieth century were published within a year of each other, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1921, James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 – not coincidentally if one accepts that new centuries brew up an infection of creative fervency. ‘We are now in a period of crisis,’ Lawrence wrote in his foreword to the American edition of Women in Love. ‘Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul.’ Joyce, too, was acutely wrestling with his own soul.
Both novels had been preoccupying their writers for many years, and both are nominally set before or apart from the First World War: Ulysses in a 24-hour period in 1904, Women in Love we are not entirely sure when, though there is, in the final pages, a lightning-bolt reference to the Kaiser’s washing his hands of the catastrophe – ‘Ich habe es nicht gewollt’ (‘I didn’t intend this to happen’) – and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the longing for newness and change that pervades the novel is a response to the ruination of war. ‘If only one might create the future after one’s own heart,’ Birkin thinks, one’s heart being the only thing left intact.
Neither writer cared much for the other’s work. ‘The man writes really badly,’ Joyce said of Lawrence. ‘Lush’ was his only comment after someone read to him from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And Lawrence, who was better at vituperation, returned the compliment with interest, calling Joyce ‘a clumsy olla putrida . . . nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness.’ Those remarks refer specifically to Finnegans Wake. Of Ulysses he had this to say: ‘I am sorry but I am one of those people who can’t read Ulysses. Only bits. But I am glad I have seen the book, since in Europe they usually mention us together . . . and I feel I ought to know in what company I creep to immortality.’
Looking back, it seems inevitable that they would creep to immortality in unholy alliance given their chronology and reputations – both born at the fag-end of the nineteenth century, both fiercely innovative, both writing a prose considered intransigent and transgressive by the faint-hearted, both prosecuted for being obscene, both soul-wrestlers, both sickly, both self-exiled, both short-lived. Otherwise, their two supreme works glower at each other across an unbridgeable divide. Ulysses is a great comic novel in the celebratory here-and-now mode, Women in Love a great tragic novel, part valediction to an old world – ‘the lovely accomplished past’ – part struggle to be born again into a new.
Molly Bloom’s high-spirited sexuality was anathema to Lawrence’s puritanism, and Leopold Bloom’s acceptance of her infidelity beyond the range of his humanity. As a rule, comedy needs a cuckold or some similarly passive recipient of life’s jokes and cruelties at its heart: a done-to not a doer, someone upon whom things are visited. But men in Lawrence’s novels are not able to release their self-importance or cede their masculinity in this way. So the all-receiving, magnanimous mock-heroic comedy of Ulysses – one day in the life of a much insulted ex-blotting-paper salesman – is out of the question for Lawrence. But he was on another and perhaps grander errand; his vision of a disintegrated world truer to the times, his imagination of disaster on a more epic scale, his ambition – to find some residue of individuality in the universal crisis and to rescue it, maybe, through love (‘this marriage with her was his resurrection,’ Birkin thinks) – bolder and, yes, more preposterous.
But never mind the preposterous. It’s a small price to pay for the novel’s great leap, balancing despair and hope, into the cold unknown. Lawrence was not interested in the sort of bravura technical innovation that engrossed Joyce, but there is no less narrative boldness in the topographical and spiritual trajectory of Women in Love: from a small room in an English mining town, where two sisters are stitching embroidery and talking about their chances of finding a husband – much in the spirit of Jane Austen – to the icy Alpine wastes of a Europe in which nothing of warm humanity, nothing but bitterness and irony, the dregs of our intelligence, survives. Our hearts break as Gerald stumbles in the snow. But the disaster goes beyond the snuffing out of an individual life. Only in Greek Tragedy does one experience a comparable sense of social and moral annihilation.
