FLITTING
That evening Ursula returned home very bright-eyed and wondrous—which
irritated her people. Her father came home at suppertime, tired after
the evening class, and the long journey home. Gudrun was reading, the
mother sat in silence.
Suddenly Ursula said to the company at large, in a bright voice,
“Rupert and I are going to be married tomorrow.”
Her father turned round, stiffly.
“You what?” he said.
“Tomorrow!” echoed Gudrun.
“Indeed!” said the mother.
But Ursula only smiled wonderfully, and did not reply.
“Married tomorrow!” cried her father harshly. “What are you talking
about.”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “Why not?” Those two words, from her, always drove
him mad. “Everything is all right—we shall go to the registrar’s
office—”
There was a second’s hush in the room, after Ursula’s blithe vagueness.
“_Really_, Ursula!” said Gudrun.
“Might we ask why there has been all this secrecy?” demanded the
mother, rather superbly.
“But there hasn’t,” said Ursula. “You knew.”
“Who knew?” now cried the father. “Who knew? What do you mean by your
‘you knew’?”
He was in one of his stupid rages, she instantly closed against him.
“Of course you knew,” she said coolly. “You knew we were going to get
married.”
There was a dangerous pause.
“We knew you were going to get married, did we? Knew! Why, does anybody
know anything about you, you shifty bitch!”
“Father!” cried Gudrun, flushing deep in violent remonstrance. Then, in
a cold, but gentle voice, as if to remind her sister to be tractable:
“But isn’t it a _fearfully_ sudden decision, Ursula?” she asked.
“No, not really,” replied Ursula, with the same maddening cheerfulness.
“He’s been _wanting_ me to agree for weeks—he’s had the licence ready.
Only I—I wasn’t ready in myself. Now I am ready—is there anything to be
disagreeable about?”
“Certainly not,” said Gudrun, but in a tone of cold reproof. “You are
perfectly free to do as you like.”
“‘Ready in yourself’—_yourself_, that’s all that matters, isn’t it! ‘I
wasn’t ready in myself,’” he mimicked her phrase offensively. “You and
_yourself_, you’re of some importance, aren’t you?”
She drew herself up and set back her throat, her eyes shining yellow
and dangerous.
“I am to myself,” she said, wounded and mortified. “I know I am not to
anybody else. You only wanted to _bully_ me—you never cared for my
happiness.”
He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark.
“Ursula, what are you saying? Keep your tongue still,” cried her
mother.
Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed.
“No, I won’t,” she cried. “I won’t hold my tongue and be bullied. What
does it matter which day I get married—what does it _matter!_ It
doesn’t affect anybody but myself.”
Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring.
“Doesn’t it?” he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away.
“No, how can it?” she replied, shrinking but stubborn.
“It doesn’t matter to _me_ then, what you do—what becomes of you?” he
cried, in a strange voice like a cry.
The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised.
“No,” stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. “You only want
to—”
She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together,
every muscle ready.
“What?” he challenged.
“Bully me,” she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand
had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up
against the door.
“Father!” cried Gudrun in a high voice, “it is impossible!”
He stood unmoving. Ursula recovered, her hand was on the door handle.
She slowly drew herself up. He seemed doubtful now.
“It’s true,” she declared, with brilliant tears in her eyes, her head
lifted up in defiance. “What has your love meant, what did it ever
mean?—bullying, and denial—it did—”
He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched
fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had
flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs.
He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated
animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire.
Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother’s voice
was heard saying, cold and angry:
“Well, you shouldn’t take so much notice of her.”
Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and
thoughts.
Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat and furs, with a
small valise in her hand:
“Good-bye!” she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone.
“I’m going.”
And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door,
then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and
her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the
house.
Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged
feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went
through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a
dumb, heart-broken, child’s anguish, all the way on the road, and in
the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she
was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of
hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no
extenuation.
Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to
Birkin’s landlady at the door.
“Good evening! Is Mr Birkin in? Can I see him?”
“Yes, he’s in. He’s in his study.”
Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.
“Hello!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the
valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who
wept without showing many traces, like a child.
“Do I look a sight?” she said, shrinking.
