EXCURSE
Next day Birkin sought Ursula out. It happened to be the half-day at
the Grammar School. He appeared towards the end of the morning, and
asked her, would she drive with him in the afternoon. She consented.
But her face was closed and unresponding, and his heart sank.
The afternoon was fine and dim. He was driving the motor-car, and she
sat beside him. But still her face was closed against him,
unresponding. When she became like this, like a wall against him, his
heart contracted.
His life now seemed so reduced, that he hardly cared any more. At
moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or
Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why
strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of
accidents—like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human
relationships? Why take them seriously-male or female? Why form any
serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking
all for what it was worth?
And yet, still, he was damned and doomed to the old effort at serious
living.
“Look,” he said, “what I bought.” The car was running along a broad
white road, between autumn trees.
He gave her a little bit of screwed-up paper. She took it and opened
it.
“How lovely,” she cried.
She examined the gift.
“How perfectly lovely!” she cried again. “But why do you give them me?”
She put the question offensively.
His face flickered with bored irritation. He shrugged his shoulders
slightly.
“I wanted to,” he said, coolly.
“But why? Why should you?”
“Am I called on to find reasons?” he asked.
There was a silence, whilst she examined the rings that had been
screwed up in the paper.
“I think they are _beautiful_,” she said, “especially this. This is
wonderful—”
It was a round opal, red and fiery, set in a circle of tiny rubies.
“You like that best?” he said.
“I think I do.”
“I like the sapphire,” he said.
“This?”
It was a rose-shaped, beautiful sapphire, with small brilliants.
“Yes,” she said, “it is lovely.” She held it in the light. “Yes,
perhaps it _is_ the best—”
“The blue—” he said.
“Yes, wonderful—”
He suddenly swung the car out of the way of a farm-cart. It tilted on
the bank. He was a careless driver, yet very quick. But Ursula was
frightened. There was always that something regardless in him which
terrified her. She suddenly felt he might kill her, by making some
dreadful accident with the motor-car. For a moment she was stony with
fear.
“Isn’t it rather dangerous, the way you drive?” she asked him.
“No, it isn’t dangerous,” he said. And then, after a pause: “Don’t you
like the yellow ring at all?”
It was a squarish topaz set in a frame of steel, or some other similar
mineral, finely wrought.
“Yes,” she said, “I do like it. But why did you buy these rings?”
“I wanted them. They are second-hand.”
“You bought them for yourself?”
“No. Rings look wrong on my hands.”
“Why did you buy them then?”
“I bought them to give to you.”
“But why? Surely you ought to give them to Hermione! You belong to
her.”
He did not answer. She remained with the jewels shut in her hand. She
wanted to try them on her fingers, but something in her would not let
her. And moreover, she was afraid her hands were too large, she shrank
from the mortification of a failure to put them on any but her little
finger. They travelled in silence through the empty lanes.
Driving in a motor-car excited her, she forgot his presence even.
“Where are we?” she asked suddenly.
“Not far from Worksop.”
“And where are we going?”
“Anywhere.”
It was the answer she liked.
She opened her hand to look at the rings. They gave her _such_
pleasure, as they lay, the three circles, with their knotted jewels,
entangled in her palm. She would have to try them on. She did so
secretly, unwilling to let him see, so that he should not know her
finger was too large for them. But he saw nevertheless. He always saw,
if she wanted him not to. It was another of his hateful, watchful
characteristics.
Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger.
And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would
not accept this ring from him in pledge.
“Look,” she said, putting forward her hand, that was half-closed and
shrinking. “The others don’t fit me.”
He looked at the red-glinting, soft stone, on her over-sensitive skin.
“Yes,” he said.
“But opals are unlucky, aren’t they?” she said wistfully.
“No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what _luck_
would bring? I don’t.”
“But why?” she laughed.
And, consumed with a desire to see how the other rings would look on
her hand, she put them on her little finger.