By the nature of the prose they write, too, are Joyce and Lawrence polar opposites: Joyce of the school of Flaubert, highly architectural, a French polisher of language, prepared to give a week to find the words to make the phrase he wants, and then another to their rearrangement; Lawrence impressionistic and impulsive, over-fluid and repetitive sometimes, appearing merely to sketch approximations of meaning, at others finding expression which answers to Shelley’s description of Wordsworth’s imagination – ‘new creating’ what it sees. How best to put it was not what concerned Lawrence, because ‘putting it’ implies the pre-existence of an ideal ‘it’; for Lawrence everything was forever up for discovery. A new world, new feelings, and a new language in which to apprehend them. Though Lawrence is often accused of preachiness, Women in Love is in fact the least dogmatic of novels. Descriptively it is entirely collaborative, engaging its readers in the act of finding out what was not known before.
It is all so matter-of-fact and familiar at first – ‘Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking’ – that we might be forgiven thinking we are back in Cranford. But quickly we realise we are somewhere we have never previously been. A sense of obsolescence hangs over everything, the town, the house, even the conversation about marriage, as though the sisters know they are asking questions of each other to which there cannot any longer be an answer. Altogether, they are more excruciated than any of the women we know from the Victorian novel, their emotions more highly wrought and closer to the skin. ‘Nerve-worn,’ Lawrence calls Hermione Roddice, but all the characters in Women in Love are emotionally frayed. Psychologically, they are at the end of their tether, wanting love but wary of it, detesting mankind but frightened by the violence of their recoil from other people, desperate to be gone, though what they are desperate to be gone from they cannot say.
Only in Ursula, initially, does there appear to be some prospect for change. She has about her ‘that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened’ – a description that defies literal explanation. What is being evoked here: what Ursula looks like, how Ursula feels, what it is like to be in her company? The words reach for what is scarcely reachable; in their agitated accumulation of obstruction – ‘caught, meshed, contravened’ (near echoing Shakespeare’s ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confin’d’) – they mimic Ursula’s baffled struggle to live her life and to understand why, as yet, she cannot. Rarely does a novel deliver up a character’s innermost conflicts in language as tactile as this.
And it burrows deeper yet. ‘Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!’ First a flame, apprehended almost mystically, Ursula is now as subject to the pulse of nature as a seed. Listen, and you can hear the grass grow; listen, and you can hear Ursula’s heartbeat. Of the English writers who preceded Lawrence, only Hardy gave this sense of humanity bound to the same laws that govern vegetable life. But whereas in Hardy these workings in nature’s darkness are a cause for bitterness, the reason why Tess cannot escape her fate and Jude will never be anything but obscure, in Lawrence they mirror our struggle to come to some consciousness of ourselves. In Women in Love it is as though everybody must be tried in gladiatorial contest with nature – Birkin attempts to stone the reflected image of the moon into fragments, Hermione terrorises catkins with her love for them, Gudrun baits the highland cattle, Gerald tries to subdue water itself. And finally the Alps await.
Nature is a protagonist in Women in Love. Not a lyrical or consoling backdrop, but a persistent, exemplary presence. Fraught and worn-out the humans in the novel might be, but out there, where human life is not, some healthful principle of growth goes on vigorously asserting itself. Beyond the colliery, ‘the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air . . . Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-blooms . . . currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white . . .’ All the verbs are purposeful and big with promise. They have the future in them. Though it is a future with which, at the last, we might not have the courage to keep pace. The snows and naked rocks in which the novel ends are full of vitalistic menace. ‘Round about, spiked, slashed, snow-peaks pricked the heaven.’ From which the thought follows that ‘Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion.’
And yet Women in Love is not a nihilistic book. Perhaps by its dramatic nature no novel ever can be. The danger in reading Women in Love, whether we are carried away by its speculations or remain determined to resist them, is to treat it like a dissertation and not a novel. Lawrence has suffered shamefully in recent years from the mistaken assumption that a novel is the sum of its ideas. The more so as those ideas are not of a sort it is fashionable for us to like. Once it could be shown by feminists, for example, that Lawrence was a sexist, or by democrats that Lawrence was no democrat, there seemed no longer any reason why we should read him. Scandalous – that we should think of literature as having to believe what we believe, as though we read merely to have our ideologies and prejudices confirmed. In so far as Lawrence’s personal beliefs are the issue, the matter is quickly dealt with: they are none of our affair. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ Lawrence himself was forever saying. Whatever the novelist happens to think – and in fact Lawrence did not systematically think what he has been accused of thinking – the novel itself must think differently anyway; its dramatic dynamic will always see to that. Lawrence’s characters have a lot to say for themselves, but every word that even the most Lawrentian-sounding of them speaks has to take its chance, to sink or swim dramatically, in that give-and-take of dialogue and event which is a novel.