“No—why? Come in,” he took the bag from her hand and they went into the
study.
There—immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that
remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed
violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.
“What’s the matter?” he said again, when she was quieter. But she only
pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that
cannot tell.
“What is it, then?” he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes,
regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.
“Father hit me,” she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a
ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.
“What for?” he said.
She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness
about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.
“Why?” he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.
She looked round at him, rather defiantly.
“Because I said I was going to be married tomorrow, and he bullied me.”
“Why did he bully you?”
Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears
came up.
“Because I said he didn’t care—and he doesn’t, it’s only his
domineeringness that’s hurt—” she said, her mouth pulled awry by her
weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so
childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep
wound.
“It isn’t quite true,” he said. “And even so, you shouldn’t _say_ it.”
“It _is_ true—it _is_ true,” she wept, “and I won’t be bullied by his
pretending it’s love—when it _isn’t_—he doesn’t care, how can he—no, he
can’t—”
He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself.
“Then you shouldn’t rouse him, if he can’t,” replied Birkin quietly.
“And I _have_ loved him, I have,” she wept. “I’ve loved him always, and
he’s always done this to me, he has—”
“It’s been a love of opposition, then,” he said. “Never mind—it will be
all right. It’s nothing desperate.”
“Yes,” she wept, “it is, it is.”
“Why?”
“I shall never see him again—”
“Not immediately. Don’t cry, you had to break with him, it had to
be—don’t cry.”
He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet
cheeks gently.
“Don’t cry,” he repeated, “don’t cry any more.”
He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.
At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and
frightened.
“Don’t you want me?” she asked.
“Want you?” His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her
play.
“Do you wish I hadn’t come?” she asked, anxious now again for fear she
might be out of place.
“No,” he said. “I wish there hadn’t been the violence—so much
ugliness—but perhaps it was inevitable.”
She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened.
“But where shall I stay?” she asked, feeling humiliated.
He thought for a moment.
“Here, with me,” he said. “We’re married as much today as we shall be
tomorrow.”
“But—”
“I’ll tell Mrs Varley,” he said. “Never mind now.”
He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking
at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed
her hair off her forehead nervously.
“Do I look ugly?” she said.
And she blew her nose again.
A small smile came round his eyes.
“No,” he said, “fortunately.”
And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his
arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her, he
could only bear to hide her against himself. Now; washed all clean by
her tears, she was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower
so new, so tender, so made perfect by inner light, that he could not
bear to look at her, he must hide her against himself, cover his eyes
against her. She had the perfect candour of creation, something
translucent and simple, like a radiant, shining flower that moment
unfolded in primal blessedness. She was so new, so wonder-clear, so
undimmed. And he was so old, so steeped in heavy memories. Her soul was
new, undefined and glimmering with the unseen. And his soul was dark
and gloomy, it had only one grain of living hope, like a grain of
mustard seed. But this one living grain in him matched the perfect
youth in her.
“I love you,” he whispered as he kissed her, and trembled with pure
hope, like a man who is born again to a wonderful, lively hope far
exceeding the bounds of death.
She could not know how much it meant to him, how much he meant by the
few words. Almost childish, she wanted proof, and statement, even
over-statement, for everything seemed still uncertain, unfixed to her.
But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul,
the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to
unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being
gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death,
could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships
youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was
young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his
resurrection and his life.
All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be
adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How
could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or
weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light! How
could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said “Your
nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.” But it sounded like lies,
and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with
truth, “I love you, I love you,” it was not the real truth. It was
something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of
having transcended the old existence. How could he say ‘I’ when he was
something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula
of the age, was a dead letter.
In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was
no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder
of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of
her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the
duality. Nor can I say “I love you,” when I have ceased to be, and you
have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new
oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer,
all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts.
But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.
They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her,
she wrote to her father and mother. Her mother replied, not her father.
She did not go back to school. She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or
at the Mill, moving with him as he moved. But she did not see anybody,
save Gudrun and Gerald. She was all strange and wondering as yet, but
relieved as by dawn.