“They can be made a little bigger,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, doubtfully. And she sighed. She knew that, in
accepting the rings, she was accepting a pledge. Yet fate seemed more
than herself. She looked again at the jewels. They were very beautiful
to her eyes—not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of
loveliness.
“I’m glad you bought them,” she said, putting her hand, half
unwillingly, gently on his arm.
He smiled, slightly. He wanted her to come to him. But he was angry at
the bottom of his soul, and indifferent. He knew she had a passion for
him, really. But it was not finally interesting. There were depths of
passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional.
Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level—always so
abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken
himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame—like a
demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of
the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting
finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to
accept him at the quick of death?
She now became quite happy. The motor-car ran on, the afternoon was
soft and dim. She talked with lively interest, analysing people and
their motives—Gudrun, Gerald. He answered vaguely. He was not very much
interested any more in personalities and in people—people were all
different, but they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite
limitation, he said; there were only about two great ideas, two great
streams of activity remaining, with various forms of reaction
therefrom. The reactions were all varied in various people, but they
followed a few great laws, and intrinsically there was no difference.
They acted and reacted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and
once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer
mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the
differences were only variations on a theme. None of them transcended
the given terms.
Ursula did not agree—people were still an adventure to her—but—perhaps
not as much as she tried to persuade herself. Perhaps there was
something mechanical, now, in her interest. Perhaps also her interest
was destructive, her analysing was a real tearing to pieces. There was
an under-space in her where she did not care for people and their
idiosyncracies, even to destroy them. She seemed to touch for a moment
this undersilence in herself, she became still, and she turned for a
moment purely to Birkin.
“Won’t it be lovely to go home in the dark?” she said. “We might have
tea rather late—shall we?—and have high tea? Wouldn’t that be rather
nice?”
“I promised to be at Shortlands for dinner,” he said.
“But—it doesn’t matter—you can go tomorrow—”
“Hermione is there,” he said, in rather an uneasy voice. “She is going
away in two days. I suppose I ought to say good-bye to her. I shall
never see her again.”
Ursula drew away, closed in a violent silence. He knitted his brows,
and his eyes began to sparkle again in anger.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked irritably.
“No, I don’t care. Why should I? Why should I mind?” Her tone was
jeering and offensive.
“That’s what I ask myself,” he said; “why _should_ you mind! But you
seem to.” His brows were tense with violent irritation.
“I _assure_ you I don’t, I don’t mind in the least. Go where you
belong—it’s what I want you to do.”
“Ah you fool!” he cried, “with your ‘go where you belong.’ It’s
finished between Hermione and me. She means much more to _you_, if it
comes to that, than she does to me. For you can only revolt in pure
reaction from her—and to be her opposite is to be her counterpart.”
“Ah, opposite!” cried Ursula. “I know your dodges. I am not taken in by
your word-twisting. You belong to Hermione and her dead show. Well, if
you do, you do. I don’t blame you. But then you’ve nothing to do with
me.
In his inflamed, overwrought exasperation, he stopped the car, and they
sat there, in the middle of the country lane, to have it out. It was a
crisis of war between them, so they did not see the ridiculousness of
their situation.
“If you weren’t a fool, if only you weren’t a fool,” he cried in bitter
despair, “you’d see that one could be decent, even when one has been
wrong. I _was_ wrong to go on all those years with Hermione—it was a
deathly process. But after all, one can have a little human decency.
But no, you would tear my soul out with your jealousy at the very
mention of Hermione’s name.”
“I jealous! _I_—jealous! You _are_ mistaken if you think that. I’m not
jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not _that!_”
And Ursula snapped her fingers. “No, it’s you who are a liar. It’s you
who must return, like a dog to his vomit. It is what Hermione _stands
for_ that I _hate_. I _hate_ it. It is lies, it is false, it is death.
But you want it, you can’t help it, you can’t help yourself. You belong
to that old, deathly way of living—then go back to it. But don’t come
to me, for I’ve nothing to do with it.”
