WOMAN TO WOMAN
They came to the town, and left Gerald at the railway station. Gudrun
and Winifred were to come to tea with Birkin, who expected Ursula also.
In the afternoon, however, the first person to turn up was Hermione.
Birkin was out, so she went in the drawing-room, looking at his books
and papers, and playing on the piano. Then Ursula arrived. She was
surprised, unpleasantly so, to see Hermione, of whom she had heard
nothing for some time.
“It is a surprise to see you,” she said.
“Yes,” said Hermione—“I’ve been away at Aix—”
“Oh, for your health?”
“Yes.”
The two women looked at each other. Ursula resented Hermione’s long,
grave, downward-looking face. There was something of the stupidity and
the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it. “She’s got a
horse-face,” Ursula said to herself, “she runs between blinkers.” It
did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny.
There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to
her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she
did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life. Her
self was all in her head, she did not know what it was spontaneously to
run or move, like a fish in the water, or a weasel on the grass. She
must always _know_.
But Ursula only suffered from Hermione’s one-sidedness. She only felt
Hermione’s cool evidence, which seemed to put her down as nothing.
Hermione, who brooded and brooded till she was exhausted with the ache
of her effort at consciousness, spent and ashen in her body, who gained
so slowly and with such effort her final and barren conclusions of
knowledge, was apt, in the presence of other women, whom she thought
simply female, to wear the conclusions of her bitter assurance like
jewels which conferred on her an unquestionable distinction,
established her in a higher order of life. She was apt, mentally, to
condescend to women such as Ursula, whom she regarded as purely
emotional. Poor Hermione, it was her one possession, this aching
certainty of hers, it was her only justification. She must be confident
here, for God knows, she felt rejected and deficient enough elsewhere.
In the life of thought, of the spirit, she was one of the elect. And
she wanted to be universal. But there was a devastating cynicism at the
bottom of her. She did not believe in her own universals—they were
sham. She did not believe in the inner life—it was a trick, not a
reality. She did not believe in the spiritual world—it was an
affectation. In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and
the devil—these at least were not sham. She was a priestess without
belief, without conviction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned
to the reiteration of mysteries that were not divine to her. Yet there
was no escape. She was a leaf upon a dying tree. What help was there
then, but to fight still for the old, withered truths, to die for the
old, outworn belief, to be a sacred and inviolate priestess of
desecrated mysteries? The old great truths _had_ been true. And she was
a leaf of the old great tree of knowledge that was withering now. To
the old and last truth then she must be faithful even though cynicism
and mockery took place at the bottom of her soul.
“I am so glad to see you,” she said to Ursula, in her slow voice, that
was like an incantation. “You and Rupert have become quite friends?”
“Oh yes,” said Ursula. “He is always somewhere in the background.”
Hermione paused before she answered. She saw perfectly well the other
woman’s vaunt: it seemed truly vulgar.
“Is he?” she said slowly, and with perfect equanimity. “And do you
think you will marry?”
The question was so calm and mild, so simple and bare and dispassionate
that Ursula was somewhat taken aback, rather attracted. It pleased her
almost like a wickedness. There was some delightful naked irony in
Hermione.
“Well,” replied Ursula, “_He_ wants to, awfully, but I’m not so sure.”
Hermione watched her with slow calm eyes. She noted this new expression
of vaunting. How she envied Ursula a certain unconscious positivity!
even her vulgarity!
“Why aren’t you sure?” she asked, in her easy sing song. She was
perfectly at her ease, perhaps even rather happy in this conversation.
“You don’t really love him?”
Ursula flushed a little at the mild impertinence of this question. And
yet she could not definitely take offence. Hermione seemed so calmly
and sanely candid. After all, it was rather great to be able to be so
sane.
“He says it isn’t love he wants,” she replied.
“What is it then?” Hermione was slow and level.
“He wants me really to accept him in marriage.”
Hermione was silent for some time, watching Ursula with slow, pensive
eyes.
“Does he?” she said at length, without expression. Then, rousing, “And
what is it you don’t want? You don’t want marriage?”
“No—I don’t—not really. I don’t want to give the sort of _submission_
he insists on. He wants me to give myself up—and I simply don’t feel
that I _can_ do it.”
Again there was a long pause, before Hermione replied:
“Not if you don’t want to.” Then again there was silence. Hermione
shuddered with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked _her_ to
subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire.
“You see I can’t—”
“But exactly in what does—”
They had both begun at once, they both stopped. Then, Hermione,
assuming priority of speech, resumed as if wearily:
“To what does he want you to submit?”