Gerald sat talking to her one afternoon in the warm study down at the
Mill. Rupert had not yet come home.
“You are happy?” Gerald asked her, with a smile.
“Very happy!” she cried, shrinking a little in her brightness.
“Yes, one can see it.”
“Can one?” cried Ursula in surprise.
He looked up at her with a communicative smile.
“Oh yes, plainly.”
She was pleased. She meditated a moment.
“And can you see that Rupert is happy as well?”
He lowered his eyelids, and looked aside.
“Oh yes,” he said.
“Really!”
“Oh yes.”
He was very quiet, as if it were something not to be talked about by
him. He seemed sad.
She was very sensitive to suggestion. She asked the question he wanted
her to ask.
“Why don’t you be happy as well?” she said. “You could be just the
same.”
He paused a moment.
“With Gudrun?” he asked.
“Yes!” she cried, her eyes glowing. But there was a strange tension, an
emphasis, as if they were asserting their wishes, against the truth.
“You think Gudrun would have me, and we should be happy?” he said.
“Yes, I’m _sure!_” she cried.
Her eyes were round with delight. Yet underneath she was constrained,
she knew her own insistence.
“Oh, I’m _so_ glad,” she added.
He smiled.
“What makes you glad?” he said.
“For _her_ sake,” she replied. “I’m sure you’d—you’re the right man for
her.”
“You are?” he said. “And do you think she would agree with you?”
“Oh yes!” she exclaimed hastily. Then, upon reconsideration, very
uneasy: “Though Gudrun isn’t so very simple, is she? One doesn’t know
her in five minutes, does one? She’s not like me in that.” She laughed
at him with her strange, open, dazzled face.
“You think she’s not much like you?” Gerald asked.
She knitted her brows.
“Oh, in many ways she is. But I never know what she will do when
anything new comes.”
“You don’t?” said Gerald. He was silent for some moments. Then he moved
tentatively. “I was going to ask her, in any case, to go away with me
at Christmas,” he said, in a very small, cautious voice.
“Go away with you? For a time, you mean?”
“As long as she likes,” he said, with a deprecating movement.
They were both silent for some minutes.
“Of course,” said Ursula at last, “she _might_ just be willing to rush
into marriage. You can see.”
“Yes,” smiled Gerald. “I can see. But in case she won’t—do you think
she would go abroad with me for a few days—or for a fortnight?”
“Oh yes,” said Ursula. “I’d ask her.”
“Do you think we might all go together?”
“All of us?” Again Ursula’s face lighted up. “It would be rather fun,
don’t you think?”
“Great fun,” he said.
“And then you could see,” said Ursula.
“What?”
“How things went. I think it is best to take the honeymoon before the
wedding—don’t you?”
She was pleased with this _mot_. He laughed.
“In certain cases,” he said. “I’d rather it were so in my own case.”
“Would you!” exclaimed Ursula. Then doubtingly, “Yes, perhaps you’re
right. One should please oneself.”
Birkin came in a little later, and Ursula told him what had been said.
“Gudrun!” exclaimed Birkin. “She’s a born mistress, just as Gerald is a
born lover—_amant en titre_. If as somebody says all women are either
wives or mistresses, then Gudrun is a mistress.”
“And all men either lovers or husbands,” cried Ursula. “But why not
both?”
“The one excludes the other,” he laughed.
“Then I want a lover,” cried Ursula.
“No you don’t,” he said.
“But I do,” she wailed.
He kissed her, and laughed.
It was two days after this that Ursula was to go to fetch her things
from the house in Beldover. The removal had taken place, the family had
gone. Gudrun had rooms in Willey Green.
Ursula had not seen her parents since her marriage. She wept over the
rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she
could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and
Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon.
It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at
the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was
frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts
of the girls.
“I don’t believe I dare have come in alone,” said Ursula. “It frightens
me.”
“Ursula!” cried Gudrun. “Isn’t it amazing! Can you believe you lived in
this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of
terror, I cannot conceive!”
They looked in the big dining-room. It was a good-sized room, but now a
cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the
floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of
pale boarding.
In the faded wallpaper were dark patches where furniture had stood,
where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming
walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was
neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was
enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where
were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some cardboard box? In
the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.