And in the stress of her violent emotion, she got down from the car and
went to the hedgerow, picking unconsciously some flesh-pink
spindleberries, some of which were burst, showing their orange seeds.
“Ah, you are a fool,” he cried, bitterly, with some contempt.
“Yes, I am. I _am_ a fool. And thank God for it. I’m too big a fool to
swallow your cleverness. God be praised. You go to your women—go to
them—they are your sort—you’ve always had a string of them trailing
after you—and you always will. Go to your spiritual brides—but don’t
come to me as well, because I’m not having any, thank you. You’re not
satisfied, are you? Your spiritual brides can’t give you what you want,
they aren’t common and fleshy enough for you, aren’t they? So you come
to me, and keep them in the background! You will marry me for daily
use. But you’ll keep yourself well provided with spiritual brides in
the background. I know your dirty little game.” Suddenly a flame ran
over her, and she stamped her foot madly on the road, and he winced,
afraid that she would strike him. “And _I, I’m_ not spiritual enough,
_I’m_ not as spiritual as that Hermione—!” Her brows knitted, her eyes
blazed like a tiger’s. “Then _go_ to her, that’s all I say, _go_ to
her, _go_. Ha, she spiritual—_spiritual_, she! A dirty materialist as
she is. _She_ spiritual? What does she care for, what is her
spirituality? What _is_ it?” Her fury seemed to blaze out and burn his
face. He shrank a little. “I tell you it’s _dirt, dirt_, and nothing
_but_ dirt. And it’s dirt you want, you crave for it. Spiritual! Is
_that_ spiritual, her bullying, her conceit, her sordid materialism?
She’s a fishwife, a fishwife, she is such a materialist. And all so
sordid. What does she work out to, in the end, with all her social
passion, as you call it. Social passion—what social passion has
she?—show it me!—where is it? She wants petty, immediate _power_, she
wants the illusion that she is a great woman, that is all. In her soul
she’s a devilish unbeliever, common as dirt. That’s what she is at the
bottom. And all the rest is pretence—but you love it. You love the sham
spirituality, it’s your food. And why? Because of the dirt underneath.
Do you think I don’t know the foulness of your sex life—and her’s?—I
do. And it’s that foulness you want, you liar. Then have it, have it.
You’re such a liar.”
She turned away, spasmodically tearing the twigs of spindleberry from
the hedge, and fastening them, with vibrating fingers, in the bosom of
her coat.
He stood watching in silence. A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at
the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time
he was full of rage and callousness.
“This is a degrading exhibition,” he said coolly.
“Yes, degrading indeed,” she said. “But more to me than to you.”
“Since you choose to degrade yourself,” he said. Again the flash came
over her face, the yellow lights concentrated in her eyes.
“_You!_” she cried. “You! You truth-lover! You purity-monger! It
_stinks_, your truth and your purity. It stinks of the offal you feed
on, you scavenger dog, you eater of corpses. You are foul, _foul_—and
you must know it. Your purity, your candour, your goodness—yes, thank
you, we’ve had some. What you are is a foul, deathly thing, obscene,
that’s what you are, obscene and perverse. You, and love! You may well
say, you don’t want love. No, you want _yourself_, and dirt, and
death—that’s what you want. You are so _perverse_, so death-eating. And
then—”
“There’s a bicycle coming,” he said, writhing under her loud
denunciation.
She glanced down the road.
“I don’t care,” she cried.
Nevertheless she was silent. The cyclist, having heard the voices
raised in altercation, glanced curiously at the man, and the woman, and
at the standing motor-car as he passed.
“—Afternoon,” he said, cheerfully.
“Good-afternoon,” replied Birkin coldly.
They were silent as the man passed into the distance.
A clearer look had come over Birkin’s face. He knew she was in the main
right. He knew he was perverse, so spiritual on the one hand, and in
some strange way, degraded, on the other. But was she herself any
better? Was anybody any better?
“It may all be true, lies and stink and all,” he said. “But Hermione’s
spiritual intimacy is no rottener than your emotional-jealous intimacy.