“He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally—I
really don’t know _what_ he means. He says he wants the demon part of
himself to be mated—physically—not the human being. You see he says one
thing one day, and another the next—and he always contradicts himself—”
“And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,” said
Hermione slowly.
“Yes,” cried Ursula. “As if there were no one but himself concerned.
That makes it so impossible.”
But immediately she began to retract.
“He insists on my accepting God knows what in _him_,” she resumed. “He
wants me to accept _him_ as—as an absolute—But it seems to me he
doesn’t want to _give_ anything. He doesn’t want real warm intimacy—he
won’t have it—he rejects it. He won’t let me think, really, and he
won’t let me _feel_—he hates feelings.”
There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have
made this demand of her? Her he _drove_ into thought, drove inexorably
into knowledge—and then execrated her for it.
“He wants me to sink myself,” Ursula resumed, “not to have any being of
my own—”
“Then why doesn’t he marry an odalisk?” said Hermione in her mild
sing-song, “if it is that he wants.” Her long face looked sardonic and
amused.
“Yes,” said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did
not want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been
his slave—there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself
before a man—a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as the
supreme thing. He did not want an odalisk. He wanted a woman to _take_
something from him, to give herself up so much that she could take the
last realities of him, the last facts, the last physical facts,
physical and unbearable.
And if she did, would he acknowledge her? Would he be able to
acknowledge her through everything, or would he use her just as his
instrument, use her for his own private satisfaction, not admitting
her? That was what the other men had done. They had wanted their own
show, and they would not admit her, they turned all she was into
nothingness. Just as Hermione now betrayed herself as a woman. Hermione
was like a man, she believed only in men’s things. She betrayed the
woman in herself. And Birkin, would he acknowledge, or would he deny
her?
“Yes,” said Hermione, as each woman came out of her own separate
reverie. “It would be a mistake—I think it would be a mistake—”
“To marry him?” asked Ursula.
“Yes,” said Hermione slowly—“I think you need a man—soldierly,
strong-willed—” Hermione held out her hand and clenched it with
rhapsodic intensity. “You should have a man like the old heroes—you
need to stand behind him as he goes into battle, you need to _see_ his
strength, and to _hear_ his shout—. You need a man physically strong,
and virile in his will, _not_ a sensitive man—.” There was a break, as
if the pythoness had uttered the oracle, and now the woman went on, in
a rhapsody-wearied voice: “And you see, Rupert isn’t this, he isn’t. He
is frail in health and body, he needs great, great care. Then he is so
changeable and unsure of himself—it requires the greatest patience and
understanding to help him. And I don’t think you are patient. You would
have to be prepared to suffer—dreadfully. I can’t _tell_ you how much
suffering it would take to make him happy. He lives an _intensely_
spiritual life, at times—too, too wonderful. And then come the
reactions. I can’t speak of what I have been through with him. We have
been together so long, I really do know him, I _do_ know what he is.
And I feel I must say it; I feel it would be perfectly _disastrous_ for
you to marry him—for you even more than for him.” Hermione lapsed into
bitter reverie. “He is so uncertain, so unstable—he wearies, and then
reacts. I couldn’t _tell_ you what his reactions are. I couldn’t _tell_
you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day—a little
latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant,
always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good
to bad, bad to good. And nothing is so devastating, nothing—”
“Yes,” said Ursula humbly, “you must have suffered.”
An unearthly light came on Hermione’s face. She clenched her hand like
one inspired.
“And one must be willing to suffer—willing to suffer for him hourly,
daily—if you are going to help him, if he is to keep true to anything
at all—”
“And I don’t _want_ to suffer hourly and daily,” said Ursula. “I don’t,
I should be ashamed. I think it is degrading not to be happy.”
Hermione stopped and looked at her a long time.
“Do you?” she said at last. And this utterance seemed to her a mark of
Ursula’s far distance from herself. For to Hermione suffering was the
greatest reality, come what might. Yet she too had a creed of
happiness.
“Yes,” she said. “One _should_ be happy—” But it was a matter of will.
“Yes,” said Hermione, listlessly now, “I can only feel that it would be
disastrous, disastrous—at least, to marry in a hurry. Can’t you be
together without marriage? Can’t you go away and live somewhere without
marriage? I do feel that marriage would be fatal, for both of you. I
think for you even more than for him—and I think of his health—”
“Of course,” said Ursula, “I don’t care about marriage—it isn’t really
important to me—it’s he who wants it.”
“It is his idea for the moment,” said Hermione, with that weary
finality, and a sort of _si jeunesse savait_ infallibility.
There was a pause. Then Ursula broke into faltering challenge.
“You think I’m merely a physical woman, don’t you?”
