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.
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.