One can preserve the decencies, even to one’s enemies: for one’s own
sake. Hermione is my enemy—to her last breath! That’s why I must bow
her off the field.”
“You! You and your enemies and your bows! A pretty picture you make of
yourself. But it takes nobody in but yourself. I _jealous! I!_ What I
say,” her voice sprang into flame, “I say because it is _true_, do you
see, because you are _you_, a foul and false liar, a whited sepulchre.
That’s why I say it. And _you_ hear it.”
“And be grateful,” he added, with a satirical grimace.
“Yes,” she cried, “and if you have a spark of decency in you, be
grateful.”
“Not having a spark of decency, however—” he retorted.
“No,” she cried, “you haven’t a _spark_. And so you can go your way,
and I’ll go mine. It’s no good, not the slightest. So you can leave me
now, I don’t want to go any further with you—leave me—”
“You don’t even know where you are,” he said.
“Oh, don’t bother, I assure you I shall be all right. I’ve got ten
shillings in my purse, and that will take me back from anywhere _you_
have brought me to.” She hesitated. The rings were still on her
fingers, two on her little finger, one on her ring finger. Still she
hesitated.
“Very good,” he said. “The only hopeless thing is a fool.”
“You are quite right,” she said.
Still she hesitated. Then an ugly, malevolent look came over her face,
she pulled the rings from her fingers, and tossed them at him. One
touched his face, the others hit his coat, and they scattered into the
mud.
“And take your rings,” she said, “and go and buy yourself a female
elsewhere—there are plenty to be had, who will be quite glad to share
your spiritual mess,—or to have your physical mess, and leave your
spiritual mess to Hermione.”
With which she walked away, desultorily, up the road. He stood
motionless, watching her sullen, rather ugly walk. She was sullenly
picking and pulling at the twigs of the hedge as she passed. She grew
smaller, she seemed to pass out of his sight. A darkness came over his
mind. Only a small, mechanical speck of consciousness hovered near him.
He felt tired and weak. Yet also he was relieved. He gave up his old
position. He went and sat on the bank. No doubt Ursula was right. It
was true, really, what she said. He knew that his spirituality was
concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in
self-destruction. There really _was_ a certain stimulant in
self-destruction, for him—especially when it was translated
spiritually. But then he knew it—he knew it, and had done. And was not
Ursula’s way of emotional intimacy, emotional and physical, was it not
just as dangerous as Hermione’s abstract spiritual intimacy? Fusion,
fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most
men insisted on, was it not nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it
was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotional body? Hermione saw
herself as the perfect Idea, to which all men must come: And Ursula was
the perfect Womb, the bath of birth, to which all men must come! And
both were horrible. Why could they not remain individuals, limited by
their own limits? Why this dreadful all-comprehensiveness, this hateful
tyranny? Why not leave the other being, free, why try to absorb, or
melt, or merge? One might abandon oneself utterly to the _moments_, but
not to any other being.
He could not bear to see the rings lying in the pale mud of the road.
He picked them up, and wiped them unconsciously on his hands. They were
the little tokens of the reality of beauty, the reality of happiness in
warm creation. But he had made his hands all dirty and gritty.
There was a darkness over his mind. The terrible knot of consciousness
that had persisted there like an obsession was broken, gone, his life
was dissolved in darkness over his limbs and his body. But there was a
point of anxiety in his heart now. He wanted her to come back. He
breathed lightly and regularly like an infant, that breathes
innocently, beyond the touch of responsibility.
She was coming back. He saw her drifting desultorily under the high
hedge, advancing towards him slowly. He did not move, he did not look
again. He was as if asleep, at peace, slumbering and utterly relaxed.
She came up and stood before him, hanging her head.
“See what a flower I found you,” she said, wistfully holding a piece of
purple-red bell-heather under his face. He saw the clump of coloured
bells, and the tree-like, tiny branch: also her hands, with their
over-fine, over-sensitive skin.
“Pretty!” he said, looking up at her with a smile, taking the flower.