“Imagine that we passed our days here!” said Ursula.
“I know,” cried Gudrun. “It is too appalling. What must we be like, if
we are the contents of _this!_”
“Vile!” said Ursula. “It really is.”
And she recognised half-burnt covers of “Vogue”—half-burnt
representations of women in gowns—lying under the grate.
They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without
weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in
nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the
red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid.
The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound
re-echoed under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor.
Against the wall of Ursula’s bedroom were her things—a trunk, a
work-basket, some books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in
the universal emptiness of the dusk.
“A cheerful sight, aren’t they?” said Ursula, looking down at her
forsaken possessions.
“Very cheerful,” said Gudrun.
The two girls set to, carrying everything down to the front door. Again
and again they made the hollow, re-echoing transit. The whole place
seemed to resound about them with a noise of hollow, empty futility. In
the distance the empty, invisible rooms sent forth a vibration almost
of obscenity. They almost fled with the last articles, into the
out-of-door.
But it was cold. They were waiting for Birkin, who was coming with the
car. They went indoors again, and upstairs to their parents’ front
bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, and across the country
at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light.
They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over
the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.
“Really,” said Ursula, “this room _couldn’t_ be sacred, could it?”
Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes.
“Impossible,” she replied.
“When I think of their lives—father’s and mother’s, their love, and
their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up—would you
have such a life, Prune?”
“I wouldn’t, Ursula.”
“It all seems so _nothing_—their two lives—there’s no meaning in it.
Really, if they had _not_ met, and _not_ married, and not lived
together—it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“Of course—you can’t tell,” said Gudrun.
“No. But if I thought my life was going to be like it—Prune,” she
caught Gudrun’s arm, “I should run.”
Gudrun was silent for a few moments.
“As a matter of fact, one cannot contemplate the ordinary life—one
cannot contemplate it,” replied Gudrun. “With you, Ursula, it is quite
different. You will be out of it all, with Birkin. He’s a special case.
But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place,
marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there _are_, thousands
of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very
thought of it sends me _mad_. One must be free, above all, one must be
free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free—one must
not become 7, Pinchbeck Street—or Somerset Drive—or Shortlands. No man
will be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a
free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glücksritter. A man with a
position in the social world—well, it is just impossible, impossible!”
“What a lovely word—a Glücksritter!” said Ursula. “So much nicer than a
soldier of fortune.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Gudrun. “I’d tilt the world with a Glücksritter.
But a home, an establishment! Ursula, what would it mean?—think!”
“I know,” said Ursula. “We’ve had one home—that’s enough for me.”
“Quite enough,” said Gudrun.
“The little grey home in the west,” quoted Ursula ironically.
“Doesn’t it sound grey, too,” said Gudrun grimly.
They were interrupted by the sound of the car. There was Birkin. Ursula
was surprised that she felt so lit up, that she became suddenly so free
from the problems of grey homes in the west.
They heard his heels click on the hall pavement below.
“Hello!” he called, his voice echoing alive through the house. Ursula
smiled to herself. _He_ was frightened of the place too.
“Hello! Here we are,” she called downstairs. And they heard him quickly
running up.
“This is a ghostly situation,” he said.
“These houses don’t have ghosts—they’ve never had any personality, and
only a place with personality can have a ghost,” said Gudrun.
“I suppose so. Are you both weeping over the past?”
“We are,” said Gudrun, grimly.
Ursula laughed.
“Not weeping that it’s gone, but weeping that it ever _was_,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied, relieved.
He sat down for a moment. There was something in his presence, Ursula
thought, lambent and alive. It made even the impertinent structure of
this null house disappear.
“Gudrun says she could not bear to be married and put into a house,”
said Ursula meaningful—they knew this referred to Gerald.
He was silent for some moments.
“Well,” he said, “if you know beforehand you couldn’t stand it, you’re
safe.”
“Quite!” said Gudrun.
“Why _does_ every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a
little grey home in the west? Why is this the goal of life? Why should
it be?” said Ursula.
“_Il faut avoir le respect de ses bêtises_,” said Birkin.