“No indeed,” said Hermione. “No, indeed! But I think you are vital and
young—it isn’t a question of years, or even of experience—it is almost
a question of race. Rupert is race-old, he comes of an old race—and you
seem to me so young, you come of a young, inexperienced race.”
“Do I!” said Ursula. “But I think he is awfully young, on one side.”
“Yes, perhaps childish in many respects. Nevertheless—”
They both lapsed into silence. Ursula was filled with deep resentment
and a touch of hopelessness. “It isn’t true,” she said to herself,
silently addressing her adversary. “It isn’t true. And it is _you_ who
want a physically strong, bullying man, not I. It is you who want an
unsensitive man, not I. You _don’t_ know anything about Rupert, not
really, in spite of the years you have had with him. You don’t give him
a woman’s love, you give him an ideal love, and that is why he reacts
away from you. You don’t know. You only know the dead things. Any
kitchen maid would know something about him, you don’t know. What do
you think your knowledge is but dead understanding, that doesn’t mean a
thing. You are so false, and untrue, how could you know anything? What
is the good of your talking about love—you untrue spectre of a woman!
How can you know anything, when you don’t believe? You don’t believe in
yourself and your own womanhood, so what good is your conceited,
shallow cleverness—!”
The two women sat on in antagonistic silence. Hermione felt injured,
that all her good intention, all her offering, only left the other
woman in vulgar antagonism. But then, Ursula could not understand,
never would understand, could never be more than the usual jealous and
unreasonable female, with a good deal of powerful female emotion,
female attraction, and a fair amount of female understanding, but no
mind. Hermione had decided long ago that where there was no mind, it
was useless to appeal for reason—one had merely to ignore the ignorant.
And Rupert—he had now reacted towards the strongly female, healthy,
selfish woman—it was his reaction for the time being—there was no
helping it all. It was all a foolish backward and forward, a violent
oscillation that would at length be too violent for his coherency, and
he would smash and be dead. There was no saving him. This violent and
directionless reaction between animalism and spiritual truth would go
on in him till he tore himself in two between the opposite directions,
and disappeared meaninglessly out of life. It was no good—he too was
without unity, without _mind_, in the ultimate stages of living; not
quite man enough to make a destiny for a woman.
They sat on till Birkin came in and found them together. He felt at
once the antagonism in the atmosphere, something radical and
insuperable, and he bit his lip. But he affected a bluff manner.
“Hello, Hermione, are you back again? How do you feel?”
“Oh, better. And how are you—you don’t look well—”
“Oh!—I believe Gudrun and Winnie Crich are coming in to tea. At least
they said they were. We shall be a tea-party. What train did you come
by, Ursula?”
It was rather annoying to see him trying to placate both women at once.
Both women watched him, Hermione with deep resentment and pity for him,
Ursula very impatient. He was nervous and apparently in quite good
spirits, chattering the conventional commonplaces. Ursula was amazed
and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as any _fat_
in Christendom. She became quite stiff, she would not answer. It all
seemed to her so false and so belittling. And still Gudrun did not
appear.
“I think I shall go to Florence for the winter,” said Hermione at
length.
“Will you?” he answered. “But it is so cold there.”
“Yes, but I shall stay with Palestra. It is quite comfortable.”
“What takes you to Florence?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermione slowly. Then she looked at him with her
slow, heavy gaze. “Barnes is starting his school of æsthetics, and
Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national
policy—”
“Both rubbish,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Hermione.
“Which do you admire, then?”
“I admire both. Barnes is a pioneer. And then I am interested in Italy,
in her coming to national consciousness.”
“I wish she’d come to something different from national consciousness,
then,” said Birkin; “especially as it only means a sort of
commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national
rant. And I think Barnes is an amateur.”
Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility. But yet,
she had got Birkin back again into her world! How subtle her influence
was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction
exclusively, in one minute. He was her creature.
“No,” she said, “you are wrong.” Then a sort of tension came over her,
she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went
on, in rhapsodic manner: “_Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il più
grande entusiasmo, tutti i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono
tutti_—” She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she
thought in their language.
He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said:
“For all that, I don’t like it. Their nationalism is just
industrialism—that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.”
“I think you are wrong—I think you are wrong—” said Hermione. “It seems
to me purely spontaneous and beautiful, the modern Italian’s _passion_,
for it is a passion, for Italy, _l’Italia_—”
“Do you know Italy well?” Ursula asked of Hermione. Hermione hated to
be broken in upon in this manner. Yet she answered mildly:
“Yes, pretty well. I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my
mother. My mother died in Florence.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause, painful to Ursula and to Birkin. Hermione however
seemed abstracted and calm. Birkin was white, his eyes glowed as if he
were in a fever, he was far too over-wrought. How Ursula suffered in
this tense atmosphere of strained wills! Her head seemed bound round by
iron bands.