Everything had become simple again, quite simple, the complexity gone
into nowhere. But he badly wanted to cry: except that he was weary and
bored by emotion.
Then a hot passion of tenderness for her filled his heart. He stood up
and looked into her face. It was new and oh, so delicate in its
luminous wonder and fear. He put his arms round her, and she hid her
face on his shoulder.
It was peace, just simple peace, as he stood folding her quietly there
on the open lane. It was peace at last. The old, detestable world of
tension had passed away at last, his soul was strong and at ease.
She looked up at him. The wonderful yellow light in her eyes now was
soft and yielded, they were at peace with each other. He kissed her,
softly, many, many times. A laugh came into her eyes.
“Did I abuse you?” she asked.
He smiled too, and took her hand, that was so soft and given.
“Never mind,” she said, “it is all for the good.” He kissed her again,
softly, many times.
“Isn’t it?” she said.
“Certainly,” he replied. “Wait! I shall have my own back.”
She laughed suddenly, with a wild catch in her voice, and flung her
arms around him.
“You are mine, my love, aren’t you?” she cried straining him close.
“Yes,” he said, softly.
His voice was so soft and final, she went very still, as if under a
fate which had taken her. Yes, she acquiesced—but it was accomplished
without her acquiescence. He was kissing her quietly, repeatedly, with
a soft, still happiness that almost made her heart stop beating.
“My love!” she cried, lifting her face and looking with frightened,
gentle wonder of bliss. Was it all real? But his eyes were beautiful
and soft and immune from stress or excitement, beautiful and smiling
lightly to her, smiling with her. She hid her face on his shoulder,
hiding before him, because he could see her so completely. She knew he
loved her, and she was afraid, she was in a strange element, a new
heaven round about her. She wished he were passionate, because in
passion she was at home. But this was so still and frail, as space is
more frightening than force.
Again, quickly, she lifted her head.
“Do you love me?” she said, quickly, impulsively.
“Yes,” he replied, not heeding her motion, only her stillness.
She knew it was true. She broke away.
“So you ought,” she said, turning round to look at the road. “Did you
find the rings?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
“In my pocket.”
She put her hand into his pocket and took them out.
She was restless.
“Shall we go?” she said.
“Yes,” he answered. And they mounted to the car once more, and left
behind them this memorable battle-field.
They drifted through the wild, late afternoon, in a beautiful motion
that was smiling and transcendent. His mind was sweetly at ease, the
life flowed through him as from some new fountain, he was as if born
out of the cramp of a womb.
“Are you happy?” she asked him, in her strange, delighted way.
“Yes,” he said.
“So am I,” she cried in sudden ecstacy, putting her arm round him and
clutching him violently against her, as he steered the motor-car.
“Don’t drive much more,” she said. “I don’t want you to be always doing
something.”
“No,” he said. “We’ll finish this little trip, and then we’ll be free.”
“We will, my love, we will,” she cried in delight, kissing him as he
turned to her.
He drove on in a strange new wakefulness, the tension of his
consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over, all his body
awake with a simple, glimmering awareness, as if he had just come
awake, like a thing that is born, like a bird when it comes out of an
egg, into a new universe.
They dropped down a long hill in the dusk, and suddenly Ursula
recognised on her right hand, below in the hollow, the form of
Southwell Minster.
“Are we here!” she cried with pleasure.
The rigid, sombre, ugly cathedral was settling under the gloom of the
coming night, as they entered the narrow town, the golden lights showed
like slabs of revelation, in the shop-windows.
“Father came here with mother,” she said, “when they first knew each
other. He loves it—he loves the Minster. Do you?”
“Yes. It looks like quartz crystals sticking up out of the dark hollow.
We’ll have our high tea at the Saracen’s Head.”
As they descended, they heard the Minster bells playing a hymn, when
the hour had struck six.
Glory to thee my God this night
For all the blessings of the light—
So, to Ursula’s ear, the tune fell out, drop by drop, from the unseen
sky on to the dusky town. It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding.