“But you needn’t have the respect for the _bêtise_ before you’ve
committed it,” laughed Ursula.
“Ah then, _des bêtises du papa?_”
“_Et de la maman_,” added Gudrun satirically.
“_Et des voisins_,” said Ursula.
They all laughed, and rose. It was getting dark. They carried the
things to the car. Gudrun locked the door of the empty house. Birkin
had lighted the lamps of the automobile. It all seemed very happy, as
if they were setting out.
“Do you mind stopping at Coulsons. I have to leave the key there,” said
Gudrun.
“Right,” said Birkin, and they moved off.
They stopped in the main street. The shops were just lighted, the last
miners were passing home along the causeways, half-visible shadows in
their grey pit-dirt, moving through the blue air. But their feet rang
harshly in manifold sound, along the pavement.
How pleased Gudrun was to come out of the shop, and enter the car, and
be borne swiftly away into the downhill of palpable dusk, with Ursula
and Birkin! What an adventure life seemed at this moment! How deeply,
how suddenly she envied Ursula! Life for her was so quick, and an open
door—so reckless as if not only this world, but the world that was gone
and the world to come were nothing to her. Ah, if she could be _just
like that_, it would be perfect.
For always, except in her moments of excitement, she felt a want within
herself. She was unsure. She had felt that now, at last, in Gerald’s
strong and violent love, she was living fully and finally. But when she
compared herself with Ursula, already her soul was jealous,
unsatisfied. She was not satisfied—she was never to be satisfied.
What was she short of now? It was marriage—it was the wonderful
stability of marriage. She did want it, let her say what she might. She
had been lying. The old idea of marriage was right even now—marriage
and the home. Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at the words. She
thought of Gerald and Shortlands—marriage and the home! Ah well, let it
rest! He meant a great deal to her—but—! Perhaps it was not in her to
marry. She was one of life’s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that
have no root. No, no it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a
rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in
evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed
her. This picture she entitled “Home.” It would have done for the Royal
Academy.
“Come with us to tea—_do_,” said Ursula, as they ran nearer to the
cottage of Willey Green.
“Thanks awfully—but I _must_ go in—” said Gudrun. She wanted very much
to go on with Ursula and Birkin.
That seemed like life indeed to her. Yet a certain perversity would not
let her.
“Do come—yes, it would be so nice,” pleaded Ursula.
“I’m awfully sorry—I should love to—but I can’t—really—”
She descended from the car in trembling haste.
“Can’t you really!” came Ursula’s regretful voice.
“No, really I can’t,” responded Gudrun’s pathetic, chagrined words out
of the dusk.
“All right, are you?” called Birkin.
“Quite!” said Gudrun. “Good-night!”
“Good-night,” they called.
“Come whenever you like, we shall be glad,” called Birkin.
“Thank you very much,” called Gudrun, in the strange, twanging voice of
lonely chagrin that was very puzzling to him. She turned away to her
cottage gate, and they drove on. But immediately she stood to watch
them, as the car ran vague into the distance. And as she went up the
path to her strange house, her heart was full of incomprehensible
bitterness.
In her parlour was a long-case clock, and inserted into its dial was a
ruddy, round, slant-eyed, joyous-painted face, that wagged over with
the most ridiculous ogle when the clock ticked, and back again with the
same absurd glad-eye at the next tick. All the time the absurd smooth,
brown-ruddy face gave her an obtrusive “glad-eye.” She stood for
minutes, watching it, till a sort of maddened disgust overcame her, and
she laughed at herself hollowly. And still it rocked, and gave her the
glad-eye from one side, then from the other, from one side, then from
the other. Ah, how unhappy she was! In the midst of her most active
happiness, ah, how unhappy she was! She glanced at the table.
Gooseberry jam, and the same home-made cake with too much soda in it!
Still, gooseberry jam was good, and one so rarely got it.
All the evening she wanted to go to the Mill. But she coldly refused to
allow herself. She went the next afternoon instead. She was happy to
find Ursula alone. It was a lovely, intimate secluded atmosphere. They
talked endlessly and delightedly. “Aren’t you _fearfully_ happy here?”
said Gudrun to her sister glancing at her own bright eyes in the
mirror. She always envied, almost with resentment, the strange positive
fullness that subsisted in the atmosphere around Ursula and Birkin.
