Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Again she was some time silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “ ‘Woman wailing for her demon lover,—”hequoted2—“why, I don’t know.”

  Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Ursula was watching him as if furtively, not really aware of what she was seeing. There was a great physical attractiveness in him—a curious hidden richness, that came through his thinness and his pallor like another voice, conveying another knowledge of him. It was in the curves of his brows and his chin, rich, fine, exquisite curves, the powerful beauty of life itself, something like laughter, invisible and satisfying. Also the magic of his thighs had fascinated her: the inner slopes of his thighs. She could not say what it was. But there was a sense of richness and of strong, free liberty.

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

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

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

  “That and nothing else.”

  She was frankly puzzled.

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER IV

  Diver

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

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

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

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

  Gudrun stood by the stone wall, watching.

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

  “Ugh!” shivered Ursula. “So cold!”

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

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

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

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

  “It is Gerald Crich,” said Ursula.

  “I know,” replied Gudrun.

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

  “He is waving,” said Ursula.

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

  “Like a Nibelung,” laughed Ursula.1Gudrun said nothing, only stood still looking over the water.

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

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

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

  “What?” exclaimed Ursula in surprise.

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

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

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

  “It has form, too—it has a period.”

  “What period?”

  “Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don’t you think?”2

  Ursula laughed.

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

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

  Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.

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

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

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

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

  “Exactly,” said Gudrun.

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

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

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