It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the inn, smelling
of straw and stables and petrol. Above, she could see the first stars.
What was it all? This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of
one’s childhood—a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had
become unreal. She herself was a strange, transcendent reality.
They sat together in a little parlour by the fire.
“Is it true?” she said, wondering.
“What?”
“Everything—is everything true?”
“The best is true,” he said, grimacing at her.
“Is it?” she replied, laughing, but unassured.
She looked at him. He seemed still so separate. New eyes were opened in
her soul. She saw a strange creature from another world, in him. It was
as if she were enchanted, and everything were metamorphosed. She
recalled again the old magic of the Book of Genesis, where the sons of
God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. And he was one of
these, one of these strange creatures from the beyond, looking down at
her, and seeing she was fair.
He stood on the hearth-rug looking at her, at her face that was
upturned exactly like a flower, a fresh, luminous flower, glinting
faintly golden with the dew of the first light. And he was smiling
faintly as if there were no speech in the world, save the silent
delight of flowers in each other. Smilingly they delighted in each
other’s presence, pure presence, not to be thought of, even known. But
his eyes had a faintly ironical contraction.
And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the
hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her
face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a
sense of a heavenful of riches.
“We love each other,” she said in delight.
“More than that,” he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering,
easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back
of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had
discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful
than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there,
at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of
his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of
the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such
as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other,
something more.
This was release at last. She had had lovers, she had known passion.
But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men
coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are
in the beginning.
Her face was now one dazzle of released, golden light, as she looked up
at him, and laid her hands full on his thighs, behind, as he stood
before her. He looked down at her with a rich bright brow like a diadem
above his eyes. She was beautiful as a new marvellous flower opened at
his knees, a paradisal flower she was, beyond womanhood, such a flower
of luminousness. Yet something was tight and unfree in him. He did not
like this crouching, this radiance—not altogether.
It was all achieved, for her. She had found one of the sons of God from
the Beginning, and he had found one of the first most luminous
daughters of men.
She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the
back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a
dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into
herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of
passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the
darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a
dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them
both with rich peace, satisfaction.
“My love,” she cried, lifting her face to him, her eyes, her mouth open
in transport.
“My love,” he answered, bending and kissing her, always kissing her.
She closed her hands over the full, rounded body of his loins, as he
stooped over her, she seemed to touch the quick of the mystery of
darkness that was bodily him. She seemed to faint beneath, and he
seemed to faint, stooping over her. It was a perfect passing away for
both of them, and at the same time the most intolerable accession into
being, the marvellous fullness of immediate gratification,
overwhelming, out-flooding from the source of the deepest life-force,
the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the
back and base of the loins.
After a lapse of stillness, after the rivers of strange dark fluid
richness had passed over her, flooding, carrying away her mind and
flooding down her spine and down her knees, past her feet, a strange
flood, sweeping away everything and leaving her an essential new being,
she was left quite free, she was free in complete ease, her complete
self. So she rose, stilly and blithe, smiling at him. He stood before
her, glimmering, so awfully real, that her heart almost stopped
beating. He stood there in his strange, whole body, that had its
marvellous fountains, like the bodies of the sons of God who were in
the beginning. There were strange fountains of his body, more
mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more
satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had
thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now,
behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange
marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the
phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable
riches.
They were glad, and they could forget perfectly. They laughed, and went
to the meal provided. There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large
broad-faced cut ham, eggs and cresses and red beet-root, and medlars
and apple-tart, and tea.
“What _good_ things!” she cried with pleasure. “How noble it
looks!—shall I pour out the tea?—”
She was usually nervous and uncertain at performing these public
duties, such as giving tea. But today she forgot, she was at her ease,
entirely forgetting to have misgivings. The tea-pot poured beautifully
from a proud slender spout. Her eyes were warm with smiles as she gave
him his tea. She had learned at last to be still and perfect.
“Everything is ours,” she said to him.
“Everything,” he answered.