Many a reader finds Birkin’s speeches about society, art, love, sex, the blood and loins, problematic – both difficult to understand and difficult to take. The mistake is to suppose we are meant to find them easy. Ursula makes argumentative mincemeat of him in most of their exchanges. Imperious in his maleness one minute, he is reduced to a mere ‘word-bag’ the next. While behind him, shadowing his every speculation, Hermione haunts his words like the malevolent spirit of parody. But if nothing Birkin says is permitted to prevail philosophically, that is no reason why we shouldn’t find his thinking challenging – upsetting in both senses of the word: disconcerting in its originality, and moving in its desperation. What drives Birkin to go on exploring and speechifying is the extremity of his dissatisfaction. ‘Where are you right?’ Ursula rounds on him. ‘I?’ he replies. ‘I’m not right . . . I loathe myself as a human being.’ The world of ethics and ideas in which he lives, like the world of social relations in which he moves, feels old and moribund, fatally half-hearted, ‘a dead tree’. If the currant-bushes can break into leaf, if the woods can be ‘purplish with new life,’ why cannot the humans? Ursula might break through her old integuments by the mere act of patient waiting, but others cannot. So they strive, expostulate and yearn. There are few novels in which the main characters battle so hard to think and talk themselves into a new world. We are at liberty to grow impatient with them if we choose, just as they grow impatient with one another, but if we reject the talk entirely that is because we expect too little of a novel, not too much.
But it’s not primarily by virtue of what the characters have to say for themselves that Women in Love is a great novel; what’s extraordinary is how, again and again, people act and speak from somewhere which is unknown and frightening to them. Both Ursula and Gudrun are shocked to discover the violent loathing for their family and past relations they express. Gerald makes his move on Gudrun like a man lost, without choice or volition. Standing over the dead body of her mill-owner husband with her children all around her, Mrs Crich delivers a sort of anti-eulogy which chills the blood:
‘Ay,’ she said bitterly, at length, speaking as if to the unseen witnesses of the air. ‘You’re dead.’ She stood for some minutes in silence, looking down. ‘Beautiful,’ she asserted, ‘beautiful as if life had never touched you – never touched you. God send I look different. I hope I shall look my years when I am dead . . . None of you look like this when you are dead! Don’t let it happen again . . . If I thought that the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I’d strangle them when they were infants, yes –’
We sometimes talk familiarly about Lawrence as though, whether we admire him or we don’t, we know exactly what he means. But there is nothing we can know or easily grasp about this scene. The idea that it might be terrible for an elderly man to look beautiful in death, as though life had never touched him, is a complete challenge to our comprehension both of death and life. Mrs Crich’s judgement is devastating, not because we know her to be right, or because we agree with her that her husband should have foregone his idealism and looked old in death not young, ugly not beautiful, ravaged not spared, but because her verdict is so shocking, and because we do not recognise the depths from which she delivers it. When we choose to parody Lawrence’s obscurantist mysticism we invoke the dark gods. That only proves our shallowness. In Mrs Crich’s cry we hear those gods – or at least we hear those cries of pain and triumph we associate with Cassandra and Clytemnestra and their like, the laments and yammerings of pre-Christian literature where character is not defined by morality alone, where the human and the superhuman have not been separated, where the mystery of humanity is beyond solution.
Women in Love is the nearest any English novel has so far approximated to the fearful grandeur of Medea or the Oresteia.
Howard Jacobson, 2008
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 mask-like, 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 was 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 of 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 ends 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 to be 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 recognize 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 magnetized her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like cold 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 paroxysm, 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 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 blenched 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 some one 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 aesthetic 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, care-worn 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 flowerbuds, 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 care-worn, 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 the 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 woman 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 them.
‘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.