How really beautifully this room is done,” she said aloud. “This hard
plaited matting—what a lovely colour it is, the colour of cool light!”
And it seemed to her perfect.
“Ursula,” she said at length, in a voice of question and detachment,
“did you know that Gerald Crich had suggested our going away all
together at Christmas?”
“Yes, he’s spoken to Rupert.”
A deep flush dyed Gudrun’s cheek. She was silent a moment, as if taken
aback, and not knowing what to say.
“But don’t you think,” she said at last, “it is _amazingly cool!_”
Ursula laughed.
“I like him for it,” she said.
Gudrun was silent. It was evident that, whilst she was almost mortified
by Gerald’s taking the liberty of making such a suggestion to Birkin,
yet the idea itself attracted her strongly.
“There’s a rather lovely simplicity about Gerald, I think,” said
Ursula, “so defiant, somehow! Oh, I think he’s _very_ lovable.”
Gudrun did not reply for some moments. She had still to get over the
feeling of insult at the liberty taken with her freedom.
“What did Rupert say—do you know?” she asked.
“He said it would be most awfully jolly,” said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked down, and was silent.
“Don’t you think it would?” said Ursula, tentatively. She was never
quite sure how many defences Gudrun was having round herself.
Gudrun raised her face with difficulty and held it averted.
“I think it _might_ be awfully jolly, as you say,” she replied. “But
don’t you think it was an unpardonable liberty to take—to talk of such
things to Rupert—who after all—you see what I mean, Ursula—they might
have been two men arranging an outing with some little _type_ they’d
picked up. Oh, I think it’s unforgivable, quite!” She used the French
word “_type_.”
Her eyes flashed, her soft face was flushed and sullen. Ursula looked
on, rather frightened, frightened most of all because she thought
Gudrun seemed rather common, really like a little _type_. But she had
not the courage quite to think this—not right out.
“Oh no,” she cried, stammering. “Oh no—not at all like that—oh no! No,
I think it’s rather beautiful, the friendship between Rupert and
Gerald. They just are simple—they say anything to each other, like
brothers.”
Gudrun flushed deeper. She could not _bear_ it that Gerald gave her
away—even to Birkin.
“But do you think even brothers have any right to exchange confidences
of that sort?” she asked, with deep anger.
“Oh yes,” said Ursula. “There’s never anything said that isn’t
perfectly straightforward. No, the thing that’s amazed me most in
Gerald—how perfectly simple and direct he can be! And you know, it
takes rather a big man. Most of them _must_ be indirect, they are such
cowards.”
But Gudrun was still silent with anger. She wanted the absolute secrecy
kept, with regard to her movements.
“Won’t you go?” said Ursula. “Do, we might all be so happy! There is
something I _love_ about Gerald—he’s _much_ more lovable than I thought
him. He’s free, Gudrun, he really is.”
Gudrun’s mouth was still closed, sullen and ugly. She opened it at
length.
“Do you know where he proposes to go?” she asked.
“Yes—to the Tyrol, where he used to go when he was in Germany—a lovely
place where students go, small and rough and lovely, for winter sport!”
Through Gudrun’s mind went the angry thought—“they know everything.”
“Yes,” she said aloud, “about forty kilometres from Innsbruck, isn’t
it?”
“I don’t know exactly where—but it would be lovely, don’t you think,
high in the perfect snow—?”
“Very lovely!” said Gudrun, sarcastically.
Ursula was put out.
“Of course,” she said, “I think Gerald spoke to Rupert so that it
shouldn’t seem like an outing with a _type_—”
“I know, of course,” said Gudrun, “that he quite commonly does take up
with that sort.”
“Does he!” said Ursula. “Why how do you know?”
“I know of a model in Chelsea,” said Gudrun coldly. Now Ursula was
silent. “Well,” she said at last, with a doubtful laugh, “I hope he has
a good time with her.” At which Gudrun looked more glum.