She gave a queer little crowing sound of triumph.
“I’m so glad!” she cried, with unspeakable relief.
“So am I,” he said. “But I’m thinking we’d better get out of our
responsibilities as quick as we can.”
“What responsibilities?” she asked, wondering.
“We must drop our jobs, like a shot.”
A new understanding dawned into her face.
“Of course,” she said, “there’s that.”
“We must get out,” he said. “There’s nothing for it but to get out,
quick.”
She looked at him doubtfully across the table.
“But where?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll just wander about for a bit.”
Again she looked at him quizzically.
“I should be perfectly happy at the Mill,” she said.
“It’s very near the old thing,” he said. “Let us wander a bit.”
His voice could be so soft and happy-go-lucky, it went through her
veins like an exhilaration. Nevertheless she dreamed of a valley, and
wild gardens, and peace. She had a desire too for splendour—an
aristocratic extravagant splendour. Wandering seemed to her like
restlessness, dissatisfaction.
“Where will you wander to?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I feel as if I would just meet you and we’d set off—just
towards the distance.”
“But where can one go?” she asked anxiously. “After all, there _is_
only the world, and none of it is very distant.”
“Still,” he said, “I should like to go with you—nowhere. It would be
rather wandering just to nowhere. That’s the place to get to—nowhere.
One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own
nowhere.”
Still she meditated.
“You see, my love,” she said, “I’m so afraid that while we are only
people, we’ve got to take the world that’s given—because there isn’t
any other.”
“Yes there is,” he said. “There’s somewhere where we can be
free—somewhere where one needn’t wear much clothes—none even—where one
meets a few people who have gone through enough, and can take things
for granted—where you be yourself, without bothering. There is
somewhere—there are one or two people—”
“But where—?” she sighed.
“Somewhere—anywhere. Let’s wander off. That’s the thing to do—let’s
wander off.”
“Yes—” she said, thrilled at the thought of travel. But to her it was
only travel.
“To be free,” he said. “To be free, in a free place, with a few other
people!”
“Yes,” she said wistfully. Those “few other people” depressed her.
“It isn’t really a locality, though,” he said. “It’s a perfected
relation between you and me, and others—the perfect relation—so that we
are free together.”
“It is, my love, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s you and me. It’s you and
me, isn’t it?” She stretched out her arms to him. He went across and
stooped to kiss her face. Her arms closed round him again, her hands
spread upon his shoulders, moving slowly there, moving slowly on his
back, down his back slowly, with a strange recurrent, rhythmic motion,
yet moving slowly down, pressing mysteriously over his loins, over his
flanks. The sense of the awfulness of riches that could never be
impaired flooded her mind like a swoon, a death in most marvellous
possession, mystic-sure. She possessed him so utterly and intolerably,
that she herself lapsed out. And yet she was only sitting still in the
chair, with her hands pressed upon him, and lost.
Again he softly kissed her.
“We shall never go apart again,” he murmured quietly. And she did not
speak, but only pressed her hands firmer down upon the source of
darkness in him.
They decided, when they woke again from the pure swoon, to write their
resignations from the world of work there and then. She wanted this.
He rang the bell, and ordered note-paper without a printed address. The
waiter cleared the table.
“Now then,” he said, “yours first. Put your home address, and the
date—then ‘Director of Education, Town Hall—Sir—’ Now then!—I don’t
know how one really stands—I suppose one could get out of it in less
than month—Anyhow ‘Sir—I beg to resign my post as classmistress in the
Willey Green Grammar School. I should be very grateful if you would
liberate me as soon as possible, without waiting for the expiration of
the month’s notice.’ That’ll do. Have you got it? Let me look. ‘Ursula
Brangwen.’ Good! Now I’ll write mine. I ought to give them three
months, but I can plead health. I can arrange it all right.”
He sat and wrote out his formal resignation.