Birkin rang the bell for tea. They could not wait for Gudrun any
longer. When the door was opened, the cat walked in.
“Micio! Micio!” called Hermione, in her slow, deliberate sing-song. The
young cat turned to look at her, then, with his slow and stately walk
he advanced to her side.
“_Vieni—vieni quá_,” Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive,
protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior.
“_Vieni dire Buon’ Giorno alla zia. Mi ricordi, mi ricordi bene—non è
vero, piccolo? È vero che mi ricordi? È vero?_” And slowly she rubbed
his head, slowly and with ironic indifference.
“Does he understand Italian?” said Ursula, who knew nothing of the
language.
“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “His mother was Italian. She was born
in my waste-paper basket in Florence, on the morning of Rupert’s
birthday. She was his birthday present.”
Tea was brought in. Birkin poured out for them. It was strange how
inviolable was the intimacy which existed between him and Hermione.
Ursula felt that she was an outsider. The very tea-cups and the old
silver was a bond between Hermione and Birkin. It seemed to belong to
an old, past world which they had inhabited together, and in which
Ursula was a foreigner. She was almost a parvenue in their old cultured
milieu. Her convention was not their convention, their standards were
not her standards. But theirs were established, they had the sanction
and the grace of age. He and she together, Hermione and Birkin, were
people of the same old tradition, the same withered deadening culture.
And she, Ursula, was an intruder. So they always made her feel.
Hermione poured a little cream into a saucer. The simple way she
assumed her rights in Birkin’s room maddened and discouraged Ursula.
There was a fatality about it, as if it were bound to be. Hermione
lifted the cat and put the cream before him. He planted his two paws on
the edge of the table and bent his gracious young head to drink.
“_Sicuro che capisce italiano_,” sang Hermione, “_non l’avrà
dimenticato, la lingua della Mamma._”
She lifted the cat’s head with her long, slow, white fingers, not
letting him drink, holding him in her power. It was always the same,
this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male
being. He blinked forbearingly, with a male, bored expression, licking
his whiskers. Hermione laughed in her short, grunting fashion.
“_Ecco, il bravo ragazzo, com’ è superbo, questo!_”
She made a vivid picture, so calm and strange with the cat. She had a
true static impressiveness, she was a social artist in some ways.
The cat refused to look at her, indifferently avoided her fingers, and
began to drink again, his nose down to the cream, perfectly balanced,
as he lapped with his odd little click.
“It’s bad for him, teaching him to eat at table,” said Birkin.
“Yes,” said Hermione, easily assenting.
Then, looking down at the cat, she resumed her old, mocking, humorous
sing-song.
“_Ti imparano fare brutte cose, brutte cose_—”
She lifted the Mino’s white chin on her forefinger, slowly. The young
cat looked round with a supremely forbearing air, avoided seeing
anything, withdrew his chin, and began to wash his face with his paw.
Hermione grunted her laughter, pleased.
“_Bel giovanotto_—” she said.
The cat reached forward again and put his fine white paw on the edge of
the saucer. Hermione lifted it down with delicate slowness. This
deliberate, delicate carefulness of movement reminded Ursula of Gudrun.
“_No! Non è permesso di mettere il zampino nel tondinetto. Non piace al
babbo. Un signor gatto così selvatico—!_”
And she kept her finger on the softly planted paw of the cat, and her
voice had the same whimsical, humorous note of bullying.
Ursula had her nose out of joint. She wanted to go away now. It all
seemed no good. Hermione was established for ever, she herself was
ephemeral and had not yet even arrived.
“I will go now,” she said suddenly.
Birkin looked at her almost in fear—he so dreaded her anger. “But there
is no need for such hurry,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered. “I will go.” And turning to Hermione, before there
was time to say any more, she held out her hand and said “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye—” sang Hermione, detaining the hand. “Must you really go
now?”
“Yes, I think I’ll go,” said Ursula, her face set, and averted from
Hermione’s eyes.
“You think you will—”
But Ursula had got her hand free. She turned to Birkin with a quick,
almost jeering: “Good-bye,” and she was opening the door before he had
time to do it for her.
When she got outside the house she ran down the road in fury and
agitation. It was strange, the unreasoning rage and violence Hermione
roused in her, by her very presence. Ursula knew she gave herself away
to the other woman, she knew she looked ill-bred, uncouth, exaggerated.
But she did not care. She only ran up the road, lest she should go back
and jeer in the faces of the two she had left behind. For they outraged
her.