“Now,” he said, when the envelopes were sealed and addressed, “shall we
post them here, both together? I know Jackie will say, ‘Here’s a
coincidence!’ when he receives them in all their identity. Shall we let
him say it, or not?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“No—?” he said, pondering.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Their imaginations shall not work on us. I’ll post
yours here, mine after. I cannot be implicated in their imaginings.”
He looked at her with his strange, non-human singleness.
“Yes, you are right,” she said.
She lifted her face to him, all shining and open. It was as if he might
enter straight into the source of her radiance. His face became a
little distracted.
“Shall we go?” he said.
“As you like,” she replied.
They were soon out of the little town, and running through the uneven
lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant
warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible
night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either
side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it
was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes
the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of a barn.
“Are you going to Shortlands to dinner?” Ursula asked him suddenly. He
started.
“Good God!” he said. “Shortlands! Never again. Not that. Besides we
should be too late.”
“Where are we going then—to the Mill?”
“If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night. Pity to come
out of it, really. Pity we can’t stop in the good darkness. It is
better than anything ever would be—this good immediate darkness.”
She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew there was no
leaving him, the darkness held them both and contained them, it was not
to be surpassed. Besides she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave
loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was
some of the inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks
for, which one accepts in full.
He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car. He felt as if
he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of
real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these
are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to
have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins,
and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and
left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be
awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind.
And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical,
mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.
It was very difficult to speak, it was so perfect to sit in this pure
living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable
force, upheld immemorially in timeless force, like the immobile,
supremely potent Egyptians, seated forever in their living, subtle
silence.
“We need not go home,” he said. “This car has seats that let down and
make a bed, and we can lift the hood.”
She was glad and frightened. She cowered near to him.
“But what about them at home?” she said.
“Send a telegram.”
Nothing more was said. They ran on in silence. But with a sort of
second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he
had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his
breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he
had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed,
slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his
pure Egyptian concentration in darkness.
They came to a village that lined along the road. The car crept slowly
along, until he saw the post-office. Then he pulled up.
“I will send a telegram to your father,” he said. “I will merely say
‘spending the night in town,’ shall I?”
“Yes,” she answered. She did not want to be disturbed into taking
thought.
She watched him move into the post-office. It was also a shop, she saw.
Strange, he was. Even as he went into the lighted, public place he
remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality
in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable. There he was! In a strange
uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in
its potency, mystic and real. This dark, subtle reality of him, never
to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfected
being. She too was dark and fulfilled in silence.
He came out, throwing some packages into the car.
“There is some bread, and cheese, and raisins, and apples, and hard
chocolate,” he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of
the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him. She
would have to touch him. To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a
travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence
must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in
unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have
the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in
not-knowing.
Soon they had run on again into the darkness. She did not ask where
they were going, she did not care. She sat in a fullness and a pure
potency that was like apathy, mindless and immobile. She was next to
him, and hung in a pure rest, as a star is hung, balanced unthinkably.
Still there remained a dark lambency of anticipation. She would touch
him. With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the
reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of
darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching
upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of
darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation.
And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to
take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her
darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him,
and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an
Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic
nodality of physical being. They would give each other this
star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.
She saw that they were running among trees—great old trees with dying
bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and
like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and
mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car
advanced slowly.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
“In Sherwood Forest.”
It was evident he knew the place. He drove softly, watching. Then they
came to a green road between the trees. They turned cautiously round,
and were advancing between the oaks of the forest, down a green lane.
The green lane widened into a little circle of grass, where there was a
small trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car
stopped.
“We will stay here,” he said, “and put out the lights.”
He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows
of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to
the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were
faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible
disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had
supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him,
and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible
flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were
the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon
the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never
to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a
palpable revelation of living otherness.
She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of
unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a
magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a
mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual
reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains
outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic
body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire
fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial
magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.
They slept the chilly night through under the hood of the car, a night
of unbroken sleep. It was already high day when he awoke. They looked
at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and
secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night.
It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark
reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the
remembrance and the knowledge.